Conference rocks::weight_control

re .0

>    How do you deal with stuck-up, snotty people that really go out
>    of their way to subtly put down overweight people.

Well, I guess they should be treated the same way as the stuck-up snotty
people that put down folks with other characteristics they don't care for,
depending on your style...sarcasm, silence, making them uncomfortable...

>    And, how about men that say, "Gee, you have a great personality
>    but I really like thin women."  

I take it this is distinct from Question 1, in that you don't *have* to stay
in contact with this person anymore?  In which case, you can answer that
he unfortunately doesn't have a great personality, even though you do like thin
men! :-)  Or better yet, you prefer heavier men :-)

I doubt this was very helpful, but I enjoyed writing it anyway. :-)  I guess
there isn't much we can do to change others, other than educating them and
telling them what we think about the subject at hand.  And remembering that
they are the ones missing out...

Jill

    
    
    So many people look at being overweight as a weakness in that persons
    personality....and lets face it, when we are at our heaviest can
    you honestly say we are having fun?  and full of self-confidence?
    We always say, "If they only knew what they are missing?"  But what
    are WE missing.
    
    A couple of weeks ago a guy in my group said....if you don't lose
    20 lbs, I'll hit you...!  Naturally, I took that to heart.  It's
    tough facing reality...but the impact of the comment faded and here I
    am, still working on losing 'that 20 lbs'.... because I can only
    lose it when I want to.
    
    Basically, now I tell people...thank you for sharing that with me
    and go on. 
                           
    

    I have found that people who put down overweight people (including
    yours truly) understand all too well.  My very thin sister is not
    that way naturally, and maintains her fashion-svelte figure by starving
    more than she binges.  For a long time she hated the sight of an
    overweight person (like me) because to her I represented everything
    she was struggling to overcome.  It was almost as if she felt she
    would "catch" obesity if she was around a fat person too long (the
    same way some people react to someone with a disease like cancer).
    At the same time, she did like the fact that I was fat, because
    this allowed her to feel superior to me--I still obviously had a
    problem that she, the Superior Being, had triumphed.  So most of
    her put-downs were efforts to both protect herself from "contamination"
    (sort of like crossing your fingers to keep away bad luck) and good
    ole sibling rivalry (nyaah, nyaah, I can do better than you can).
    How did I handle it?  By giving her the Boredom Treatment ("is 
    that all you can think about?  How veddy, veddy dull . . . ") or
    ignoring it completely.  That became the way I often coped with
    outsiders who offered similar snubs; I never let them know they
    were hitting home.  In fact, I went out of my way to act as if I
    was proud, and felt beautiful when around these people.  It was
    fun to see their confusion; evidently, they got blown away by the
    thought that a fat/ugly/repulsive person like me dared to act like
    a thing/beautiful person.  I enjoyed that.
    
    As for the guy who says he really prefers thin women . . . just
    chuck him under the chin (as you would a baby) and coo (in your
    best Mae West voice) "Women who look like women frighten you, little
    boy?"  Then sashay away with your best Mae West walk.  (Nice, wicked
    little fantasy, isn't it?)   ;-)
    
    Marcia

    I've been heavy all my life, so I can deal with this.  Depending
    on the commenter's attitude, I either laugh it off, pat my belly
    and tell them how much I've lost, or hone up my nastiest wit and
    take a truly low blow back at them.  For me, ignoring them is not
    an option.
    
    On the other hand, I have a real problem with folks who have just
    the nicest personality, and who you really like, but who refuse
    to take their weight problem seriously.  This is the kind of person
    who cannot see the difference between "I care about you and how
    much you weigh" and "All you care about is how much I weigh".
    
    						-Jeff
    

    Odd...actually it has been years since someone made a crack about
    my weight to my face...it was a reference to getting a wide angle
    lens for the camera since I was having my picutre taken. I laughed
    it off at the moment...went home and cried my heart out...I wonder
    to this day why I laughed. I *should* have said something to let
    the person know how very offended and hurt I was.
    
    I'm always paranoid when I pass a group of people who suddenly start
    laughing..a hang-up from my high school years when I was teased
    unmercifully about my obesity. 
    
    BTW: Marcia...I love your Mae West response..you must be a truely
    beautiful woman with a loving heart and a gracious soul. Thankyou!

    Re the man who says "you have a nice personality, but I prefer
    thin women...", well, what's wrong with that?  If someone has
    physical preferences for men/women they date, there's nothing
    wrong with them.  They're not necessarily snobs.  Come on,
    folks, tell me you're not more attracted to certain "types",
    whether it's a specific hair color, a body build, a height,
    a preference for moustaches, or whatever!  And we all know
    from being overweight that it DOES affect our lives: our
    personalities, our health, our activities.  If someone does
    not want to deal with that, or can't, it's quite understandable.
    
    You were perhaps offended, perhaps hurt.  That I understand
    from my own experiences.  But the guy does not necessarily
    have problems!  Sounds like he was honest with you, and tried
    to temper his comment with a complement which, unfortunately, 
    didn't do much good.  There's lots worse out there, especially
    when we're feeling our most vulnerable.  Stay away from the
    ones that see your low self esteem as a chance to use someone,
    treat them like dirt, and discard them!
    
    --Louise

I have often wondered, how with so many hurtful/scornful people in the
    world, anyone could possibly have felt like I do...about food...about
    the way I look.  But I found some answers - from reading notesfiles
    and books and talking to people...it is so good to know I am not
    alone - and although we are not all alike in our reasons for putting
    on weight, there is always hope, and oh....there are friends!
    
this poignant piece was taken from a chapter in "Feeding The Hungry 
Heart", by Geneen Roth.  It was written by someone in her workshops 
(called "Breaking Free").  It is about the hungers some have (I know I 
do).  Perhaps it will give others the same insights it gave me.  I'm 
sorry it's so long, but I feel it's worth it.

-Jody

**********************************************************************
Days alone come down to this.  I work, I write, and the sun goes down. 
 Then, if I didn't have a group in the evening, I don't always know
what to do with myself.  Maybe I'll call Nancy upstairs, call her and
have her down for an hour or two.  I see myself sitting in the rocking
chair, Nancy on the bed.  I see myself listening to her and thinking
about my writing.  No, I won't call Nancy.  Go to a movie, then.
Katherine Hepburn is playing in "Mary, Queen of Scots".  I love
Hepburn; it would be a pleasure to see her, but a distraction.  From
what? From following myself into the center, which I keep trying to
avoid.  I don't know what to do when I get done.  So I distract myself
by calling a friend, seeing a movie. 
  I remember now why I ate.
  Last Thursday morning I had returned from Tom's house facing the
possibility of our relationship's ending.  The ache in my chest had
spread to my shoulders, neck, stomach.  I was also hungry, so I
prepared my usual breakfast.  As I sat at the kitchen table, I
thought, "I don't want to have to get up from this table and go on to
the next thing.  I hurt too much."  I looked down at my plate; only
one dried pear left.  But lots more in the refrigerator, a whole bag
full. "I could eat all day.  That way I wouldn't have to think about
anything else.  Tom's face, the way the light hits his beard in the
morning, streaming through the red and white hairs." 
  "Snap out of it," I told myself. "Stop dwelling on his face." I 
can't.
  What about the pears? It would be so easy to let the morning fade
noiselessly into afternoon while I sat here chewing and chewing.  It
would give me something to do.  I could eat till I couldn't eat; then
I could sleep.  When I awoke the pain in my stomach would be louder
than the one in my chest.  I could drown the ache, wash it over with
waves and waves of nausea, transfer my despair to the physical level. 
Food magic.  Until the hollowness sucked me cold like a vacuum and I
needed relief again. 
  Days alone come down to this: propelling myself through a labyrinth
of walls whose texture changes, paths whose scenery varies, I follow
the tangled forest of my mind.  And then I get to the center and then
I run.  I talk I leave I eat but I run.  The center - steel gray, I
imagine, with lacy edges - but the center of what? Of whatever I eat
to avoid.  The center, a reservoir of life's experiences, a storehouse
of images, tears, knowledge, wisdom.  The center, the ineffable center
of me.  Where is it?  In my chest? My stomach? My brain? 
  Wherever it is, it is waiting; it is hungry.  Like a baby bird whose
mouth waits to be filled, it is hungry.  The hunger stretches across
miles, closes in on itself and begins again.  Like a circle with a
million circles inside of it, my hunger, stark and raw, waits for me
at the center. 
  When I am standing at the rim, it looks like darkness, like the gulf
between two bodies or two thoughts, between two breaths.  There is
always the chance that the next word may not arise, that the bodies
may not come together, or that the next breath will not be taken.
Terrified of taking that chance, I talk I leave I eat but I run.  I am
terrified of leaping so far - what if my legs won't hold me? What if I
make the leap and all that's there is silence, separation and death? 
  It's safer, yes, it's safer to stay hungry.  Like a fist in my 
stomach, my hunger opens and closes.  Sometimes I can ignore it.  And 
there is always food.  One dried pear after another, chewing and 
chewing and chewing, sitting at the kitchen table until the sun goes 
down and the shadows lengthen and there is nothing else to do but go 
to bed.  In the morning I am an echo of myself.
  The others - what do they do with their hungers? The voice at the 
center of the vortex that calls them, beckons them to follow its 
spiraling down, down to the starkness, the rawness? They may drink or 
take drugs, or they eat; oh yes, they eat.  It's all the same.  We all 
run.  We are all afraid of our own hungers.
  Except the ones who aren't.  The madmen, the artists, the saints.  
They walk right into the starkness.  They absorb their grief.  They 
become, they actually become, the space between one breath and 
another.  The madmen stay mad because they are caught in the eye of 
the center, whirling.  They become so enmeshed in the heart of the 
darkness that they think that's all there is.  They leap into, but do 
not know how to leap out of.  The artists, the saints get to the other 
side.  No longer afraid of their own hungers, they seem to live at the 
center of a sparkle that brightens and dims according to a natural 
rhythm.  But even the madmen are ahead of us: at least they leap.  
We would rather remain hungry and afraid.  We would rather turn to 
food or drugs or drink that dulls the call, never reaching the loamy 
hungers inside.
  The drive to eat compulsively is not about food.  It is a about 
hungers.  The hungers of regret and sorrow, of unspoken anger, 
unrealized dreams; the hungers of your own potential that are waiting 
to be filled, like a baby bird's mouth.  The more you run from them, 
the more they threaten to overtake you, consume you, so the more 
you run from them.  Something in you, the voice of your hungers, does 
not want you to die without having realized your own uniqueness, so it 
calls to you.  When you don't listen, it screams at you.  When you 
run, it follows you.  Trying to escape from it is like trying to 
escape from your own shadow.
  The more you run, the more frightened you become.  Because then you 
have to deal with the problem you've created along the way:  the ten 
or twenty or thirty pounds you've gained.  Problems that arise from 
running are only symptoms of the underlying hungers.,  But they become 
realities in themselves that must be dealt with - so the focus gets 
transferred from the psychic to the physical level.
  Yet when you stop running, you stop being afraid.  It turns out that 
the fear of hunger is worse than the hunger itself.  Because the 
hunger, when you're in it, is just hunger.  Not frightening, not 
anything but hunger.  Out of experience of it, a way to fill it becomes 
apparent.  When you are being afraid of it, you cant focus on ways to 
ease it.  Fear is all you know - wild fear that sends you running, 
trembling in ten different directions, all of which are an attempt to 
avoid, not to fulfill, the hunger.
  When you stop running, you become part artist, part madwoman, part 
saint.
  Days alone come down to this.  A choice between running and standing 
still.  Yesterday I wrote until the sun went down.  And then I didn't 
know what to do.  I was slammed up against myself and I wanted to 
escape, climb the walls of the labyrinth.  Wedged into an empty space, 
I felt myself slipping into the steel-gray center, and I wanted to 
flail my arms and legs, get back outside again.  But since I was 
writing about hungers, I watched.  The wind chimes brushed together 
softly; a mockingbird sang out.  I waited, and watched myself waiting. 
 I wanted to run, to eat, to call someone - even the operator at my 
answering service would do.  Break the stillness, the deafening 
aloneness, the movement into the center of hunger.  As I rocked back 
and forth, back and forth, and the chair creaked against the floor, 
the sound of my own sighs startled me.   spider weaved its way over my 
desk.  I let myself down into the space between thoughts.  The 
steel-gray center became fluid and weightless, and then I wasn't 
waiting anymore, wasn't frightened anymore.  There was no trying, no 
struggle.  It seemed as though the shape of the hungry space receded 
where I stuck out, and stuck out where I receded, so that when I 
slipped into it, we fit.  And like puzzle pieces that, when assembled, 
create an image, a visual unity that makes you forget about the 
individual parts, when I slipped into the hungry space, it and I - we 
- became a third thing, a felt unity.  Me became me being me.  Not me 
being afraid or me being hungry but me being what makes me me.  In the 
crevices between unscheduled moments - the moments I am most fearful 
of - the background noise is dimmed to such a low level that I can 
unfold myself if I dare.  I become authentic.  Am I most fearful, 
then, of becoming uniquely myself?  Of the power that would ensue if I 
weren't constantly trying to talk myself out of being myself?  Are 
the empty spaces empty because I refuse to join my edges with their 
recessions?  Probably.
  Yesterday, as I sat in the rocking chair, in the silence, the image 
of a bird came in.  A Japanese paper bird, delicately folded in 
origami style.  The beak was well defined, the head small and 
unobtrusive; the wingspan was glorious, streaked with blues and 
purple.  A long and graceful body edged out into a tail with three 
distinct feathers.  I thought to unfold it.  Then the voice of fear: 
"No. If you do that, you'll never put it back together.  Keep it in 
one piece." Rocking back and forth, I argued with myself:"Unfold it, 
see how it works." "Leave it alone." "Go ahead." "If you unfold the 
bird, you will be left with empty spaces; then what will you do?" I 
looked again at the bird, decided to unfold it.  First the beak, then 
the head.  After that, the body, unfolding back in on itself more and 
more until I got to the wings.
  And when I unfolded them, first one and then the other, I saw that 
the space between the wings, like the space between breaths, contained 
the secret of how to fly...

    I was recently at a lunchen where a woman said something that struck
    me so funny I feel that I just have to share it with you all.  To
    be sure, this lady falls into the category of people who **REALLY**
    don't understand.  We were talking about the Lyposuction (sp?) 
    operation where fat is removed from under the skin.  There were
    many people who expressed varying degrees of concern about this
    and that possible bad outcome.  Then, this very thin person piped
    in and said "Not only that, but people who have this operation don't
    realize that once you have the fat cells removed, you can NEVER
    gain them back, no matter how hard you try".  Now _that_ is a lady
    who does not understand.
    
    Marion
    
    :-D

re .9 ("you can't gain fat cells back no matter how hard you try")

dream on... :-)

Jill

    This does point to a problem that I, as an overweight person,
    had NO idea existed:  some folks have a terrible time gaining
    weight.  Since it's all too easy for me to do, I had no real
    grasp of how frustrating it can be for underweight folks.
    There are many people at the gym who are there because they
    are trying to GAIN weight - men and women who desparately want
    to add some meat to their bones.  There's two sides to every coin.
    
    Also, I've heard there's two kinds of fat:  brown fat and white
    fat.  The brown fat is the short term storage fat, the necessary
    kind that your muscles can tap most easily, the kind that's
    used for storing fat-soluable nutrients.  The white kind is what
    we're all trying to get rid of - long term storage fat, not
    really necessary, hard to tap, not used for the give-and-take
    energy needs of your body.  Liposuction, anorexia, and dieting
    without exercising deplete the brown fat, which is non-replaceable.
    The white fat is all TOO replaceable.  Losing brown fat leaves you
    with less energy and strength, since your muscles have to wait
    longer to get "fed" by the white fat.
    
    I don't know the scientific background for all this - if anyone
    does, I'd be glad to hear it.
    
    --Louise

    
    Man I sure have had my taste in this Department?  You know
    that song>
    
    I've been pushed round I've been lied to.. I think they wrote
    it for me.. I wish I could go on live TV.. Like Phil D. show
    and say how I feel about people putting down because they don't
    look like they feel we should.. People put sexy pretty people 
    down also..
    
    I have had men look at me and say forget her she's too FAT!
    
    One song I always hated is I don't want her you can have
    her she's too FAT for me..
    
    Alot of men think that Fat girls are just looking for 
    a man.. but a Fat girl has feelings and some have a 
    good heart..
    
    Maybe we could have a pumber sticker made up:
    
    Fat People are Nice too Or Have you hugged a Fatty today?
    
    I have learned you have to over look these people and I had
    enough put downs to know.. like my sister telling me she liked
    going to the beach with me so the guys can look at her...nice
    right..
    
    
    We are as important as the next guy so lets hold our heads up
    high and lose this weight and lets see what the world can find then?
    
    Ha ha..
    
    
    Ann
    
    

    A question that people who "mean well" ask that sometimes bugs me:
    
    Although I have hit goal, I still pretty much stick to the prescribed
    exchanges for the various WW food groups for the most part.   The
    main difference now is that I'll allow myself "that little extra
    treat" a bit more often than I did when I was actively trying to
    lose.  Why is it that on some of those occasions, people who know
    I was on a weightloss program see me with, say, a piece of pastry
    or some nuts/chips or a dish of ice cream, and say:
    
    	"Can you have that?"
    
    or
    
    	"Are you supposed to have that?"
    
    or words to that effect.  For some reason, that rubs me the wrong
    way.  Was wondering if anyone out there had a good tactful way to
    respond to such comments....
    
    
    Thanks,
    Paul
        

    Well, let's assume they're just genuinely surprised and/or concerned
    for your continued well-being.

    They may not understand that WW maintenance does allow "treats," and
    that having lost as much as you have, and having dieted for quite a
    while, you've learned what your limits are and can now safely eat these
    things.  It might be a good opportunity to "educate" them as to what WW
    and proper eating habits in general are all about!

    I'd rather get that response (though I agree it can be irritating) than
    the infamous "Oh, c'mon, a little bit won't hurt you!"

    Beverly

    I'm pretty sensitive about being overweight (which is why I'm trying
    to lose the surplus pounds).
    
    What brought me to the point of depair was an advert on UK television
    for a lager (can't remember what it is called).  Griff Rhys-Jones
    is in it and it has clips from 'Ice Cold in Alex' with John Mills
    interspersed with jokes about going into a nudist camp for a drink.
    The group is outside the camp and the main 'joke' is that an enormously
    fat woman (only seen in shadow across the wall of the camp) has
    taken off her clothes despite the pleading of the aforementioned
    Rhys-Jones.
    
    The woman's name - you've guessed it - Katie.
    
    Imagine how many overweight Kates there are in Britain being teased
    rotten.
    
    Very funny
    
    Kate Tudor

    How to be instantly unpopular.  I find that my biggest problem comes
    from other people who are 'too short for their weight'.
    
    What happens is that I decide to try a course of action, such as
    drinking lots of water.  Instantly, everyone that has not diagnosed
    their own problem has the answer to my problem - I drink too much
    water.  Same goes for going vegitarianism, eating lots of meat, or
    whatever I try.
    
    Perhaps I should be grateful that someone cares.