HuffPost Personals: “I Am More Than My Morbid Obesity!”

So very, very, very much more.

I’m sorry. I’m a fat nerd too, just like so many of you, but this complaint is a fridge too far.

I’ve never been asked to swap airplane seats, or been told I’m so fat that I’d soon be bedridden, or had my stomach stapled and STILL weigh over 200 pounds.

Weight and body image are both a medical and a psychological problem, and retraining doctors to be nicer to fat people will ultimately lead to weaker pushback on patients who need to hear unpleasant facts.

Why @OP does she look like a teenage obese Kurt Russell?

[quote]But she says a lot of this is the fault of doctors who see obesity as a medical condition to be fixed,

Welp, that’s sort of their job. Obesity is a major modifiable health risk.

She’s fat but not like my 600 lb life fat

[Quote]instead of a simple physical trait like red hair or a second penis

😂😂😂

Roxane Gay, you in danger girrl

Like the back end of a bus!

This tenant my management company found is easily 300 lbs. I feel bad for her sometimes, she lives above me and never leaves. But my god she is a loudmouth and when she walks it sounds like she is gonna crash down through my ceilings. She is quite trashy and not a respectful neighbor. I call her Baby Reindeer.

"A fridge too far"-I'm borrowing that.

I have a very fat friend. Shell be first to admit it's her eating and lifestyle. She likes bad food, admits to disliking most vegetables and makes no excuses why she's fat. I find it refreshing, shes hilarious and fun, and wish more fat people would quit trying to blame their thyroid or metabolism and just admit "yeah, I stuff my face with fatty foods and don't exercise".

I have a very fat daughter

r11 great for you and your friend, but many people who are fat (and I mean MANY), it is NOT "yeah, I stuff my face with fatty foods and don't exercise." I think it would surprise you to find out that not all fat people stuff their faces, eat shitty food and don't exercise.

I was one of those people. I did NOT sit down with a bag of chips or cookies or cake or go to the buffet or any of those things you believe ALL fat people do. I grew up in a house where we had no junk food (this is during the 70s and 80s) because my parents were hippies and didn't believe in eating a lot of sugar. We didn't even have white sugar in our house, it wasn't allowed. Cereal for breakfast? Only if it was Wheateena or Nutri-Grain - not the stuff most or all of the kids my age ate. Soda and packaged treats? Verboten. None of that shit was allowed in our house. You know what my "sneak treat" was sometimes after school? a slice of small Orowheat wheat berry bread with a little butter. That's it.

I was always chubby, and this was a kid who rode her bike to school once or twice a week (it was 5 1/2 miles on mountain roads), had farm chores every day, rode horses, did dishes and milked a goat everyday. I was not allowed to be sedentary.

When I moved out at 18, I finally got to eat food that most of the rest of the world did, and quickly gained weight. However, I was never the kind who overindulged on a daily basis and really didn't regularly keep crappy foods in the house. There was a short period of time when I did because of who I was living with, but even then, I didn't like ice cream and wasn't really a "sweets" person.

Eventually, a lump was found on my thyroid which they couldn't rule out as cancerous and half of my thyroid was removed so it could be sectioned and examined for cancerous cells. It came back non-cancerous, so the other half of my thyroid stayed in. I started thyroid meds, but that didn't help to lose weight. I was walking miles a day, working out a treadmill, doing Weight Watchers. I even went on a backwoods camping trip for a week wherein we were on the move every day with a canoe, backpacking our own food, which was not that much food because we had to carry a week's worth of supplies with us. I came out of that camping trip having GAINED 5 lbs.

That was it for me. I went through the exhaustive process to get approved for weight loss surgery - the full-on, open RNY gastric bypass and I eventually lost 100 lbs. I kept it off for almost 21 years and then through a few years of loss, grief and heavy drinking/alcoholism gained close to half of it back. At the beginning of this year, I decided to take GLP-1 (self-pay) and lost 60 lbs. I stopped taking them about 2 months ago and haven't gained back the weight yet. I have been ravenously hungry for about the past 2 weeks but I'm addressing that with some modifications in what I'm eating and I'm going to begin hiking again now that the weather has cooled off.

I'll just add that I have another friend who gained a bunch of weight from having PCOS, not stuffing her face, and she also had the gastric bypass surgery about 3 years after I did. She also did not stuff her face or NOT exercise...in fact, she owned a Curves franchise at the time and worked out every day. She has never gained back all the weight she lost from the surgery, but she did gain about 30 extra lbs after Covid and went on GLP-1 to lose it in mid-2024 (which she did). She also hasn't gained back the weight since she stopped (about 9 months ago).

This ended up being a long post, but it is to tell you that FAT does NOT always equal gluttony and sloth. I wish more people would realize this and stop painting all fat people with broad strokes, because the need to put people in a neat little box is a RAMPANT problem for many people in this world.

"I'm just being honest" is what every abusive person says when caught trying to destroy somebody.

Has Chrissy Metz weighed in? (pun intended)

My neighbor I mentioned has stick like legs but then her gunt/stomach up to her chest is like one giant Baked Potato. (Potatoe?)

Her outfit is leggings with a big ole dress above the leggings.

And we live in a beautiful area (ocean) I dont know how she does not take walks- Its the only reason I stay here.

She’s too casual with “my labs are fine” language. Eventually, the extreme excess weight catches up with people with the onset of one co-morbidity or several. But she does have a point about the medical profession, which in general shames overweight people and does not understand the root causes of obesity. In fact, most doctors are very poorly trained in treating obesity realistically. It’s not as simple as calories in, calories out, shut your pie hole.

Source: myself, life-long struggle with obesity. Have had both bariatric surgery (gastric sleeve) and currently on a GLP-1 (Zepbound). I’m 100 lbs lighter now that I was at my highest weight, with about 20 to go to goal weight. I have had very supportive and excellent medical care with providers who “get it.”

R17 All fatties have had that indignity.

"Oh, you're here for six gunshot wounds to the crotch. Let's talk about your diet."

"The chart says you've got a miniature Dennis Quaid swimming around in your veins, but you gotta do something about this weight."

"You broke both legs jumping off the roof of a crack house? We'll set those in a jif, but I'd really like you to see our nutritionist about Ozempic."

Her labs are not fine.

Neither is her sanity.

And she does NOT have a pretty face.

Actually, 5'10" and 235 lbs makes her sound like she's just trying to make $ out of her unremarkable blubber.

Sad.