Do Overweight People Gross You Out?

I came across an article on the Marie Claire website called Overweight Couples On TV.  It was posted yesterday and the magazine has had over 28,000 emails to the magazine + almost 1200 comments on the post.


Basically, she was asked by her editors if watching overweight people make out made her uncomfortable.  Of course they were referring to the new CBS show Mike + Molly.  Now I admit, I watched the first episode of this show and never watched another but it certainly wasn't because they were overweight.  I just didn't find it funny and I was watching too much TV anyways so it never made the cut.


Basically, the blogger Maura Kelly said that yes she was disgusted watching Mike + Molly make out but that just watching an overweight person walk by her made her feel disgusting.  She said that just like TV isn't allowed to promote anorexia, they shouldn't be allowed to promote obesity either.  She said some skinny models were naturally skinny but that fat people had a choice and they chose to be fat.  And then she went on to give overweight people some nutrition tips to help them become bearable for her to look at.


She concluded her article by asking what we thought about fat people making out on TV - are we cool with it or do we think we are being an insensitive jerk?


Without a doubt, she is a insensitive jerk.  It is blogs like this + people like her that give overweight the complexes they do and the reasons why anorexia is more + more prevalent.  While I agree, being obese is definitely unhealthy,  it by no way, shape or form gross me out or disgust me. 


The worst part is that the Editor of Marie Claire defended Ms. Kelly and thought that the issue that we should be having should be with CBS and Mike + Molly and not the views of her blogger.


Obviously, the pressure from the public and their dislike of her take on people not like her, she issued an apology:

UPDATE: I would really like to apologize for the insensitive things I've said in this post. Believe it or not, I never wanted anyone to feel bullied or ashamed after reading this, and I sorely regret that it upset people so much. A lot of what I said was unnecessary. It wasn't productive, either.





I know a lot of people truly struggle to lose weight — for medical and psychological reasons — and that many people have an incredibly difficult time getting to a healthy size. I feel for those people and I'm truly sorry I added to the unhappiness and pain they feel with my post.





I would like to reiterate that I think it's great to have people of all shapes and healthy sizes represented in magazines (as, it bears mentioning here, they are in Marie Claire) and on TV shows — and that in my post, I was talking about a TV show that features people who are not simply a little overweight, but appear to be morbidly obese. (Morbid obesity is defined as 100 percent more than their ideal weight.)  And for whatever it's worth, I feel just as uncomfortable when I see an anorexic person as I do when I see someone who is morbidly obese, because I assume people suffering from eating disorders on either end of the spectrum are doing damage to their bodies, and that they are unhappy. But perhaps I shouldn’t be so quick to judge based on superficial observations.




To that point (and on a more personal level), a few commenters and one of my friends mentioned that my extreme reaction might have grown out of my own body issues, my history as an anorexic, and my life-long obsession with being thin. As I mentioned in the ongoing dialogue we’ve been carrying on in the comments section, I think that's an accurate insight.




People have accused me of being a bully in my post. I never intended to be that — it's actually the very last thing I want to be, as a writer or a person. But I know that I came off that way, and I really cannot apologize enough to the people whom I upset.

It saddens me that every day I read the paper or watch the news and I come across yet another story of people being bullied.  People being bullied because of their gender, their sexuality, their weight - anything that makes them different.  Why are we still not able to, as a society, celebrate these differences that make us unlike the person beside us?  It makes me want to build a secret room in my basement and keep my kids there forever so they never ever have to witness the garbage that I see every.single.day.