Hard 8

Dear TIME,

 Allow me to respond,

Getting obese patients to lose weight is tricky to begin with,

I have to tell you straight, we fatz have grown up and interacted with slim people and I'm afraid we're on to the fact that despite being the weight you are, you probably don't know why nor can you replicate it in anyone else. We cannot be expected to keep humouring this pretence for much longer can we? I mean, we have done it for a long enough now. Try not to get upset.

Take up a hobby. I think crochet is excellent for breaking bad habits, it helps you focus and keep your mind off others, try making this lovely waistcoat, I just know it will help you to MYOB.

I've noticed that pretending you are superior to fat people and knowledgeable about weight only leads to frustration. Let me help soothe away those boo boos by explaining. When people pretend to be superior and aren't, they are saying to themselves "I am not good enough as I am". This leads to a gaping tear between the expectation of superiority and a secret sense of inferiority. This process can make people fractious and tend towards blaming fat people, as if we cheated you out of the expected windfall of self esteem in some way. So you fixate on any fat person who doesn't hate themselves. If only you spent more time working directly on your own self esteem and did less pretending we'd all be happier. We wouldn't have to support your draining high maintenance demands to lower ourselves to make you feel better. That is a fool's errand I can tell you;

About 165 people, or 8% of the group, chose ideal body shapes that were the same or bigger than their own, suggesting a misunderstanding of healthy weight ideal bodies.

That's 92% of fat people not feeling they look good are a healthy weight yet it just doesn't feel enough does it? That's how badly dependent you are on fat people having lowered self esteem. Is it really that 8% of 'hold outs' stopping the millions of diet attempts from working? Are they acting as a global stopper in the universe preventing all the adipose cells worldwide flowing into a universal furnace?

I think we would have heard about this hard eight by now, don't you? Why don't you try this book, I haven't read it, but borrowing a lesson from you, if you don't know what you are talking about, you must know what you are talking about. Please stop thinking we worship you and wish to touch the hem of your garment because you can't hear yourselves. Sometimes  we have to let you hector us on various things you want us to eat/do/think just to let you get some of it out of your system. Often you sulk if we don't allow you to try and 'save us' from nutritional apostasy, real or imagined.

many clinically obese men and women think they're already at a healthy weight look good.

Is it about looks or health? Oh well, I'm sure that I don't have the level of sophistication to make two contrasting and unrelated ideas seem like a conclusion. Oh, wait, maybe it's because my fat mind is a bit slow and your thin one is lightening fast and athletic.

Wow, your thin mind is just too fast for mere logic! Now that would be a disincentive for losing weight I must say, what if my mind ended up so fast that I made no sense and didn't notice? That would be embarrassing (mind you, not if I was oblivious to it eh?) I prefer the simple life of slowly trying to make sense of things and testing what logic I can, you don't think I'm a degenerate do you?

I'm not going to lie, I was one of those who pretended along that being slim meant you knew something about becoming slim. I never got the "go to the doctor and s/he has a few words with you about your weight and you will lose it". Maybe it was the witch doctor?

I am now thoroughly ashamed of this pretence it's clearly lead you a merry dance and gone to your head, it was to keep hope alive, what was I supposed to do, just accept being fat? I could not, so whatever it took, even when it made no sense, after all, being something doesn't give you mastery of biology does it? I ignored that, now it's hard to tell you because you get upset and say you're doing it to help me.

You aren't because you and I both know deep down, you aren't a doctor. Let's be honest it makes you feel good about being slimmer, yes it does, that's why you love talking about fat, you love it I know. But you can't hear how silly you sound strutting around like a bumptious school prefect talking about how to make fat people see the error of our ways. I just don't feel it's fair to pretend you don't sound like a bossy 5 year old who thinks they know everything! The kind everyone in the family laughs at until they realise suddenly, that everything revolves around them. Many of us can't keep playing along anymore, so please drop it, our indulgence can only go so far.

A healthy acceptance of one's own body is undoubtedly critical to good self-esteem.

Then why is it not working for you? Have you given up? I see the signs, when you're desperate to lower others around you, trying to look better in comparison. But you actually go nowhere, you stay the same. If you had hope, you'd be fine with others having self respect, because you'd be hopeful of raising your own. Don't give up, keep trying, keep pushing yourself. Take smoking, it's not easy to start, research shows that smokers try quite a lot of cigarettes before they stop coughing or vomiting. Yet they keep trying and look how many of them smoke now! I know you can do it.

But a lack of awareness of one's own obesity can lead to undiagnosed obesity-related conditions including sleep apnea, high blood pressure and diabetes.

They know they're fat don't they? They just thought they looked good with it, you can't have missed that. Hey, is that a hidden joke? Did you take bets on how many instances of nonsense you could get into this article without anyone noticing?

Well done! You had me going.

Wriggles.

H/T living400