The very big fatso guy, the little bit fatso guy, or the small fatso guy?” Again, true story. I can’t make this stuff up. We even took it a little further and asked if maybe she wanted, “the skinny, but big-stomach fatso guy?” By the end of the inquiry, she decided that she came to see the “very big fatso guy,” but that she’d settle for the “little-bit fatso guy,” yours truly (and, for what it’s worth, that puts me second in the fatso ranking for our office). I don’t remember anymore what we met about, but I just can’t forget how matter-of-fact she was about wanting to meet with the “fatso guy.”
It still makes me chuckle to think about it.
Even in this age of hyper-sensitivity to the “weight issue,” for some cultures being fat is not a matter of feelings, but a simple matter of fact. You’re either fat, fatter, fattest or not. As one health professional pointed out to a friend of mine, “when it comes to your health, there’s no such thing as borderline. You are diabetic, you have hyper-tension or you are obese, chronically or otherwise.” Any notion of a fine line bordering the two sides is misleading and ultimately full of false hope. It’s a cover up, if you will, of the truth — the goatee trying to mask a double chin or the baggy clothes hanging ever so gently over the Pillsbury folds. You can run and you can hide, but you can’t escape from yourself. The sooner people take their emotional prejudices or low self-esteems off the issue and stop tip-toeing around it like a forbidden topic, the better the likelihood that we can address fatness for what it is, a potentially, life-threatening condition of the body. By that, I don’t just mean a threat in terms of life or death, but rather a threat in terms of the quality of one’s life. The good news is that we know how to treat it — if you don’t, then I’d recommend a stop-in at your local gym for a clue on how to get started.
There’s some level of irony in a fat man preaching to the fat choir, but the point is being fat is not the problem. The problem is being fat and not doing anything about it or even worse, being fat and thinking that not talking about it helps you somehow or that it’ll go away — we’ve all heard of the elephant in the room.
Advocates with the Northern Marianas Protection & Advocacy Systems Inc. face the realities of lifestyle disabilities on a daily basis. In some cases, people through nobody’s fault but their own become substantially limited in their major life-activities. These include the ones who gave up on themselves and pounded their hearts and their bodies into submission with layers upon layers of excess with no real attempt to resist. They’re often the same ones who spend the remaining years of their lives blaming others without ever realizing that, when they point one finger, three more are pointing back at themselves.
Ultimately, we can’t always control our fate and bad things happen to good people. But, being fat is a matter of choice and some of us choose to live with it on this imaginary border of false hope. That’s all well and good, but the reality is rough and the consequences are more often than not marked with excruciating pain, isolation, poverty and an absolute dependence on others — $674 a month in SSI payments hardly seems like a fair trade.
For more information on life-style disabilities and/or the rights of people with disabilities, please feel free to come by the NMPASI office and meet with any one of our “fatso guys’ or contact us at (670) 235-7273/4 [voice] / 235-7275 [fax] / 235-7278 [tty] and/or via the internet at www.nmpasi.com
[Disclaimer: This article was approved by Jim Rayphand, Jimmy “Big Tuna” Sablan, Tom Thornburgh, and Greg Borja, NMPASI’s four fatso guys.]
JIM RAYPHAND
Executive Director
Northern Marianas Protection
& Advocacy Systems Inc
