they have their fair share of fat spoiled kids here - but that might be different. But yes, Chinese can be very direct - I am still trying to teach my wife a bit about how to behave when around foreigners - water off the duck’s back. she has learned some, though and she’ll do great soon - I hope.
I had no idea I’d get such a response. It bugged me the most because some of the most caring, loving, generous, and yes, beautiful people I know are what many of you would call “fat”. I just happen to come from a place where being “big” is normal. Lots of diabetes and heart disease, yes, and we’re trying to change things, but we’re an island of people who love our food.
Now I don’t think my 11 year old would call any of his aunties or uncles fat pigs; maybe he does when he’s not around me, but I like to think he’d be more sensitive than that. Last night though, I sat my six yo down and had a talk with him about why we don’t use fat to describe people, just like we don’t use ‘stupid’ or ‘ugly’ to describe people.
Someone said something about not liking fat people because they die younger, or something like that. Yes, it bugs me that many of my relatives have health problems related to their weight, but it also bugs me that it’s still okay to hate fat people, and it bugs me that a close cousin of mine who I know will always be obese doesn’t want to come here to visit me because she thinks people will look at her like she’s a freak.
Okay, so maybe I am over reacting to this… could be the post partum hormones.
[quote=“monkey”]Well, it IS different. People can’t change their skin color. Fat people could easily stop shovelling food into their face all day and do something about their, erm … “yuckiness.”
[/quote]
Monkey, maybe you don’t really know any “big” people. I don’t think it’s that easy for them.
I feel like I have to confess. I have used the world stupid as in, “stupid cabdriver”, or “Mr. Bean is stupid.” I think that’s different 
And I have called myself fat in the last six weeks, but that’s normal postpartum silliness with my girlfriends. I’m just not one of those bigger people who is able to be big and still look nice.
And I have to stress: this really is not about me and my size. I was just really surprised that this person said this so easily, as easily, IMO, as saying, “I don’t like people who curse,” which I do too much of myself.
[quote=“braxtonhicks”]
and it bugs me that a close cousin of mine who I know will always be obese doesn’t want to come here to visit me because she thinks people will look at her like she’s a freak.[/quote]
People would definitely look at her like she’s a freak here. My sister is quite obese. She was well over 350 pounds last time I saw her, 2 years ago. I always discouraged her from coming to visit me here for this very reason.
I also encouraged her to do something about her weight many times, citing health problems, and improved sexual relations with her husband. Nobody else in our family had the nerve to speak to her about it. She always blew me off. I even spoke to her husband about it because they have a young daughter and his reply was that she ‘makes nutritious meals for our family’~! He and his daughter are fit.
Lo and behold, my 52 year old sister gets rushed to the hospital with a blood sugar level that’s through the roof. They diagnose diabetes and put her on a strict diet. She almost died.
Now she’s lost loads of weight in the past year and has strictly adhered to her diet. My mother told me when she saw her a few weeks ago after not having seen her for about six months, that it didn’t look like she’d lost that much more weight, but that she’s measuring out her portion sizes and counting calories (many diabetics must do this). She has had a long battle of the bulge. I think one problem is a very sedentary lifestyle. Even after losing 100 pounds or more she’s still too big to exercise? Even a walk up the hill to the shop everyday (she lives in San Francisco) would probably help her, but she just sits.
She has an excellent job, is highly intelligent, has loads of friends, and is one of the kindest people you’d ever meet. She seems to care far more about others than herself, and I think she has some emotional problems that somehow have manifested in her obesity. No, I don’t think it’s that easy for very obese people to lose weight, it takes will power and a change of lifestyle. And it also takes people who care about them to be supportive and to face up to them and not pussyfoot around their weight problem.
I go up and down on the scales myself as it’s in our genes, but I live in morbid fear that I would ever let myself become like my sister. I think I’d rather be dead. In fact, in all truth, I would have to say that in some ways I don’t, haven’t and won’t live in the US again because I’m afraid that I would become apathetic and balloon into a walrus there. So, in part, it’s also environmental. Where are the fatties in Taiwan? In Europe, I didn’t see so many either. Get off an airplane in any major US city (or North America) and it’s wall-to-wall flesh. That’s very disturbing. Not a joke.
The fact is making fat comments here is a normal thing. If girlfriends haven’t seen eachother for a long time it is acceptable for one of them to explicitly say “My! You’ve gotten so fat!” Sometimes the recipient of this comment is a stick, sometimes not. I’m not trying to judge the correctness of these comments, but to tell you that the person you talked to was probably acting within normal cultural boundaries, and not because she’s evil.
I would try and tell her that foreigners don’t like those kinds of comments, and that she’s lucky she only told you. Because you’re not angry at her (although we know you are), but she would lose a lot of face if she did that to anyone else. She will get the point that she has offended you greatly and will probably never do something like that to you, or any other foreigner, again.
I am 190cm and around 110KG (from a high of 125…spent five years on crutches here which didn’t help) I have slimmed down a lot and feel pretty comfortable where I am now. Lots of hiking and Aikido. I still get fat comments from people. But when I go home and see some of those really large folks in the buffet line, I consider myself pretty slim.
I am also seeing more obesity in children here. The parents are feeding them a lot of crap (Mickey Ds and 7-11).
The next time someone makes a fat comment, just change the subject to oral hygene. 
I completely disagree. They know what they’re saying and they say it with some malevolence. Lots of haughty Taiwanese women tend to slight one another to boost their own egos. Since they’re all obsessed with being skinny, they KNOW that this is not the comment that a “friend” wants to hear.
I’m telling you this is true. I used to think it was just a cultural anomaly, but ask anyone if they think it’s impolite and they’ll say YES, or ‘We’re concerned’, which is crap. They would never say this to a really fat person.
[quote=“fredericka bimmel”]
They know what they’re saying and they say it with some malevolence. Lots of haughty Taiwanese women tend to slight one another to boost their own egos.[/quote]
So, just give’em a good bitch-slap.
Smokers are drinkers are taxed to an extreme degree in most western countries, ostensibly because “they are a health risk to themselves and others.” Why aren’t fatties taxed in a similar manner?
I completely disagree. They know what they’re saying and they say it with some malevolence. Lots of haughty Taiwanese women tend to slight one another to boost their own egos. Since they’re all obsessed with being skinny, they KNOW that this is not the comment that a “friend” wants to hear.
I’m telling you this is true. I used to think it was just a cultural anomaly, but ask anyone if they think it’s impolite and they’ll say YES, or ‘We’re concerned’, which is crap. They would never say this to a really fat person.[/quote]
I agree with fredericka, but let’s put it in context. In Taiwan, you know you’re a part of the group when everyone starts treating you like shit. That’s why college friends give each other horrible nicknames like “gorilla (for a girl with big teeth),” “zit face(someone with pock marks),” and “colon comrade (for a gay classmate).” I’ve heard all of these used. It is normal here to be cruel to friends, giving derogatory nicknames and pointing out every physical flaw. People with class don’t do it, here or anywhere.
I’m as tall as DB (about 190kg), but I usually weigh in at under 100kg, but I work out almost daily and have a muscular build. The other day, I was on the elevator with someone I don’t know but who knows me. I had just eaten a huge meal and was slouching a bit, so my normally tight stomach was protruding a bit. She told me “You should consider going on a diet.” I responded “First, you don’t know me at all. Second, I work out almost daily and my body fat is a mere 15%. Maybe you should think before you speak.” Dipshit. That shut her up.
My girlfriend once told me that she thought I was a bit fat until she saw me with my shirt off. I think many Taiwanese just don’t understand the difference between bigger than normal and fatter than normal. That doesn’t excuse them running off their mouths.
The fact is that people in Taiwan has a morbid obsession with skinnyness. Being 10 kilos overweight is healthier than being 10 kilos underweight, and let’s face it - Taiwan has an epidemic of seriously unhealthily underweight people. Sure, skinny people don’t “gross me out” the way that obese people do, but looking like a bag of bones like so many Taiwanese do isn’t attractive, either. There needs to be a healthy balance. The problem is that hardly anyone in Taiwan engages in regular exercise beyond a spending an hour a week slowly moving their hands in the air as “tai chi”. Most people here sit around playing Age of Empires and watching those goddamn screechingly melodramatic soap operas they play on TV all day. The thing that saves most Taiwanese from ballooning into the whales that such a sedentary lifestyle would normally cause are a much healthier diet than found in the West, and genetics (this is touchy territory if you take it too far, but facts are facts that whites, blacks, and Asians inherit different body shapes & sizes. Nobody blames Eskimos and Samoans for being obese, because we all accept their body mass as just part of their genetic inheritance. Most East Asians seem to have the “short, small, black-haired, brown-eyed, and skinny” gene).
I’m about 20-30 kilos heavier than I need to be, I’ll admit. I exercise regularly and sometimes I try to eat healthy, but all that beer really packs on the pounds in my belly. But I have a naturally stocky build and nothing I can do can change my natural body shape - I always have been and always shall be shaped like a short bull, just as some have a natural tall beanpole shape. Taiwanese have a difficult time accepting this fact that different people have different body shapes. And as for fat=unhealthy and skinny=healthy, well, how do explain the fact that I walk at a faster pace than all the slowpoke Taiwanese shuffling down the streets and appear to be twice as strong? In over 3 years here I’ve never had any physical confrontations with any Taiwanese because, as I’ve been told, many of them are intimidated by me - your average skinny-armed, chicken-bone legged Taiwanese who can’t punch his way out of a paper bag is naturally not going to take his chances against a foreigner who outweighs him two-to-one not only in fat but also muscle. Which is great with me - I’m a quiet type who hates physical confrontations.
Sure, you don’t see that many fat people in Taiwan. But one thing you hardly ever see, unless you go the gyms (which are expensive, one reason why so few Taiwanese go) are hardbodies. Hardly anyone here with any muscle tone at all. Once in a great while you’ll see someone whose body looks like occassionally they do a little exercise now and then.
And when I said that Taiwanese are morbidly obsessed with skinniness - it’s sick the way that every girl here in Taiwan claims that she is “too fat”. Apparently in the eyes of Taiwanese girls, possessing an ounce of body fat makes you an obese pig. Girls in Taiwan with healthy, strong physiques - girls that look like real adult women, not underfed prepubescent little girls - are considered fat and ugly by many in Taiwan, or so you’d believe listening to Taiwanese women whine about their weight. I try to reassure them by saying, “You look great. You’re fine. You’re perfect as you are now, you don’t need to lose or gain any more weight,” and they say, “But you are foreigner! Foreigners like fat girls! Taiwanese man likes thin girls, so I must lose weight!” I find all this…disturbing. Extremely unhealthy. I bet the anexoria rates are through the roof in Taiwan.
I think Monkey has a valid point. And the concept of ‘ease’ is irrelavant. There is still much debate on the issue of genetic obesity – true or false – but the fact is that the vast majority of seriously overweight people are the authors of their own misfortune. Look around the US. Don’ expect anyone to believe for a second that these blimp-people are victims of weight gain that is out of their control.
Take a Taiwan example: I really dislike men who are heavy betelnut chewers. Don’t tell me that being born and raised in Pingtung makes a man genetically ‘wired’ to chew betelnut ('It’s not his fault; he’s from Pingtung!). He CHOSE his own path.
Likewise, fat people could correct their appearance. Sure, different people have different degrees of difficulty maintaining their correct weight, but this does not disqualify them from being able to be within a reasonable weight range.
And instead of people self-censoring themselves, wouldn’t it be better if people came to be more open?
‘God, you are fat!’
‘Yes, I know. I really need to do something about it.’
Better than getting huffy over an observation of truth.
I really dislike people that are alcoholics. But as we know now from research, alcoholism is more often than not a genetic disease - it really does run in the family, and people who don’t have the genetic propensity towards alcoholism stand a much greater chance of remaining sober. Many Native Americans lack the enzymes to break down alcohol molecules properly, which has caused a great problem with alcoholism in their communities. Mental illness - that’s also a genetic disease, for the most part; it runs in the family. Do you go around blaming people who are mentally unstable because some chemicals in their brains are unhinged as “it’s their own damn fault, they can control themselves and not act so crazy.” IQ (or lack of it) is inherited - smart parents breed smart kids and mentally challenged parents breed mentally challenged kids. Of course there are exceptions - there are always exceptions to everything - but in general this rule pretty much holds up. Fat families breed generations of little porkers.
If genetics have nothing to do with a propensity towards obesity (or height, eye/hair/skin color, diseases, and any other physical traits) then explain why Chinese seem to stay effortlessly thin while barely doing any physical exercise all day and cramming their faces full of that sugary bread loaded with carbohydrates & fried chicken dripping with grease all day. Then explain to me why you hate 2/3 of Inuits, Pacific Islanders, and African-Americans - because you hate fat people, and since most black people in America are overweight, then you must be a racist who hates black people.
It’s hard to argue that genetics has nothing to do with obesity, but I would argue that cultural and societal factors are more important in determining the average girth of a country’s citizens.
The explosion in obesity rates in the U.S. is fairly recent, having taken place in the last thirty to forty years. This explosion has affected all ethnic groups and socio-economic levels, although interestingly it has affected the poor and non-white groups the most. Obesity rates in children have climbed during this period which also suggests that some other factor besides genetics is at work.
Well, I didn’t say it was the only factor, but it is an important factor. Different genes=different body shapes. It’s probably close to 1/3 genetics, 1/3 exercise levels, and 1/3 the food you eat, in my completely unscientific opinion.
In America obesity is very closely linked to poverty, because the cheapest foods to survive on are deeply unhealthy and loaded with carbs. Good food - real food like they have in Taiwan - is hard to find in your average American grocery store at a reasonable price. Fruits and vegetables are artificially expensive in order to appease the farm subsidies lobby. Fish, the healthiest meat, is beyond the reach for those on a budget except for special occasions as an expensive treat. If you’re watching your budget and need to feed a family of four with the cheapest foods, the most bang for your buck is to load up on the hot dogs and hamburger helper with macaroni and peanut butter jelly sandwiches. Buy a big bag of potato chips and jumbo cola and Chef Boyardee ravioli and tomato soup for the kids. It’s a strange reversal of traditional standards of social class - for most of history in most societies, fat=good because fat=rich. Now fat=bad because fat=poor and fat=lazy. The poorest people in America are the fattest and the thinnest are the richest - the reverse of they way it’s usually always been.
[quote=“blueface666”][quote=“fredericka bimmel”]
They know what they’re saying and they say it with some malevolence. Lots of haughty Taiwanese women tend to slight one another to boost their own egos.[/quote]
So, just give’em a good bitch-slap. [/quote]
give’em a good bitch-slap? 
That is supposed to be funny?
You are pathetic.
[quote=“Tomas”]
My girlfriend once told me that she thought I was a bit fat until she saw me with my shirt off.[/quote]
Woooo! Abs of steel? 
Funny that people look skinny with their clothes on here, but when you see them in the dressing room at the gym, they don’t. Lots are flabbier than you’d imagine. It’s of course the genetic disposition of slight frames that cannot carry extra weight as gracefully as say, beefier Africans or Caucasians. See this article.
Interestingly, and I’ve noticed this since growing up in the south, that black women who’ve got some extra padding look a whole lot better than other women. They carry themselves with a degree of confidence because they know that in their circles, it’s not considered unattractive to have a big fat ass. And they often dress well too.
The thing that shocks me is that women friends of mine in the US who were my size when I lived there years ago, have all, i mean all taken on zaftig proportions and their male counterparts now have big fat bellies. I cannot think of a single caucasian male here in Taiwan that I know between the ages of 35-45 that has such an enormous gut like they do in the US. It’s definitely a combo of the food and lifestyle, not just genetics.
[quote=“AnnaWang”][quote=“blueface666”][quote=“fredericka bimmel”]
They know what they’re saying and they say it with some malevolence. Lots of haughty Taiwanese women tend to slight one another to boost their own egos.[/quote]
So, just give’em a good bitch-slap. [/quote]
give’em a good bitch-slap?
That is supposed to be funny?
You are pathetic.[/quote]
Anna, it’s called a politically incorrect joke. Grow a sense of humor.
[quote=“AnnaWang”][quote=“blueface666”][quote=“fredericka bimmel”]
They know what they’re saying and they say it with some malevolence. Lots of haughty Taiwanese women tend to slight one another to boost their own egos.[/quote]
So, just give’em a good bitch-slap. [/quote]
give’em a good bitch-slap?
That is supposed to be funny?
You are pathetic.[/quote]
Take a Midol and then get back in the kitchen and make me some pie!