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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (32603)	3/16/1999 8:19:00 AM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Maybe not, but some very flabby sumo wrestlers seem to be popular in Japan, even though not all successful sumo guys are flabby -- one of the recent best Chiyofuji (now retired) had a real athlete's build. Great mounds of flab like the King of Tonga (now on a weight-losing diet) and the old, dead Aga Khan (father of Ali) (who was given his weight in gold or precious stones on his birthday by his followers or some such day was encouraged to be very big by greed. The fertility goddesses of many ancient societies were notoriously chunky, and Peter Paul Rubens took up and created a fad for really fat women -- many of them quite attractive even today to men of universal tastes. It seems that young, athletic (dash men), in condition bodies are usually considered more attractive. Emaciated (distance runner) bodies are often considered pretty major unattractive (the prison camp pictures from Bosnia and the death camps are usually considered corpselike and correspondingly unattractive. The 14th century danse macabre paintings and drawings were corpselike also and were contrasted with the healthy rotund people who survived the plagues. I think we are obsessed with skinniness (young women's eating disorders and young men compulsively adding muscle even if they must use steroids). Yet most people regardless of their excess weight do get married and despite our national obesity we have high life expectancies -- suggesting that the morbidity associated with obesity can be partially offset by other things. There is a serious question of discrimination here. I think the main problem is that we often associate extreme obesity with self-indulgence and lack of self control. In a famous attack in British Parliament a conservative MP (Mr. Quentin Hogg who was eponymously overweight)) criticized the rascality of the poor for becoming dependent on the state. A radical Laborite whose name escapes me attacked Mr. Hogg as a hypocrite whose self-indulgence had made him as bloated as you see him here today. I think the criticism of grosely obese people for lack of self-control is on the same order as the criticism of homosexuals for their choice of life style. I strongly suspect that a complex of genes will be found that make obesity the natural state toward which many people tend, and that it will be found to be a survival factor in some groups of people. This does not mean thatfat people are doomed to be fat, but that it takes far more self- discipline than many people have to keep weight down. I had a tall, slender friend in youth who was the only member of the family who was not grossly overweight. He worked continually and successfully at keeping his weight down, dieting, running, exercising all his life for fear of ballooning like his younger brother and sister. His parents, both very obese, never told him that he was adopted from outside their families.