Okay, I'm just going to take a minute to rant, and then I promise I'll move on from here.
Every so often on 3FC I run across people who have usernames like "hugefatgirl" (not a real name, I don't think). This is fine - you want to insult yourself, feel free. But the part that's getting to me is that I just saw someone with a name like that and her *starting* weight was 180. If she was big and huge at 180, what did that make me at 288? What does that make me now?
I don't know if it's just me this is getting to. I wouldn't be surprised. And I won't let it get to me, or I'll try very hard not to. I run into these things in real life all the time, and they don't get to me most of the time. But this idea that I'm bigger than huge - finding it on 3FC, so out of the blue, was a little demoralizing. I know I'm reading too much into it. The person who picked that name was going by her perception of herself, and there was no insult intended. I'm 100% certain of that. Still, it was a little hurtful.
Oh Lisa, I know what you mean. I have a co-worker who constantly talks about how she's losing weight, and how huge she feels... and she's 5' 4" and 115 lbs soaking wet.
All I think is "If you think you're huge at a normal weight... what must I be to you?"
Just like you said, I don't think people are doing such things with the intention of saying anyone who weighs more than them is also huge or bigger than huge, but that this is how they feel about themselves, not necessarily everyone else around them. We're often way more critical of ourselves than we are of others anyway.
I do, however, find it sad when people choose user names that insult their bodies or weight or personalities. Maybe they find it motivating, but I'm also the type of person who doesn't want to be ruled by my weight all over everywhere I go. (Even on 3FC!) I'm more than my weight or the fact that I'm trying to lose some of it. I'm me. I'm larger than I'd like to be. I'm part of 3FC. There's so much more than what you see. (I'm also rhyming horribly... oh boy... it won't stop...)
I understand you well, and NO you are not alone in this. I just stick to this spot on the forum because of it. I work in an office where I am clearly the fat person!
Two weeks ago they had a graduation party for me by surprise, and one nice woman brought a cake. They wanted me to cut the cake and all and I cut it reluctantly thinking, Oh my god, a fat chick cutting cake, I feel like I'm in a hollywood movie! But all the skinny women in the room were demanding that I cut HUGE pieces. I cut a simple round cake about 16 ways so they were all very small. I just wanted to die!
They all trot off to a campus weight watchers group every week and none of them lose weight because there is nothing to lose!! I can't eat anythng in the office without a comment.
SO, as a defensive move, I often refer to myself as fat to them and over accentuate my problem verbally. I think it is a way of telling them, they don't have to wonder why such a shameful creature doesn't know she is fat. I feel like a lot of people think that fat people just don't know they are fat. Really, we all know, we never stop knowing. It haunts our every moment of every day. Every bite I take! I even have started walking to my car to eat lunch that I brought in just to avoid having to eat in front of the skinny jerks!
I don't know...it is extra hard being a young woman. Because I am 24, when I was 18 I was in Weight watchers, and the older women in the group even shamed me. Their attitude was, "I've had three children, what's YOUR excuse?"
They all want to get BACK to their skinny weight. I just can sit and dream about just getting to be skinny for one day of my life, just once! So I find that, it is easy to get upset and discouraged by the other people in our every day life. They just don't understand what it is like. I try not to hold it against them....but hey sometimes it's okay to grumble!
I've seen a number of these usernames on 3fc over the years, and some discussion of them. I really do think that people who pick user names as you describe really are describing their perceptions of themselves. A lot of research indicates that many women view their bodies in a distorted way, seeing them as larger than they really are.
Coming from someone who sees herself as a huge midwestern farm girl in the land of the waifs (California), I must say that I attribute this only to myself. I know this sounds bad, and I don't mean it to sound bad, but I don't notice people bigger than myself. I only fixate on the smaller ones. I keep comparing myself to them, wondering how I stand next to them, what jean size they wear, and how uncomfortable it is to be bigger than the health nuts in my area. No joke, most people in my area are size 00-4, some 6 and 8's. I do not see many people beyond that. My fixation is solely on the 00-4 people, and I beat myself up over it.
True, my area is composed mostly of Asian girls who I can't even measure up to bone structure-wise, but it eggs me on. We are our own worst critics, and unless you are a heartless jerk you don't even have a thought that passes in your mind about how bigger people are in relation to you. I don't feel superior to people larger than myself at all, I only feel inferiority at those smaller than myself. My best friend all through elementary, middle, and high school was 250+ pounds and we did everything together.
I use to always feel uncomfortable in work in the breakout room among he dieters discussing the latest weight loss tricks and how they felt so fat and hated what they saw…. These girls and woman where like less than a stone (14lbs) overweight, I just sat there reading my magazine to embarrassed to raise an eyelid!
This annoys me too. I hate to hear a skinny(even if it's just skinny to me) person call themselves fat and talk about losing weight. Even worse my own husband does it. He is 6' and weighs about 200lbs....however he only has a 16-18% percent body fat(they do health checks at his work). He is mostly muscle and there are only a few places he has a little padding and he is always talking about"having to get rid of this fat"here or there. I know he doesn't mean to hurt me, but he has no clue that that makes me feel even worse. And what can we really say...no one wants to be know as the over-sensitive fat chick.
I can't eat anythng in the office without a comment.
Dusty - Really?? That seems awful rude of anyone to make a comment of what anyone else is eating beyond "wow that smells good!"
I'm a Cubicle-Eater. I often eat two meals at my desk during the day (believe me, I wish I had the schedule that allowed me not to have to do that.)
No one has ever made a comment (that I know of or to my face) about what I eat. I'm assuming they just don't care, just like I don't care what they do
I suggest you stand up for yourself. Take control of the comments they make. If it's an innocent food comment, your response can be just as innocent: "Thank you! It's very tasty as well as good looking!" If, by chance, it's a comment about how much/how many calories/should you be eating that etc, your response can be... (in the most innocent question voice you can muster): "Why do you ask/say that?" If they manage to muster some excuse of a reason... Just shrug back at them & smile. Continue to smile until they walk away or change the subject.
You're worth being treated with respect. Recognize that there will be times when you need to stand up for it, though.
Does anyone remember when Jillian Michaels came here a few times to give advice? One of the things she got steamy about was negative usernames. I think a few folks even changed their names to something more positive.
I think it might be just part of the way that they see themselves. Although I think their ideal of a screen name kinda stinks.
My MIL is kind enough to remind me of my weight. My mother took my girls to get me and DH christmas. My middle DD want to get me a lime green sweater that had two snowflakes right on the breast and then on the 2 pocket there was a reindeer and a snowman.
I told my Mil about how my DD wanted to get it. She looked at me and said...wow you could be the Macey's day Parade. I was mad.
But My oldest DD has a problem with her weight already and shes only 9. She is about 5 foot tall and only weights 100 lbs. She says she fat already. I try to get her to tell me who tells her that and she tell me... myself.
I really think its how one person see's them self.
This is a really complex area for me and I have been thinking about what to say.
First of all I totally agree that no one, no matter what their size should use negative motivation to drive their personal transformations. I also find it painful that people think that fat is such a horrible thing. I am not saying it is good, but using fat as if it is one of the worst things a person can be is crazy to me. Being fat doesn’t make a person ugly or disgusting. It doesn’t make them worthless or unlovable. I will sometimes call myself a fat girl. I don’t think of it as something horribly negative, but rather the current state of fact, in the same way as I am short or dark haired. At some point I will not be a fat girl anymore in the same way that I will no longer be 34 years old.
I think many people use being fat as a general term for feeling badly about themselves. I also think many, many people have very warped views on what size they actually are. Have you watched that show “How to Look Good Naked”? In one part of it they line up a group of women and then ask the person to place themselves in the line-up based on the size of whatever is their issue (bust, stomach, butt, etc.). All of the women think they are MUCH bigger than they actually are.
I know this is true for myself. If I think back on different stages in my life, the general feeling of my size didn’t significantly change as I got larger. I thought I was horribly fat when I was 200 pounds. From my perspective being there, I was. When I got to be 250 pounds that feeling of how fat I was didn’t actually change all that much. I still felt really, really fat. I look back at pictures of myself as a teenager and I was definitely somewhat chubby, but I was nowhere near as fat as I had internalized myself to be.
One thing that I have learned is that more than anything else weight loss is a mental thing. The mechanics of it may be diet and exercise, but the soul of it is learning to love yourself. That journey can be as or more difficult for someone who has 20 pounds to lose as someone who has 200. I would be lying if I said it doesn’t bother me sometimes to hear smaller women rail against themselves about being fat. There is a part of me that feels like as someone who has been as large as I was, people who haven’t been near that size can’t understand what it was like. This may be true, but then again I can’t fully understand what it must be like for people who are wheelchair bound or can’t leave their house.
There was a thread here awhile ago about a woman who was too ashamed of her body to let her own husband see her naked. She was maybe 30 pounds overweight (I can’t remember exactly)? As someone who walked around the house naked at 350 pounds, this absolutely floored me. It just makes me absolutely furious that any woman feels lesser based on how she thinks other people perceive her body. We may still want to improve them, but I don’t think there is ever a time we should hate our bodies.
In some ways I am also jealous. What if I had gotten fed up enough to do something about this when I was only 50 pounds overweight instead of waiting until I had 200 to lose? It would have saved me a lot of grief, but it is what it is. For whatever reason I had to get up to the weight I did in order to finally say enough is enough.
So, what I would say is to try and not be upset with these other women, but rather be angry at the culture of inferiority that makes any woman feel badly about herself based on how she looks or the size she wears.
OK – I guess it is time to get down off of my . It is just that the longer I do this and the more people I talk to I get more and more passionate about this subject.
I know what yall mean about the names. I have a friend who is 170lbs, I am about 350. She talks all the time about how big she is and how she can't breathe or do anything anymore. This REALLY use to bother me. I would tell her how the heck do you think I feel I am 2times your size. She would say things like "yeah but you don't understand i have never been this big" LOL I FINALLY gave up!! I told her one day...you can't understand me and I can't understand you..lol..she still says it from time to time but not as much. I have realized though...that when women are over weight, don't matter if it is 150 lbs or 30 lbs...its all the same to us. Weird huh? I would love to be 170lbs..
I can see Mizu's point, and I dare say a lot of people with very little weight to lose do indeed only focus on how they feel about their extra few lbs rather than think anything of women like us who are much much bigger than them. At the same time it IS very frustrating to hear slim people moan about being so 'huge'. That's one of the reasons I don't post on say the UK forum, I don't want to be amongst people with a few lbs to lose, I want and need to be amongst people who are in the same boat as me. Ones who know the problems being over 300 lbs brings, and how very hard it is to get on a diet and stay on it. Thank goodness for 3fc and this forum
I think the best analogy here would be to compare how azcyn felt next to her 170 pound friend. I have spoken to a girl who was size 2. She wanted to lose her 'jaw fat'. Jaw fat! She was just a girl that had a chin that wasn't that well defined. I'm sure you know someone like this or can relate to it - some people have sharper chins than others. She thought the skin connecting her chin to her neck was too slack. This girl was a pole at my height and 127 pounds. She told me that dropping ten pounds to 117 would get rid of her 'jaw fat', and make her look better elsewhere to boot.
I just remember thinking, 'Oh, yeah, right. You really need to lose 10 pounds. I wish I was 127!'. This is not unlike azcyn's scenario... I secretly wished then I could be 127 and thought the girl was crazy. I mean, she was a size 2 and felt a 0 would be much better anyways.. and she did not have jaw fat. She just saw other girls with sharper jawlines and wished for something she did not have, just like I wished for something I did not have (her weight) at that moment.
I guess what I am trying to say is that there is rarely a girl or woman out there that is happy with themselves. I came to realize since then that even the super skinny believe they have fat deposits where they do not have them.
The sad thing about this story is that she did drop 10 more pounds... and guess what? She still had an undefined chin, but hey... she got to size 0. To this day she still complains of the 'jaw fat' under her chin.
Grrr... user names
. It is just that the longer I do this and the more people I talk to I get more and more passionate about this subject.
