On Being Fat in a Thin People's World.

On Being Fat in a Thin Man’s World.

Despite the title, this hub is about some of the problems all ample people (to say the most!), not just the author, face on a daily basis when they become overweight or even - perish the word - a beast, er, obese.

But a word on my situation first so you see I possess the credentials to even be proselytizing on this sensitive subject.

I am, indeedy, large. For the first 10 years of life a thin, poorly lad couldn’t gain a pound despite his parents trying. But then we moved to the seaside and this sickly little creature bloomed - and bloomed.

Not that I became fat, but I was a burly chap all my life, weighing a round, er, around 14 to 15 stone in England and 196 to 210 pounds everywhere else where less mysterious measures were found. At 6 feet high, this wasn’t too bad.

This was great until time had its weigh, er, way, and I was suddenly in my 60’s whereupon I started to add lard around the waist and breasts (Ugh…man-boobs!).

Now its 18 stone, or about 250 pounds - but I have been in a diet since 2003 so we can expect the situation to ease soon.

Please be kind…it can happen to you!

It’s nasty to be this heavy. There is a closet full of lovely clothes that no longer can be worn.

I have found I buy one pair of jeans (42 at the moment) which last for a year or so before I buy another.

The trouble is, even tough Levis will “grow” with you, lying to you daily as you finally get them zipped. Then you go to buy another pair of 42’s and find these is a mysterious gap twixt stud and stud-hole, and there’s no way they will ever do up!

“Shite,” you wheeze fatly as you return them and get 46 this time, which take a year then do the same thing.

“They are obviously shrinking in the wash,” the portly tell themselves as they tuck into a bacon sandwich.

It’s not just trousers, guys and gals. The shirts button efficiently at the collar and for the first two descending buttons then…heck, “these have shrunk too” you gasp.

Well, at least your shoes still fit. And bless the fashion gurus for elastic topped pants.

Then there’s the diseases: Fatty heart, arterial sclerosis, arthritis and gout, hypertension, diabetes, poor circulation, weird skin growths like warts, and a lot more I’m trying to forget.

Desperately you buy exercise bikes, walkers, totter out to the nearest field or lane and try to walk it off. Ha! What is it? I 12 -mile-run to burn off a banana!

You stagger home and inhale a compensatory bacon sandwich, or two and a glass of milk.

Then there is the opposite sex. If you are married or otherwise paired-off, you find your svelte partner - who drinks, smokes, eats two bacon sandwiches to your one while staying at 110 pounds, beginning to have the expression usually reserved for those gazing at rhinos in the San Diego Zoo.

“Might be time to loose a couple of pounds,” they throw-off jocularly, trying to be kind.

“Why, do you think I’m obese or something,” you snarl.

“No, darling, darling, darling,” they quip, meanwhile dashing for cover. Not that you could ever catch them anyway.

That’s another big problem. Actually being able to do the things life often requires of you.

Like bending down and, especially, getting down on your hands and knees to rescue the pet gerbil from the cat….and then getting up again with the cat attached to your ear and the ungrateful gerbil hiding in your slipper…crunch! Durn it, never did like that gerbil much anyway.

When you get heavy, gravity become the enemy: especially when you decide it’s the day to do what this poor slab, er, slob did the other way and FALL DOWN! Do you remember those happy days when a fall was nothing; you’d bounce back up and do it again just for kicks? In fact, my party-piece when I was a drunk was purposely falling backwards from bar-stools and hitting the floor with a great crash. I’m sure everyone used to just love me.

But when the large fall, they do it magnificently, breaking bones, the concrete pavement and writhing about like stranded whales until someone calls the paramedics.

Well, it wasn’t quite that bad, my fall was partially broken by a thick stand of blackberries; unluckily, there was a chunk of concrete concealed inside by the clever blackberry for just this emergency.

This scraped and cut my leg all the way from the ankle to the thigh while the more mature of the blackberry fronds punctured my hide in as many places as they could reach.

So you don’t fall when you are old - especially when you are old and obtuse, er, you know!

Because it’s all too common to really sustain life-threatening injuries as my father did many years ago. He slipped on the cellar stairs and broke his hip. While he was in hospital, he got pneumonia and died! And he was skinny as a rail. It made me so sad, I had envisioned crucifixion for him.

What really hurts is the way all the skinnies hate us and make it painfully obvious in newspapers, magazines and the telly.

All these awful programs showing the slim easing 800 pound men through enlarged doorways en route to the crematorium.

“What a blaze, what a blaze it really was, a blaze.”

Or sucking and carving great gouts off horrid yellow grease from some poor victim lying in the operating theatre. That’s the Theatre of the Absurd all right!

What an industry has grown up around us unhappy subjects.

Diet books, weight loss programs on TV, online clubs like Slimming World and Weighwatchers. Whole ranges of “sugar free” products in the Supers. But this nation (and the US) still gets fatter and fatter…

In fact, I think the largest people I have ever seen were in Texas at a McDonalds. It was like the “Waddlers Club,” pear-shaped women and 400 pound blokes. How they had sex escapes me. But they do as several 200-pound kids gnawing on triple big Macs evidenced.

When are they going to come out with the pill that really works? Ha! Never, you know better than that…kill the goose that is laying the golden egg? Stuff us and exploit us, that’s the maxim from the shady entrepreneurs to the NHS.

God, I’m depressed writing this, I’ll have a bacon sandwich, that’ll do the trick.