Starting weight: 17 stone 4 lbs
Current weight: 14 stone 13 lbs
Weight lost: 33 lbs
It feels great to be down into the next stone bracket. Goodbye 15s – we’ve had our ups and downs but I don’t think we should see each other anymore. In fact, I never want to see you again.
Since I went to my first Weight Watchers meeting at age 15 I have been able to mentally bookmark moments of my life by how much I weighed. I could tell you the exact weight I was when I dated each of my ex-boyfriends, on the day I went to Uni, when I completed my first fun run. That figure on the scale defines not just my present, but also my past. I hope that one day I’ll be able to put my scales in the bin and not feel the need to know that number.
The number is also so intertwined with my self-esteem. It might only be a difference of 1lb, but I feel so much better now being in the 14s than the 15s. I know this shouldn’t be the case. I wish I was able to love and be proud of myself regardless of my weight, but being called the fat kid since the age of 4 is a hard thing to shake off. It’s a lifetime of being told that being fat is second-best. And those kids on the playground got those ‘fattist’ views from somewhere – quite possibly their parents, or else the endless media images, in which the overweight character is the joke of the scene.
Fat Jokes – Haha
One of my favourite shows is ‘How I Met Your Mother’, but I feel genuinely disappointed with its portrayal of overweight people. Barney makes a number of references to the amount of women he’s slept with, followed by ‘and not a single fatty – up high’… There’s a scene where Ted is out on a date with a beautiful girl and the others text him a picture of her a year earlier in which she is obese, and he runs away. In another episode Barney makes up a poem about the ‘Sexless Inkeeper’, aka the fat, ugly woman who he pretends he will sleep with to have a place to crash for the night. These are just a few of examples, which I haven’t had to look up as they are engrained in my memory, but I know there are plenty more. I remember feeling real disappointment at every one of those references, because I am that girl that Barney would shudder at the thought of being with and that Ted would run away from.
I’m not suggesting that the media needs to overcompensate by portraying being overweight as being healthy – we all know it isn’t. But in my opinion it’s just cheap humour when writer’s make simplistic fat jokes (or ginger jokes, or ugly jokes…), because four years olds can do that and there is no skill involved. It just puts someone down for what they look like.
‘Friends’ had it slightly better – at least Monica is written as a complex character. Yes, there are plenty of jokes at her expense when she is fat, but the general tone is one of fondness for her- you know the writers like her as a character and want other people to like her too – when she is fat and when she is thin.
Furthermore, when you take ‘New Girl’, which also deals with overweight characters (namely Shmidt in the past, but also his girlfriend Elizabeth), whilst they are occasionally the butt of jokes there is some major character development in there. Shmidt realises that Elizabeth is someone who really values him for who he is, and at the end of the current series he is left in a quandary where he has to choose between her and his other ex Cece (who is a model) and he can’t make the decision. Something tells me that Barney and Ted wouldn’t have taken long to make their minds up.
Maybe that’s the difference with HIMYM – as far as I can recall (and please correct me if I’m wrong) there are no major overweight characters in any of its 8 series, and ‘fatties’ are only objectified and ridiculed. There is no doubt left in the viewers mind that of course the male characters could only ever be attracted to beautiful, skinny women.
I don’t want to go down the path of political correctness. No I do not believe that comedy should have limits and I definitely don’t get on my high horse at every fat reference in the mainstream media (I’d be getting up there a lot if I did), but I wish that writers wouldn’t put their characters in boxes (and this goes for more than just the overweight ones).
I haven’t got any statistics about how the above comedies treat their overweight characters. I can only say that I have never finished an episode of ‘New Girl’ or ‘Friends’ and felt bad about myself, but with ‘How I Met Your Mother’ sometimes I switch off the TV and feel just a little bit worse. That is my only measurement and yeah I do think that the HIMYM writers have a bit of a fattist agenda.
But screw them. I want to learn how to feel good about myself regardless of that number on the scale. And whatever it reads, I wouldn’t want to date the Teds or the Barneys of this world. I’m holding out for a Shmidt, because he is fricking awesome.
Less of Me 