Make Nice with Overweight People

By Ope Olurankinse
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
everydaymatters@nigeriahorizon.com
September 23, 2008

A friend of mine recently referred to my body size as ‘regular’. Meaning that I’m neither skinny nor obese.

I can agree with that.

What I don’t agree with is when onlookers make derogatory remarks about fat people’s weight, their character, and even harass them.

I once heard the story of a fat woman who brought her own chair in a movie theater and tried to sit in the wheelchair section. She was asked to leave even though she had called the manager from home and had gotten approval ahead of time. This makes me wonder if the woman had thought to herself at the time, ‘I wish I was in a wheelchair.’

Constantly, fat people hear the message that they do not ‘fit in.’ No one wants to be friends with them. To go about their business can be such a nightmare. The first thing they hear when they go to the doctor’s office because of a chronic medical problem is, ‘you must lose weight.” This is whether their medical problem is related to excess fat or not. Most of them aren’t even taken seriously.

Human beings, regardless of size, want complete acceptance of their own self, but few people want to give it to others.

Research has shown that women are the greater victims of body fat discrimination. Our community can courteously accept a fat man but only resentfully may it concede that status of a fat woman.

A few years ago, a popular magazine in the United States named John Goodman as one of its ‘sexiest men.’ It doesn’t seem likely that a magazine would rate an obese woman as one of its sexiest women any time soon.

Rejection would accomplish nothing but insecurity, inferiority, or depression. No wonder some fat kids turn out as bullies. That’s the only defense mechanism they know.

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