Reply #74: Good for you for saying what needed to be said!!

[chefgirl]

While I am not overweight now, 5'0" 115 lbs, when I was younger I was VERY heavy. My top weight was about 200 lbs, which at five feet tall, was really pretty rotund.

I went through all the same experiences in school. P.E. class, boys being very cruel, etc. I was lucky enough to have a lot of friends however, but even they always felt it there God given right to critique my weight.

When I went to culinary school, I began to lose weight, partly because I was learning a little bit about food, and partly because I was working my ass off every day.
I mostly did it by eating low fat, high volume foods.

I learned a LOT about how shallow people are, and how transparent the whole idea of outward image is. When I was thin, all of a sudden, people were just more accessible and nicer, especially men.
When the only difference is your appearance, you see men who you know wouldn't give you the time of day if you were heavy, falling all over themselves to get you into bed, and they don't know anything more about you than the assholes who wouldn't have bothered with you before. It taught me an enormous amount about people. Lessons I will never forget.

My mother was a gorgeous woman, who was 6'0" tall and very thin when she was younger. As she got older, she eventually weighed close to 200 lbs. and, although she was still very beautiful, beat herself up till the day she died worrying about her weight. It was so sad for me to listen to her, after all the lessons I had learned about body image and perception and other peoples prejudices, but I could never get her to understand that.

Sorry, for the long post, but I want to say, I fully understand where you are coming from, buckettgirl, and I stand with you, for very personal reasons, and because you seem to have already learned the lesson I wish my Mom could have learned.

Screw other people and what they think of your appearance. If someone doesn't take the time or make the effort to look a little deeper than the surface, they aren't worth wasting time with anyway.

-chef-