There are so many different things that are thought of when you hear the word fat. Most are bad stereotypes that do not hold true when meeting an over weight person. Most heavy people are normal, hard working, intelligent individuals that are not any worse off than our ‘normal’ weight counterparts. Fighting the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ is not going to end well by making us all self-deprecating hate mongering bigots. You will find that many fat people are in fact fat haters, they don’t understand the way advertising, the media, and even your local superstore can affect the way you feel about your body. Obesity isn’t an issue because of health effects, it is the way we look at our body, how we do not measure up to our societies high standards.

Yesterday Kristi Ally went on Oprah to show off her amazing new body. Over the past year she has lost 75 pound, which I will gladly congratulate her before bashing the very notion that an average american can hold them self to the same standard. Lets not forget that aside from being a mother; she had all day, a trainer and a personal chef to make sure she achieved her goal. I know how hard it is to lose weight, I have successfully lost 40 pounds before gaining it back. During that time I had to focus all my time on dieting, measuring my food, going to bed hungry, and exercising my brains out. Living healthy is one thing but loosing weight for health is impractical since 95% of diets fail, of those 5% that lose weight, half gain the weight back and more. Which in turn leads to more health problems. Yo-yo dieters have more health problems than an overweight person that never diets, which in turn makes the idea of dieting counterproductive. So if Kristi can keep this recent drastic weight loss off, she will be living the life, but gaining it back will put her in greater risk than where she was before.

I’m thinking about where my health will be when I’m 50 not about ‘fitting in’ now.