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Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Taluntain the Longsuffering! Sorry to Allify the thread, Tal. You need a pay increase

Oh, in the interests of full disclosure, I was a fat kid. See if you can watch kids as they interact. Do you know who is the meanest to fat kids? Other fat kids! And it's not too hard to understand why. The time you get with the "regularly" sized kids picking on some other fat bastard is time that they are not picking on you. Plus, just for a short time, you get to feel marginally superior to the poor kid you are ridiculing. So much for Garfield's "Fatties of the World, Unite!" slogan.

The other trick I did was self-denigration. I'll have to find Tyrion's speech about it from the first "Ice and Fire" book, but basically he said "take the insult they hang on you and make it your own -- make like you are proud of it. That way they can no longer use it to hurt you."

Martin is a much better writer than old LKD will ever be, but I knew and was using that principle long before the books were ever published -- long before I got out of gradeschool. But all the self-denigrating humor and brave public face didn't stop the tears of frustration and humiliation from flowing at night. kids can be the cruellest of tormentors, and some people grow into adults who are just as vicious.

In the continuing interest of full disclosure, I can be one of those adults from time to time. But it's a flaw which I am addressing to the best of my ability.

 

Did someone say the Alley?

Typical conservative response, Chucky Norris.

 

I will take that as a compliment.

I read on the internet that Chuck Norris roundhouse kicks people who make fun of fat people.

 

Don't worry it was.

I don't make fun of people who are over-weight - it's none of my business.
But Republicans who can't act, but think they can? That's another matter.

 

I was just trying to stay on topic!

What about short or little people? We still use the term to denigrate people. I've done it myself -- it's ingrained in our culture, just as much as the fat insults. Think about it:

"You little bastard!"
"He's a little twerp."
"Sawed off pain in my butt"

Women who would accuse men of being totally shallow for saying "I won't date a woman who is smaller than a 34B" turn around and have no problem saying "I don't date men who are shorter than me". Talk about your hypocrisy. It's rampant size-ism, and IMHO, while it doesn't have the same history of violence and such as racism, it is still just as unfair, narrow minded, bigoted and all around just plain wrong. The overrarching question here is, why are we so obsessed with enforcing conformity.

Now I know what some people are thinking, and I won't dignify it with spelling it out. What I will say is that no one is asking the populace to respect those who are vastly different -- if it is your opinion that fat people are lazy slobs who have no self control, good on you -- in many cases you might be right! But what is being asked is that you don't denigrate them. Because in other cases you might be wrong, and we've all got only a short time on this planet, so why make life difficult for others when the payoff to you is so small?

 

It's probably just because saying, "You typical, average-sized bastard," takes too long.

 

I once dated a guy who was shorter than me....and I'm 5'2". It looked ridiculous because he liked to put his arm round me which meant that I had to walk in the gutter while he walked on the pavement so that he could reach
I have no problem with height though. It didn't bother me at the time, it's just looking back I realise how daft we must have looked! Apart from him, most guys I've been with have been taller than me but, considering my height, it's not suprising. Women have been about 50/50 height-wise

 

it ties back to the whole gender binary paradigm for some, I bet... I dont mind if a guy is not taller than me - if I did, at 5'9 in the land of the shortarsed here in Eire I would be out of luck.

I dislike body snark of any kind - you will not find me spouting any of that "real women have curves" BS either. Because real women have real bodies, not someone else's airbrushed idea and that's final. My friend who is skinny as a rake and curveless is just as much of a real woman as I am, and so is everyone inbetween. and yes, I know it is not limited to women only but as women are put on trial about their appearance a lot more... *shrug*

 

I would say that my experience with most overweight people is the same. The ones that I have known generally don't eat all that much (not more than I do) and do excercise, except they don't seem to lose weight because of it. In fact, most of the people I know that eat the most are the ones that are quite thin.

Difference in metabolism is what's responsible for quite a few of these things, is my guess. I have a pretty slow metabolism, so if I'm not very careful, I will gradually become quite fat. On the other hand, because my muscle mass increases easily with excercise, I can increase my metabolism through muscle mass to thus control how fat I become.

I also agree that the BMI is rubbish - I'm permanently overweight according to the BMI, even if I have a normal fat percentage. I've had a flatmate that was the same height as me, but had a BMI of maybe 18, whereas I'm around 25. Yet if she'd weigh as much as I do, she'd be seriously overweight, whereas I'd probably be fainting constantly if I'd weigh as much as her. It makes sense too - her shoulder width is less than my chest width is.

I'm frankly surprised that the doctors looked only at your BMI. It's pretty widely known that the BMI doesn't say much about an individual's healthy weight - it's more of an average for an entire population.

 

I had that problem. When I was training I was a UK size 12. However, according to my doctor, my BMI put me in an obese catagory. I had minimal bodyfat, it was all muscle plus my boobs didn't shrink and they weigh a about 1.5 stone between them. In order to go down to a correct BMI, I would have had to stop eating altogether and do a LOT of cardio work. It's a load of bull really

 

I hate BMI. There are a great many athletes that would be considered overweight - and in some cases even obese - if you go strictly by BMI. According to BMI, the NFL's leading rusher, Adrian Peterson, is overweight. He's 6'1" tall (about 183 cm) and 217 pounds (about 99 Kg). Does he look overweight to you?

I work out almost every day, and I'm still about 10-20 pounds overweight. Much like others have stated, I simply cannot motivate myself enough to go through all the trouble of losing weight. For me, I think part of the problem is that other than the hour or so I work out, I live a fairly sedentary life, and I think that is true for almost everyone with a desk job.

When thinking about my day, I spend close to an hour driving to work in the morning, sit for most of the 9 hours I'm there, and drive nearly an hour back home in the evening. That's 11 hours per day that I'm not particularly active, and it obviously is not counting sleep. Other than a couple hours of yard work on the weekends, there is little other physical activity other than the hour I spend working out.

I notice people in certain professions tend to be thinner than the rest of the population. In particular, I notice this about waiters and waitresses, and a lot of sales people at retail stores. I cannot help but think this is in part because they spend much more time standing and walking rather than sitting at a desk. They are burning more calories throughout the day.