I had a thought the other night as I was starting this blog; every overweight person has at some point in their life felt like everybody is looking at them. It starts with us eating. Despite the fact that biologically everybody needs to fuel their body if you are fat and are seen eating, you have a serious problem on your hands. Going to restaurants becomes a stressful occupation because you feel that people are judging what you eat or the quantity therein. Furthermore, if you choose something really unhealthy like a McDonald's burger you get called out on it and if you only eat a salad leaf, people ask if you're starving yourself.
Another peril of eating out is negotiating your way around the restaurant. In my life I've noticed that most people don't tend to tuck their chairs in all that well and when combined with a full restaurant, this is an overweight person's nightmare. You just want to enjoy a meal with your friends/family/significant other but all you see is a minefield of blocked entryways and embarrassing 'squeezy' moments where you try to fit between two people's chairs and hope for the best. You feel like everyone in the room can smell your fear but I have been told that no one ever really notices this panic I (and others) have on entering a crowded room.
Then you get the times when people genuinely are looking at you. Or at least, that's how it seems. You could be at a local bar with some friends and you'll notice someone looking in your direction. They might have a sour face on and the usual reaction on my side is "is he looking at me and if he is am I causing that face he's pulling".You'll look around the room like an animal caught in a trap just hoping to find an answer for why this person is looking in your direction.Usually, it has absolutely nothing to do with you, but with enough experience of the stranger looking in your direction, you start to get a bit paranoid.
Sometimes (and for me, this is the hardest to bare) someone WILL be looking at you. With purpose. They'll smile, you'll hide your face in your glass because there's no way that this person is at all looking at you like that. Why would they? Here's the truth ladies and gentlemen, despite my overtly confident exterior inside I have extremely low confidence when it comes to the opposite sex. Whilst I have a truly winning personality (...) I know that it is not possible to see that purely from the outside. When men (sometimes rather good looking men) smile at me or come over to talk to me I panic. It's like what they say about when you die and you flash through memories of your lifetime. For me, when a man comes over to talk to me I flash back to when I was 12-13 and would go to school discos. I think about never being asked to dance before and then being asked by all of the boys who we associated with. One by one, I was forced to suffer some kind of ritual humiliation. Either there would be bottom pinching or skirt lifting incidents which everyone would watch or my partner would simply get bored of being lumped with the fat girl and move on to someone else. All at my expense. I now see approaches from the opposite sex as someone playing some kind of cruel joke on me and I have turned people down for fear that they are playing a game.
Finally, come the haters. For as long as I remember, when you are a larger person there will be people who like to remind you of that fact. I don't know why they like to remind you of this, but there are people who will go above and beyond the call of duty to tell you. A question to these people, do you think I don't know? The problem with these people is they do absolutely nothing good. For many being overweight is not simply an issue of eating crap and not moving. There are countless people who have tried and tried to lose weight and have been knocked down continuously. I remember one incident when I was walking down the high street in Wimbledon and a woman decided to tell me that I needed to "lay off the McDonald's". At that point, I hadn't eaten a McDonald's in over 3 years. Worse of all, I had lost over 50 lbs. You try to act like it doesn't phase you but you start wondering if all your hard work is even worth it because you will always be something bad to someone else. This got me thinking, you hear people say that they're trying to be 'helpful' by telling people that they're fat because it'll give them the drive to change. Really though, you're about as helpful as a person informing someone that they're wet when they're stuck in a rainstorm. Furthermore, the health risks of obesity are consistently being compared with smoking. You won't get certain treatments for related issues unless you've undertaken a weight-loss program/stop smoking plan. I dislike smoking but I have never once seen a smoker suffer from the indignity of being aggressively called out on their smoking by a complete stranger.
As I continue on this new journey, I am aware that people are going to be looking at me. People are going to comment on my losing weight and that will be great but there will always be the people who make you feel worse about yourself. To the woman with the McDonald's comment back in 2009, I do not do this for you or anyone else that I've experienced like you. I do this for me and no one else. So, to slightly alter Winston Churchill "yes madam, I am fat, but in time I shall be thinner and you will still be nursing your ugly personality". Good luck with that.
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