What If No One Were Fat?
A Response to the Offensive Article on MSN
by Leah Day
It's a really sad thing that we live in a society so determined to put down fat people. I spotted this article on MSN this morning (April 29 2008): "What If No One Were Fat?"
I'm a skinny person who has no weight problems and even I find this article offensive. What if fat people weren't fat? You might as well ask "would anyone mind getting rid of all the fat people?" This is just another demeaning and offensive way to put down a group of people that don't deserve this treatment.
The author, Shirley Skeel writes "In the United States today, 66% of adults are overweight. Almost 33% of adults are obese, and 4.7% are morbidly obese, or more than 100 pounds overweight." Okay, so if 66% of everyone is fat, who do you think is mostly reading this article? If the fat people outnumber the skinny people, who is really in control of things?
This article was written apparently to prove just what a social and economic drain fat people are on America. According to Skeel, we would all be richer, live healthier lives, wear nicer clothes and doctors and McDonalds would be out of business if fat people weren't fat.
Yes, you have to eat to be fat. A lot of people believe fat people are just big, stupid cookie monsters with no soul. We laugh at them and shake our heads at their ungainly strides, never considering what it must be like to live a day in their shoes.
Truth of the matter is, it's very hard to change eating and lifestyle habits and it's even harder to alter your metabolism if that's the way it's operated for more than half your life. Most fat people have yo-yo dieted for years without any success and it's their self-esteem that pays the price.
Try not eating sugar for a week and see how far you get. Read your ingredient labels and don't eat even 1 gram of sugar. I bet you can't do it because you've never had to watch what you eat. Fat people are constantly watching, morbidly obsessed with losing weight because they live in a society that has shouted negativity at them from the day they got chubby.
I find it really interesting that MSN doesn't write articles "What if we had no welfare?" or "What if oil companies actually had to pay taxes?" or even better "What if all major corporations were forced to disband?" Let's start measuring the social and economic costs of welfare and what a drain that is on our country. Better yet, let's start actually holding our oil companies accountable for their disgusting profits at the expense of American drivers.
And I'm sure all Americans would be a lot better off without the corporate big hand screwing people out of their retirement they've worked half their lives to build. We would all be better off without mind-numbing, fear mongering news like this dribble from MSN this morning. And if we lost McDonalds? I certainly wouldn't be crying.
If you got rid of fast food you probably would get rid of a significant portion of fat people. Even the article mentioned that fat people make less money and are promoted less often than skinny people. Less money can often be correlated with less time because they work harder and more hours to make up for the lacking wages. And what do we do when we have less time? We eat more quick, convenience type food that generally packs on the pounds.
Any respect for Skeel went out the window when I read this paragraph "If Americans were slim and maintained their weight by eating 150 fewer calories a day (half a slice of pizza), that could snip roughly 6.5%, or $20 billion a year, off US farmers' sales (assuming no extra exports). Bob Young, the American Farm Bureau's chief economist, says farmers would cope. They'd switch some land from fattening seed oils and sugar beets to fruits and vegetables. Or they might grow corn for ethanol, or even open a hunting resort."
To start, we're already producing way too much food. America grows about 6,000 extra calories a day per person and do you want to know why people are truly fat? Because corporations like McDonalds have figured out how to process those calories down so that people can actually consume that many a day. Farmers are going broke growing corn and soybeans, meanwhile I'm luckly if I can find a bale pepper at the grocery store for less than $4.
I would encourage Shirley Skeel to research her articles better and maybe attempt writing stories that don't make a large portion of the population feel like jumping off a cliff. Remember if 66% of America is fat, that means they outnumber skinny people two to one. Fat people can and should demand better treatment of themselves because they are still people - large, round, beautiful people - that feel and think and are just as intelligent as skinny people.
Source: http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Insurance/Advice/WhatIfNoOneWereFat.aspx. Shirley Skeel. April 29, 2008
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