I think I look at fat people in the same way. They have a choice. They can make a difference to themselves but I often wonder why they are the way they are and what has caused them to be in that place / state. I often wonder if it is due to some traumatic experience in their younger years, poor parenting, bad dietary habits / choices, ignorance etc. I feel sorry for them. I pity them.
So you can take your pity and you can roll it up into a meaty little privilege-and-prejudice burrito and shove it where the sun doesn't shine because how my body looks and how it functions is none of your damned business. You might take this into consideration before passing comment on how a woman looks in future.
I was not commenting upon anyone in particular. In actual fact, I think I the only person I referred directly to was either myself or Mrs G. I was asked a question and I answered it honestly. It was not meant to cause offence.
I've been reading this thread since last night, and have bitten my tongue trying to avoid saying more or less what Charlotte has just said. She's a lot more polite than I am, and my post was heading towards being just two words. You can probably guess what they would be. The judgemental (and rather patronising) nature of your assessment of others is part of what makes it offensive, whether you intend it that way or not.
I pity myself too as I am also overweight. Aside from a very small window of my life when I was trying to meet the stringent qualifying criteria to join the police in Australia have I ever been truly fit and low in body fat. I was also probably at the peak time in my life for a male so maybe that helped. Since then I have been on a very gradual and sometimes not so gradual decline. Although I had not thought about it, something that Hellymedic stated upthread rang a bell with me - concerning trouser tightness. I use that as an indicator of whether I am winning my battle or losing it. My work trousers have not changed sizes over the years. I have purposefully kept them the same so I can watch my waist and feel it either grow or decline. My heriditable fat is from my father's side. At present I expect my appearance would be more troublesome to my mother as my face has less weight on it than ever before for the last 20 or so years. I don't look dissimilar to how my father did just before that last bit of cancer ate him up. I have cheek bones now.
But I still have excess fat around my waist. I am not happy about that.
Did it ever occur to you that this thread, along with the one about obsessing over how you look on your bike, says a hell of a lot more about you than about the people you're observing?
You seem to have a problem with your assessment of your weight - yet you project it as pity onto others. You claim you're comfortable on your bike, yet you start a thread which reads to me as though your psyche is far from comfortable. Actually, I'd be more concerned about your unhappiness about your midriff fat than about anything else. The above reads like someone who is desperately unhappy about himself, and tries to judge everyone else from within his own unhappiness, without realising that the
judging is part of the problem.
"Fit" and "low in body fat" are not necessarily the same thing. High protein + low energy (fat/carb) diets can cause calcium loss, not something we should induce in most people, especially females. People with high numbers of adipose cells are inclined to lose weight less easily that those with lower numbers of larger cells, and the number of fat cells in the adult can be heavily influenced by diet during early growth. It's a complex subject, to the point that exercise physiology is a specialist branch of medicine. Just assuming that someone 'has a choice' and chooses to be obese is so far from being right I can't let it stand. The last time I was at the 'healthy' weight for my height I was living on nerves, black coffee and cigarettes. If I train I put weight on. I tend towards lumps of muscle, rather than the stringy long-distance whippet shape, despite riding 60-100 miles per week commuting, and topping that up with (say) a 40 miler at the weekend. For me, the only valid measure of how fit I am is based on my resting b.p., heart rate, and my recovery time, all of which are good enough that my doctor calls me 'depressingly' healthy even though by the book I'm something like two stone overweight. I gave up using the scales for that reason - they bear no resemblance to what is healthy
for me. Having someone else judge based on appearance would be equally stupid.
I should perhaps add that at this size and shape, very few cycling companies make clothing to fit me. Female clothing, and in particular cycling wear, makes no account of muscularity, with or without extra layers of fat.
