Biggest Loser
You don’t have to be skinny to find love. Even the suggestion that you do is spiteful and patronising. Not to mention completely untrue.
Take the latest OECD figures that show one in four Australian adults are obese. Health wise that’s nothing to be proud of, but on the other hand, it doesn’t mean that those people are all walking around loveless and lonely.
So why is it the take home message for this season’s Biggest Loser?
Someone I love very much is fat. Really fat. Technically, you’d say he’s morbidly obese, but “morbid” actually means “gruesome” or “being unduly interested in death”, which doesn’t apply to my friend at all. At least, I don’t think it does.
It’s hard to tell, because fat people don’t talk about being fat. Sure, they’re the first to dub themselves “chubster” or “jelly belly”, or “Sir Cumference” or “Lord of the Fries”. But it’s a tactic – much the same way gay people adopted “queer”, thereby cleverly disempowering the homophobes who tried to beat them with it.
It’s as if Roseanne Barr single-handedly silenced the plus-sized world when she said, “So you’re fat? Just be fat and shut up about it.” Well, she is wrong. (And not very funny. Much funnier is Dawn French, who says she’d have been a famous model had she been around when Rubens was painting. Kate Moss? She’d have been the paintbrush.)
Continue reading "All jokes aside, there’s nothing funny about obesity" »
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Lisa H. says:
Gawd, these patronising comments are PRICELESS. My husband is a scientist. he knows all your silly ‘facts’. The reality is that science is stills silent on why some people gain a lot of weight on only a little food, and some people can eat six meals a day and find… Read more »
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not fat says:
what BJA said - stop eating too much fatties exercise a bit and then you won’t be fat any more how fucking hard is that ? Read more »
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