Re Australia’s fat abuse: Google

fatties bus “daily telegraph”

and read the Comments. This reduced me to incoherent rage on Friday. Maybe worth a blog post by itself?

Many years ago when I was at my heaviest (a US size 14-16) I used to work in an office near a four-lane highway. To get to the other side, I’d either have to use two pedestrian crossings with very slow lights, or nip across one four-lane highway when the traffic would allow. On an almost daily basis, some jerk would actually change lanes and speed up while coming towards me. As I was wearing business wear and high heels, this was not only intimidating, but downright dangerous.

It was only after I lost weight and this stopped happening that I realised it was a form of fat-bashing. See the fatty run!

Ugh!!!

But I wonder how overweight this woman could possibly have been if her weight could be supported by a ceiling fan. The story makes me think that this poor woman may have been tormented for being “fat” when she may have been fat only in a relative sense, by being “not thin” in a society where everyone must conform to the rigid equation of thinness with beauty.

“We have to look at obesity as a symptom of underlying issues ranging that from lack a of education on how to eat healthy and how to exercise to battling depression with out the benefit of professional help.”

I’m very surprised that this comment has not gone unchallenged. My body size is no more a symptom of underlying educational or psychological issues than my eye color is. Research backs me up (Gina Kolata’s “Rethinking Thin”). Fat people are psychologically indistinguishable from the thin, and do not, on average, consume more food than the thin.

Being a fat person is not necessarily evidence of physical or psychological pathology.

fat in Australia. In fact, fat enough to warrant being yelled at on the street (which some other people commented on), mostly when riding a bike or otherwise exercising. In Australia I had to buy clothes in special stores, even department stores don’t go up to my weight. Doctors would routinely suggest I lost weight.

average to plump in the UK. People presume I’ll be interested in diet conversations, but no-one has ever called me fat over here – and in fact when I once mentioned how rude people could be about fat people in Australia, people were surprised that included me. I can buy clothes in department stores, and doctors have never bought up my weight, ever. I often get “complementary” comments from strangers about my breasts though, which irritates me.

Australia and the UK have almost the same average weight and height amongst women, its completely cultural. I think bigger people are more obvious in the UK, as they aren’t publicly shamed for wearing tight clothing or “my gosh” bathers. I spent a while in Finland, a country where practically no one is fat or skinny, all sort of slender, and although I was the fattest person I ever saw there, no one commented or even seemed to notice.

Travel has completely reinforced my ideas that attitudes to fat are socially agreed on, and can be changed. I think my own country could do with some changed ideas on rudeness too, its not just fat people that get shouted at.

Maybe if i finally get some sleep I’ll be able to articulate all this better.
Often, the stereotype back home is that of the ‘jolly, fat man’ and with women it swerves to being either buxom and sexy or non-marriage material/slovenly. Age and proportion are the key divide back home between “good fat” and “bad fat” but both concepts do exist.

Things are changing though. Cultural contagion, if you will. I see a lot of american attitudes about weight reflected in the cities/urban communities. size zero’s have officially become a trend over there. Disheartening, really. It used to be the curvy women in Satayjit Rai films that were idolized…now we have bimbo, paris-hilton wannabe twits like kareena kapoor setting trends for a new generation.