Having been on both sides of the weight train, both morbidly obese and a healthy size 4, I am often still amazed at how differently people treat you depending on how you look. I wonder if anyone else has ever experienced this.
When I am thin, Men hold open the door. People move out of the way as you're walking down the street. You catch a smile here and there when someone makes eye contact with you on the street, in a store. Sales people come up to you and ask you if you need help with anything. It really is a glorious world sometimes.
When I was obese, people would ignore me as if I didn't exist. Sales people would talk to the person next to me and never to me. People don't make eye contact with you. Walking down the street, people would "barrel" through you as if YOU don't matter, but THEY do for some unknown reason.
Try going on an interview when you are obese. The interviewer comes out to see you and their face drops in a way that you can see a quick look of, only way I can describe it is "disgust", before putting on that veneer of friendliness. Then you get a VERY short interview regardless of how qualified you are for the job. Getting a job as an obese person is very difficult and it doesn't matter that I can type 120wpm or that I adapt to technology quickly or have tons of experience. People see "fat" and they THINK "lazy". Period, end of story. It is the way of the world and I HATE to accept it, but there it is out there for all to see.
If anyone thinks that kind of treatment makes fat people do something about their weight, it sure doesn't. All it does is make them feel worse about the situation they find themselves in and eat more because they are depressed and feel like a nothing. Does it help to surround them in a parking lot outside the grocery store and yell whale at them and make pig noises? Wow, that was a hard one to swallow and boy did that make me afraid to even go out in public. It definitely would have been easy to become an Agoraphobe (for those who don't know, a fear of open or public places). People are downright MEAN to overweight people. I'm sure all of you have seen the show where a thin, beautiful girl puts on a fat suit and tries to go out in the streets to see how she is treated. That's all well and good to show how people are treated, but at the end of the day, she was able to take the suit off and overweight people have to work on it.
If anyone thinks these things don't happen, think again. They happen every day. I am much more prone to seeing them even now, when I'm thin, because the hair stands up on the back of my neck at the way they are treated. Everyone has their story and everyone has reasons for things being the way they are and people looking the way they look.
Ponder this, if everyone looked beautiful and thin, there would be no variety and we would CRAVE something more, new, different. It's like that twilight zone episode where the person kept going through surgery and the nurses/doctors would show horror when the bandages were revealed, but you never got to see the face until the end. Then you saw all the doctors and nurses had pig faces and the "patient" was a beautiful blonde woman. And they all considered HER deformed, it's because the pig faces were the norm and the beauty were the grotesque.
It all boils down to perception. How do you treat people who are different from you?
Thank you for listening...
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