I wouldn’t belittle the medical reasons to maintain a balance in your lifes choice. Even May West was voluptuous and curvy, not visibly skinny so, certainly there is lattitude in an a healthy body.

Right. Because if you’re not in full support of the right of people to be morbidly obese, you sitting in judgement of people who don’t perfectly conform to impossible standards. There is no middle ground, of course. There are only two extremes that people can possible fall under. No one has legitimate concerns over others health and their long term well being. It’s ONLY a judgmental appraisal of how someone measures up to stick-thin models.

Are you for real?

It’s almost as if these fat-phobic doctors and surgeons are concerned that excess weight and body mass will have a negative impact on the success rate of their patients after invasive surgery.

“Researchers from Thomas Jefferson University found that the risk for surgery complications increases relative to the degree of obesity.” (About.com)

“Obesity is commonly considered a surgical risk factor, but the degree of risk has been imprecisely quantified. There is little evidence that excessive body weight in itself should contraindicate general surgery. However, obesity is often associated with abnormal cardiorespiratory function, metabolic function, and hemostasis, which may predispose to morbidity and mortality after surgery.” (Abstract of The risks of surgery in obese patients; from MedPub)

““A severely obese patient can be technically difficult to evaluate prior to surgery,” said Paul Poirier, M.D., Ph.D., lead author of the advisory and associate professor at Université Laval Institut universitaire de cardiologie et de pneumologie Hôpital Laval in Québec, Canada. “For example, severely obese people might feel chest tightness that could be a symptom of their obesity or of an underlying cardiac problem. Doctors need to carefully evaluate severely obese patients before they have surgery.”
Severe obesity describes people with a body mass index (BMI) of 40 or higher. This type of obesity, affecting 3 percent to 4 percent of the population, is associated with health problems that may lead to disability and death.” (From sciencedaily.com)

But, no no no, this is all evidence of FAT PHOBIA, not the reality of having a unhealthy and unsustainable BMI.

Fat is not the enemy? Obesity is a serious health problem in America, costing us over a hundred billion dollars a year in medical costs, shortens life spans, breeds chronic secondary health problems and tends to be a familial, generational trend. Fat IS the enemy; and the obesity epidemic kills many people every year, and sets kid on a lifelong path of unhealthy lifestyles.

How is fat NOT the enemy?

And in actual fact, people are already refused medical care on the NHS because of weight, they are often told that they have to lose weight before they can have operations.

I find this frustrating.

A lot of what you describe applies to me and I’m fat, even when I was fatter than I am currently.

I fully appreciate that we fat people are under pressure. I fully feel we must put our side of the story and fight so that our rights are not further impinged or lost.

Although they are under threat, I feel uncomfortable with the idea that not being easily able to take part in mindless consumerism counts as some kind of loss, even though I know it can be inconvienient.

I also feel that even when I burned to be slim, I did not envy the anorexic/bulimic slim people who seemed to be more frightened of fat than me, because I was fat, and when you are, you cannot believe it’s a fate worse than death.