If you pay any attention to the news then you will know that there is currently an obesity epidemic which is leading to serious health problems and placing a significant amount of strain on health services and the economy. Of course, when you’re the one carrying too much weight you don’t necessarily give much consideration to the implications for wider society, as you’re far more worried about your own situation. You don’t need to hear that obesity is bad for you, since you can already tell this when you find it difficult to socialise with other people because of the likelihood that you will be judged for your size.
Of course, there are other downsides to being obese, particularly the health issues associated with having a weight problem, but it is usually other people’s response to you that is immediate. Being obese may put you at greater risk of having a heart attack, but that can seem some way off, whereas when someone tells you to your face that you’re fat you can’t exactly ignore it. You may want to bury your head in the sand, but even if you laugh off any criticism or ignore it, somewhere in the back of your mind all these nasty comments remain, which you dig out whenever you’re feeling particularly bad about yourself.
Being obese can have a detrimental impact on your confidence because everyone wants to be healthy and also to be normal. When you’re obese you are substantially heavier than the recommended weight for someone of your height and although you probably don’t shout from the rooftops how much you weigh, you can’t really disguise your size either. When you’re obese it can be difficult to find clothes, let alone clothes that flatter your figure. You can be left wearing clothes that don’t really suit you or reflect the kind of image you’d like to project just because they were all you could find in your size.
When you don’t really like the way you look you can find yourself trying to blend into the background and you will generally do anything you can to avoid standing out in any way. You can find yourself sticking with people you know and feel most comfortable with, as you don’t want to be in the company of people who you don’t know and who may have a negative opinion of you just because of your size.
You therefore make choices based on how you feel about your weight, which can therefore leave you very much cut off from wider society. This only serves to make you feel worse about being obese and so it is important not to let your weight dominate your life, whether this means losing weight or learning to embrace the person you are.