Wake up world! (Obesity)

Member Name: GentleGenius

Product:	Obesity
Date:	24/10/09 (136 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: No advantages in being fat, but there are worse things in the world

Disadvantages: Unhealthy

After having read Hishyeness' truly excellent, open and honest piece about the trials and tribulations of being overweight, I felt inspired to put pen to paper (or should I say finger-pads to keyboard) and create my own piece on the same subject.

A very special thanks to Hishyeness for raising this topic in the first place, and to have produced such a stunning piece of writing which I, and I'm sure many others also did, found very moving.

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DISCLAIMER: I intend none of what follows to be a criticism of my mother in the slightest. She had her own unresolved problems, and if she were alive today and able to read this, I feel certain she'd agree with everything I've said concerning her.

I make no apologies for the length of this piece, as I feel it's one of the most important issues facing our modern society, of sensitivity and how we judge one another without first thinking.

I have many memories from my early childhood of my mother waving a spoonful of food in front of my face, attempting to get me to eat. She'd create little stories to try and make food more appealing to me, arrange my dinner in little pictures, coat orange slices in sugar to make them more palatable - all sorts. I was carted back and forth to the doctor's surgery, for my mother just to be told that it was a simple case of me having a small appetite. This was back in the post-WW2 days when it was considered that a thin person was an unhealthy person.

I don't have many photographs of myself from my past, but there are a couple from when I was aged between about 3 and about 6 where I truly was Belsen-thin, and my legs just looked too frail to hold up the rest of me. I wasn't unhealthy though.

Then came the family breakup. Without going into detail, it happened in rather an unusual way, and wasn't very well dealt with by the adults in general. Unable to comprehend suddenly what everything had all been about, I began to find a comfort of sorts in food. Everything then changed. Whereas my mother always (whilst nattering to friends, neighbours etc.) used to say she was at the end of her tether trying to get me to eat, the story changed into one of me eating her out of house and home.

Despite my sudden passion for most things edible, I managed to retain a very slender body shape right up until I was aged about 18. During those growing-up years, I can now with hindsight look back and see a definite pattern of behaviour emanating from my mother as regards my changing attitudes to food.

Once my mother discovered I'd found my appetite, instead of wondering why and questioning the issue, she breathed a sigh of relief and began to use food for me as a means of comfort, a means of discipline, a treat - all sorts of things except for what it's real use should be; staying alive and healthy. I have clear memories of whenever I was upset, an ice cream would magically appear or if ever I had something like a cold, I'd be given a huge slab (on top of my dinner) of Woolworth's iced marzipan cake with a cup of hot milky Ovaltine as a pre-bedtime treat. I was even led to believe that the cake would make my cold go away!

There is a tinge of niceness about those memories, because it meant my mum was in nurturing mode and those food treats did used to make me feel safe and secure - but, there is another, darker side. My mum and I didn't always get on too well, as I reminded her so much of my father - a thing she wasn't too keen on. Whenever I did anything wrong or upset my mum, especially if we argued during mealtimes, she'd push her plate away, tell me how much I'd upset her and that she couldn't continue eating. She'd then dash upstairs to the loo, and reappear after a while telling me that I'd made her sick. Of course, I now know who was making her sick; not me, but herself. It took me until I was aged in my 30s to realise that though, and exactly what my mum's real problem was.

When I was going through my teens, I had a very good figure, going in and out in all the right places. I was a healthy size 12 and received a fair bit of male attention, as I looked older than I was. There was a little fly in the ointment though, that once I started work at age 15, my mum was constantly remarking on my weight, saying that I was getting fat (which I wasn't), telling me that no man would want me if I put on too much weight. She would then back it up by saying how pretty I was, and that I shouldn't spoil my looks by getting fat - then she'd suggest that I cut down on my food intake.

I then got caught up in the late 1960s/early 1970s fervour of crash dieting and Limmits' meal replacements. I could never stick to any of these diets for long though, but as far as I was concerned it didn't really matter as I wasn't overweight in the first place. I'd lose a couple of pounds, then my mum would take me to one side and say how concerned she was about me, that I was dieting too strenuously and she was scared I was becoming anorexic! I just couldn't seem to win or please her, so I carried on in my own way.

My mum was still continuing the manipulative behaviour, but when I was 14 she met who was to become my stepfather, and he replaced me as being the butt of it. I was largely left to my own devices, because my mum now had a man in her life.

Though illness (cervical cancer) was partly the cause, my mum continued to become 'upset' and express her feelings by refusing food, then vanishing off to the loo to purge everything and anything she'd eaten - whereas this previously had been my fault, I was suddenly let off the hook and it became my stepfather's fault - in a very short space of time, my mum had dropped her body weight to around 5st and she still believed she was fat.

Not much was known about eating disorders back in those days, and nobody questioned that my mother could have been suffering from a condition that's a sort of a halfway house between bulimia and anorexia (oscillating from one to the other depending on what was going on), as she was a middle-aged woman. The first flutterings of recognition of eating disorders was and may still be, aimed almost exclusively at teenage females.

To move on in time!

When I met my ex husband (at age 17), I by then was firmly entrenched in the behaviour pattern of viewing food as something more than nourishment. If ever he and I argued, I'd reach for the chocolate box or the biscuit tin. He too loved his food, and I began to draw him into my own psychology, whereby we perceived food as a treat, a comforting thing, a thing which gave pleasure outside of simply having a reasonable meal then forgetting about it until teatime or whatever.

My ex and I's courtship largely revolved around a shared decadence. This expanded outwards from food into drug use, but that's another issue which I've already written about on DooYoo. We gloried in going out for slap-up meals, relished the taste, texture, smell and everything else about food. At one time, and I'm ashamed to admit this, on a day out in London we even went for a huge meal in one restaurant, came out, then immediately went into the restaurant next door and had another massive blowout! I will speak for myself here though rather than him - it didn't matter that I was bloated and full up beyond my limits - I just wanted to keep eating, as it allowed me to continually suppress the things in life I wasn't happy about.

Even with this gargantuan phase of eating, I still didn't put on a massive amount of weight. I was reasonably slim on my wedding day and didn't need a crane to carry me up the aisle. It all changed though after the marriage and my ex and I lived our lives together. We were a tremendously bad influence on one another, and just lived for food and drugs.

As time went by, the weight began to pile on and by the end of the 1970s, I'd shot up to a huge size 26! Though I'm not short, I'm only of average height and I possibly looked bigger than somebody taller who was equally and overweight to myself.

Whilst going through the years of gradual weight gain, it hadn't occurred to me to try and lose it or watch what I ate. My mum would make the occasional remark that I was becoming like a beached whale, but I chose to ignore what she said, preferring to carry on stuffing my face. The only thing which did bug me a bit was that she seemed to have got her own eating habits under control, had regained the weight lost by induced vomiting in the 1960s, had started her own business, and was doing rather well. She suddenly had a distraction from making food the focal point of her life, be it over-indulgence or abstinence.

It was in about 1980 that I first began to notice other people (aside from my mum) were viewing me as a fat person. Though I knew I was overweight, I was in denial as regards the degree of the problem, and still tried to squeeze myself into clothes that only look good on really skinny people. Then the remarks and exaggerated gestures from others began to prick away at my self-esteem.

One day I was (after having squeezed myself into a painfully tight pair of jeans) walking along the street. Two small boys were playing nearby, and they stopped their play, just to stare at me. As I walked on, I heard one loudly whisper to the other.... "She's so FAT, isn't she" - to which the other replied.... "No, it's not fat. She's got a baby in there, or it might be two babies". Even though these were two little boys who weren't really old enough to have learned any kind of finesse regarding the way they express their observations on people, what they said stuck in my head and I arrived home feeling rather hopeless and ugly. Of course, my antidote for this negative feeling about myself was to raid the fridge!

It was about the same time as the above incident that I began to notice people on trains (as I commuted to and from London each day for work) would, when I went to sit next to them, move up much further than was really necessary to allow me space. If I got into an already crowded train carriage where there was one seat left in the middle of a row of people, they'd all make wildly exaggerated movements towards squeezing right up against one another, making space for somebody at least twice the size that I actually was.

Instead of receiving (as I did when younger) wolf whistles from the hard-hat brigade on building sites, I began to get insensitive comments and hootings about my weight.

I began to cover my body up. I wore long-sleeved tops, thick tights etc. on even the hottest of days, because I didn't want to show my flab to the world. It seemed easier than dieting. The fat I was carrying around with me made hot weather very uncomfortable, but being bunged up with too many clothes created an even worse problem; constant, copious sweating. I must have got through oceans of anti-perspirant during those years.....but, I still continued to eat. It made me feel better about being fat!

Then came the big depression (which I have already written about on DooYoo). It has to be said that the cause of my depression had absolutely nothing to do with my weight, and is irrelevant to this piece I'm now writing, but it was just as I was about to tip over into the bottom of the pit, that I visited my mum one very hot, humid day in the roasting hot summer of July 1983. I can't even remember what I was wearing, but as soon as I walked into my mum's house, she took one look at me (bear in mind I was almost at the end of my tether anyway), and shouted that I looked like a bag of sh*t tied up in the middle, and how on earth could a daughter of hers allow herself to become such a dowdy, fat slob! She then went on a tirade about how disgusted with and ashamed she was of me, that I'd let myself go to this degree.

Though I was cut to the core by what felt like a searing unkindness from the one person in the world who was supposed to care about me more than anybody else, it did do me some good in a strange sort of way. At the very least, it brought to the surface my own negative feelings about the size I'd become.

Just a day or so after those observations hurled at me by my mother, something happened at work which made me even more self-conscious about my weight. One of the young guys and I were talking, and the subject got onto music. He asked me what I liked (a bored look coming over his face; he was just asking out of politeness), so I gave him a quick rundown on my likes and dislikes regarding all things musical. Gobsmacked, he stated that he didn't expect someone like me to like those kinds of music, so I demanded he explain himself. Embarrassed as I'd put him on the spot, he muttered something along the lines of believing that people who were as overweight as me didn't have much light in their personality or soul, therefore would have a pretty crap taste in music, art and the other finer aspects of life. I was too incensed, and rather injured of course, to try and explain to him that fat people are PEOPLE, that carrying a few extra lbs or stones round on your frame doesn't immediately render you a complete philistine. Bearing in mind how I consider myself to have a wondrous taste in music which is classy and myriad, I felt that this work colleague's unintentional putdown dug deeper than what my mum had called me a couple of days previously.

To cut some long stories from the next six or so months short, I was rather impressed by the slow but sure weight loss of one of my work colleagues. In a short space of time, she had turned from a sluggish, pale-faced, angry-looking, very overweight girl with big attitude, into a smiling, rosy-cheeked, slim and very pretty young woman. I asked her how she'd managed to do this, and she told me all about the F-Plan diet, stating that she'd lost 3 stones in six months, and had never felt better, both mentally and physically. At lunchtime, I visited W H Smiths and bought Audrey Eyton's F-Plan diet books, planning to begin my weight loss crusade on 1st January 1984. If she could do it, so could I?

Part of what helped me stick religiously to the F-Plan diet from 1.1.84 onwards, was the depression I was in. The depression came about as a result of something I did which was rather obsessive (to say the least), and I was able to transfer my obsession away from its root cause, onto adhering to my new diet plan. The day I began the diet, I weighed close to 21st and by April of the same year, I'd shed the first 3 of those stones. Despite being at the end of the line depression-wise, I was feeling physically so much better, and I was able to fit into clothes which were two sizes smaller (having said that about obsession, I must assert here, that I did diet sensibly). I ate a high fibre, low fat diet, three regular meals a day, with lots of fresh fruit, fresh vegetables and good carbohydrate. I drank skimmed milk on my cereal, completely cut out chocolate, ice cream, cakes, curries, chips, burgers and everything else which had done me no good before. I found the diet very satisfying and didn't feel hungry once.

By 1.1.85, I weighed a much healthier 11st and by the summer of 1985, not only had my depression more or less vanished of its own accord (its disappearance had nothing to do with the weight loss as it was a separate issue entirely), but I was down to my ideal, normal weight. It felt so great to skip down the road instead of plod, brilliant to walk into an 'ordinary' shop to buy my clothes instead of Evans, I dropped two shoe sizes and revelled in hot weather once more. During 1986, and I don't mean this cruelly in the slightest, I managed to shift the biggest weight of all that was dragging me down.....my ex-husband!

As the years wore on, though I did eat things that I shouldn't have done, I ceased to binge and managed to keep to my normal body weight until the late 1990s. I was leading a full and happy life; one which didn't revolve around food. Even my mum said how much better I looked, and she began to tell me that she blamed herself for all my eating problems by trying to stuff food into my face that I didn't want when I was a very small child. For my mum to have admitted something like that, was a major development in 'positivising' our previously difficult relationship. It must be said here though that towards the end of my mum's life, she did relapse back into using food for manipulative purposes - again lots of long and convoluted stories as to why - weighing very little when she died in 1994. Before being hospitalised, her last days were spent in a rest home where some of the staff believed she had cancer due to her being skeletal, but all medical tests down that avenue proved negative. She all but starved herself to death; a dramatic reaction to lots of problems that were going on in her life during the early part of the 1990s.

Without going into detail as it will be boring to type as well as read, life took a few not so nice turns and I began to comfort-eat once more, after having kept all the blubber off for about 12 years. This time though, I have managed to keep my bingeing under control and yes, I am overweight now, but not morbidly so. I also have inured myself to any kinds of jibes made by other people about my appearance, but those are few and far between these days due to my age. People don't expect me to be young, slender and beautiful any more. I'm having to cope with a different kind of jibe now - those which are age-related. Suddenly I'm being seen as OLD, but I consider this to be the problem of the beholders, and not mine. I'm happy as I am now. OK maybe I could walk a bit faster if I lost a couple of stones, but in the whole scheme of things, I'm not going to drive myself into depression or insanity by worrying about what other people think.

I don't binge anymore, but I still have a large appetite and though I can live quite happily without chocolate, I do like to tuck into a huge tub of ice cream now and again. I consider these days that there are more important things in the world to worry about than whether I'm a few lbs overweight or not.

Society has taught us that we ideally should be sleek, slim and 'healthy'. Well, lots of overweight people are still healthy! Far too much emphasis is placed on fitting in as regards our appearance. There have been two fine examples of how gross I feel society has become in its lack of acceptance of people in general, and how many judge others solely by their outer appearance.

Example No.1 : Susan Boyle
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Though I don't watch Britain's Got Talent on TV, I catch up with clips of it on YouTube. When this shy, middle-aged lady - obviously quite nervous at performing in front of a critical panel and a large audience - walked onto the stage, I was absolutely disgusted and enraged by the judges' and audience's initial reaction to her. As the camera panned across the audience, I saw a couple of women openly sniggering at Susan's appearance and they'd immediately labelled her as a no-talent frump! Then, the lady took the stage and sang! How dare those people, until they heard her sing, assume that Susan would be a worthless person, simply because she hadn't had a complete makeover?

Example No.2 : Kevin Skinner
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This year, country singer Kevin Skinner won the grand final of America's Got Talent. I will never forget his first performance, even though the video clip has since been removed from YouTube due to copyright laws. Kevin strolled onto the stage, looking rather scruffy with his hat on the wrong way round and a guitar slung over his shoulder. On responding to the judges' questions, his voice was pure Kentucky and I feel pretty certain that the judges and audience were viewing him as one step up from a mountain man. Kevin admitted to being uneducated, and an out-of-work chicken catcher. What annoyed me most of all, was Piers Morgan's attitude - it wasn't all that far back in time that he'd been impressed by Susan Boyle and ashamed at his initial prejudice as regards her appearance, but here he was again doing exactly the same thing with Kevin Skinner. Then, like Susan, Kevin softly played his guitar and sang, with pure passion, pure feeling, pure emotion and total depth. OK Kevin's type of music in general doesn't appeal to me, but there's no doubt this man has a gift - so, what the hell does it matter what he looks like?

Interestingly, nobody appeared to give any negative pre-judgments regarding Eli Mattson's appearance when he first took the stage for his America's Got Talent audition (I have previously written a DooYoo review on him). Why? Well, Eli looked just as scruffy as Kevin Skinner, yet he happens to be instantly good-looking! What does that say about people in general? A lot!

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What the hell does it matter what ANYBODY looks like, talented or not? Inside all of us lies a person with feelings, sensitivities, emotions and all things which add up to create the human condition. It shouldn't matter if those human qualities are covered up with a bit of extra padding and nobody should judge another person's abilities, talents or anything about them at all, simply because of their colour, race, sexual orientation, gender or....weight! Why should some overweight people (or anyone who doesn't conform to the very narrow and ignorant view that society has of what is acceptable/normal) have to work hard at taking jokes against themselves, simply because that's a coping mechanism for receiving constant, day in day out prejudice?

The old Red Indian adage says.... "Never judge a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins". I'm sure pretty much all of us are familiar with that piece of wisdom and agree with it, so why don't people practice a little more humanity to one another?

Just as a winding down note, the daughter of a friend of mine is now aged 41. She left school at age 18 with 5 A-levels, and began to train as a teacher. This girl has a lovely personality; she's kind, gentle, witty, funny, very intelligent and articulate, caring, and much more....yet, she has never had a boyfriend, let alone had a serious relationship or married....she has never had a successful job interview, so has been unemployed for all these years. Why, anyone might ask? Well, she weighs about 32st and the moment anybody claps eyes on her, they instantly judge her to be not a valid member of society, without even bothering to get to know her first!

Well, I've gone on and on for long enough now, and I could never talk about this topic in such an articulate and exquisite way as Hishyeness has done - so, over and out (for now!). All I can really say in summary to the world is, wake up, get real and have a heart, please! Whatever it is you view with such unfair prejudice, may one day happen to you.

Thanks for reading!

Summary: If people with weight problems were embraced rather than scorned, maybe the problem would diminish