Obese = Abuse
Why do people do these things to themselves? Eat beyond the capacity of their bodies to utilize the nutrients they consume in energy-expenditure, leaving them with a continual build-up of fat deposits eventually leading to morbid obesity thereby fracturing the possibilities of a reasonable life-style. We are, therefore we eat. Yes indeed. But reasonably. Consuming food, it is said, is the only truly sensual pleasure human beings can engage in without a partner to achieve fullest satisfaction.Hmmm, perhaps, but where's the satisfaction in overdoing that sensuous pleasure to the extent that you destroy your potential to live life to its fullest? The overweight person becomes physically incapacitated, unable to walk properly, achieve and/or maintain full mechanical function of the body. Let alone the damage done to internal organs by the sheer weight of all that useless fat. What happens to self esteem? We live in a world that admires the look of people who restrain their appetites.
Along with impairing oneself through a growing physical instability, a growing threat to one's health, a growing possibility that one is foreshortening one's life and inviting an early death, one has also to live with a new consideration: rejection. Society isn't dreadfully adept at dismissing opportunities to pass judgement, nor am I, particularly, although when I'm in the company of someone who is horribly obese I make an attempt to appear non-judgemental.
Heaven knows, people who carry around a truly abnormal physical presence are only too aware of how they appear to others: weak-minded, self-indulgent, not dreadfully intelligent. The book-ending descriptives could be away off base, but not the central one. And how intelligent is it, in any event, to impair oneself to that degree? And then become obsessively self-forgiving, offering to anyone who will listen the greasy panacea meant to salve one's own conscience, that being fat runs in the family?
Well, it most certainly would, if it was a family trait to overeat, to consume any and all foods regardless of nutrient value or lack thereof, at any and all opportunities. Children are set up for life when they come from such families where early exposure to overdoing things becomes the norm. It takes the rare child, become a dreadfully overweight adult, who can resolve to wrench him/herself away from the familiar comfort of eating continually. But I've seen it happen.
I've got a neighbour who is morbidly obese, completely spherical, with great mounds of fat hanging from every limb and whose ability to move about freely has been so compromised by her weight and immense body form that it becomes a feat of endurance for her to walk half a block, and as a result she doesn't venture to do that very often. Think of what suffers when one is so dreadfully physically incapacitated.
Your health, your self regard, sense of well being, developing a thick outer skin to deflect any kind of implied or supposed criticism of lack of control? Such people pounce on any news items reporting scientific findings that hint at obese geneology, and are happy to have others believe as you do, that you suffer from a kind of incurable disease - and, it is not your fault. That's key: "it is not your fault". Genetic inheritance has somehow intervened to cause you to be as you have become.
Forget that this particular house where this morbidly obese person lives too often has take-out food deliveries. Everyone loves food, loves to eat, appreciates the abundance available year around in our economy, our society. But not everyone delectates uncontrollably at the very thought of food of one kind or another, then proceeds to consume enough at each sitting to feed a horse.
If you don't exercise sufficiently. If you don't sufficiently exercise the simple option of pushing away from the table when you've eaten adequately for one single individual you have succumbed to the potential for obesity. You become a visual blight, not only to yourself but to others, because you advertise, loudly, that you cannot control your impulses, your cravings.
You have resigned yourself to a life of early-onset health problems, along with the very real possibility of early-onset death. You are declaring with your physical presence that you are, through your personal selfishness, becoming a millstone around the neck of the public health system. Oh sure, along with other people who practise equally self-injurious acts of over-indulgence.
I'd say from what I have personally observed that anyone who is a mite over five feet in height and weighs between 350 and 400 pounds is absurd beyond belief. What does it matter if you believe yourself to be an intelligent, compassionate and responsible individual? How intelligent, self-compassionate and responsible can one be to condemn oneself to this kind of life of deprivation?
Deprived of the ability to move about freely. Deprived of the willingness to show oneself more than is absolutely necessary in a public venue for fear of becoming an object of ridicule. Deprived of the assurance that one can live a reasonably-long life. Deprived of the realization that one's health in ordinary mid-life is readily manageable. Deprived of the ability to be truly self-dependent.
Obviously not food-deprived.
posted by Pieface @ Friday, August 18, 2006
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