A Heavy Matter

I'm fat. Ok, I'm *really* fat. All this sitting around and not even vacuuming really doesn't help. It's been a real struggle to keep the gain post-surgery under five pounds. So, I understand how tough it is to be fat. I do! I weigh 217 right now. If I can get down to 180, people won't notice how thin or fat I am. I'll just be there, if you know what I mean. When I get down to about 165, people say I look really great (well, for being me, anyway) and ... you're not going to try to lose any more, are you? At 150, I start to hear about how I'll get sick if I get too underweight. Seriously. The cutoff *officially* before I'm underweight is 118 pounds. I think I'd be in some serious trouble before I got there. I'm thinking a healthy weight for me would be in the 170-175 range which would technically be about 11 pounds overweight.

I think the BMI is an interesting guideline, but I'm not really getting where the powers that be decide what "overweight" really is, especially if everybody seems to be getting fatter. Wouldn't a "healthy weight" go up as well, if we're working on averages and measuring ourselves by ourselves?? How would they know what the ideal weight for health, given a certain height, would be?

Um, but we all know when we're hugely fat. We really don't need anyone else telling us. Have you ever known anyone to truly feel helped by shouts of, "Hey, lady, go on a diet because you're fat!"? Me neither. So why would people think that sending reports home to parents of fatties is gonna help? HELLO!! We know the kid is fat already. I've heard of stuff like this happening in various public school districts and I think it's the nanny state being danged nosy. It's mean to the kid, mean to the parents, and plain old not what people send their kid to school for.

And can I add that requiring classes on "diet and nutrition" for the younger set is humiliating to those with problems? I well remember the classes on "wash your face every day" to be extremely excruciating when I was a teen as I had a face full of acne. As if my washing, buying a million products AND going to the dermatologist and *still* living with that hell weren't enough. I had to deal with the other kids looking at me during the lesson as if to say, "Is she taking notes? Because she sure could use this lesson!" Stick to math and English in public schools, please, wouldya? Most of these children actually HAVE parents at home. Not that it's any of your flippin' business if they don't.

On the other hand, you do have to wonder about people sometimes. If a ride has a weight limit of 700 pounds, and you're seriously overweight, don't hop on it with a bunch of your friends! I don't usually judge a book by its cover, but the kiddo pictured is about as close to 120-odd pounds as I am. Bet you they're not suing because they know good and well if they all got on the scale and the law of addition were applied, this family weighs over 700 pounds. It isn't the ride operator's job to check out your fat rolls and make a good guestimate of your weight. You know how much you weigh. Come on, people. What really killed me in reading the article was the idea that the family itself thinks the RIDE OPERATOR should pull people who are obese out of the line so no injuries happen:

"I think that if they had made that determination, if there was a weight issue, they would be more careful and scrutinize and not let a family on that exceed it," said Manners, whose daughter Samantha was riding the Raging Rapids slide with her parents when their raft went airborne and slammed down on the slide, bruising her back. He and his wife, Frances, also had minor bruises.

You've gotta be kidding!!! If the ride operator pulled them out and made a great big public announcement about how the people about to get on were too fat and couldn't ride, you know very well somebody might just sue for the resulting public humiliation. And besides which, as I had pointed out before, you don't always know who's overweight and who isn't. I know extremes are pretty hard to miss and that I weigh twice as much as it says on my driver's license, but still.