– How you perceive yourself and how others perceive you when you are obese
I used to weigh 265 pounds. I am only about 5’9” so, yes, I was obese. But I was invisible.
Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? How can a person be composed of so much mass and be invisible? Well, in a society that places such a huge value on thinness, we become conditioned to value thin and consider the obese less than worthy of our attention.
Unfortunately, those who are obese sometimes fall prey to this thinking and begin to think even less of themselves. It is one thing when other people don’t value you because of your looks, but it is a completely different problem when you begin to devalue yourself because of the way others look at you. This leads to a self-esteem that spirals downward and eventually into oblivion. When we fail to value ourselves, we become self-destructive from the inside out. This is a condition that afflicts many of America’s obese.
I remember what it was like. I’d walk into a store where salespeople work on commission and yet no one would approach me. I could literally stand at a cash register for several minutes while salespeople chatted only a few feet away. Even then they wouldn’t offer assistance. I had to interrupt and ask.
“Well, what’s wrong with that?”, you might ask.
What’s wrong is that I could walk into the same store with the same salespeople at 165 pounds and be greeted immediately with a smile and an offer of assistance. At 265 I was invisible but somehow, in their infinite wisdom, salespeople had determined at a glance that at 265 pound woman wasn’t going to buy anything.
Truth be told, at 265, I wouldn’t even venture into a store unless I had a purchase to make. At 165, I felt comfortable browsing whenever I felt like it – even when I didn’t plan to purchase.
What really fried my buttons was shopping at stores that specialized in health and weight loss. When a 265 pound woman walks into GNC and asks for assistance with protein powders, the salespeople always assume she is shopping for somebody else. News flash, people! People don’t lose weight magically – they usually need special nutrition and supplements to help them do it! But, of course, when I’d walk in weighing 165, the clerk was always anxious to talk to me about what supplements I used and what my exercise regimen was. Society assumes that the obese don’t purchase items to help them lose weight and they certainly don’t exercise – otherwise they wouldn’t be obese, right?
Wrong!
When I weighed 265, I had to be twice as careful about my diet and exercise twice as much as I ever did at 165. At 165, I could keep a can of Pringles in my car and nobody would judge me. Doing that at 265 made me an instant glutton in anybody’s eyes.
Our society has become dangerously superficial when a person is valued simply by their looks alone. We make far too many assumptions about people based simply upon their weight. The next time you see someone who is overweight, don’t look through them. They have as much value as a person weighing 100 pounds less.