The Home of Steven Barnes
Author, Teacher, Screenwriter


Thursday, March 11, 2010

Super-Sized Advice From A Former Fat Kid


Bless you. Every time someone speaks truth--that our bodies obey the laws of physics--it helps to create a clearer path, something terribly necessary in the midst of the massive denial about the cause of obesity--an imbalance of input and output. Period. Everything else is secondary to this. It is also critical to have a way of dealing with the negative emotions: the fear, grief, rage that can be hidden within the excess tissue. Start with love, keep faith, and believe you are deserving of a life of passion, contribution, and growth.



www.realherosjourney.com
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

2 comments:

Marty S said...

Steve: My sister's granddaughter(21) is obese. She has tried exercise programs, weight watchers etc. Nothing has worked for her. Now she is resorting to something called band surgery where they put a band around your stomach so you can't eat too much without getting sick. How does this kind of desperation to lose weight, but lack of success fit in with your image of of the psychology of the obese.

Anonymous said...

"It is also critical to have a way of dealing with the negative emotions: the fear, grief, rage that can be hidden within the excess tissue."

Don't forget the positive emotions that are associated with some of that tissue - breast tissue. I'm a woman who's overweight instead of obese but if I lost enough fat to have my chest (where my body burns fat first) be as flat as that of the "former fat kid" in the picture, I'd be more likely to get harassed, not less (who does mainstream America hate more, people who look obese or people who look like transmen?). Keeping *this* fat makes my body prettier than it wouldbe otherwise and protects me from being mistaken for a transsexual and suffering the bigotry they do.

"Steve: My sister's granddaughter(21) is obese. She has tried exercise programs, weight watchers etc. Nothing has worked for her. Now she is resorting to something called band surgery where they put a band around your stomach so you can't eat too much without getting sick. How does this kind of desperation to lose weight, but lack of success fit in with your image of of the psychology of the obese."

My guesses are

(a) An imbalance of input *and output*? I would not be surprised at all if, when she and I eat the same number of calories, her body converts more calories into fat, muscle, bone, etc. and mine converts more calories into waste.

(b) Forgetting that women are both expected to lose fat and expected to keep fat (or at least get breast implants to look as if we kept fat) at the same time in some societies?