A mile

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. Then, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.

What is up with STONES?

LOL! I know how to convert KG to LB but you brits are so weird with your STONES... now I had to learn a new conversion. Looks like I weigh... 22 stones. I'm certifiably fat, it's true. I also fly a lot and have not been charged extra or discriminated against due to my weight. I used to fly twice a week on the same plane - there were about 8 regulars that took that same flight every time and about 10 or 12 seats total on the plane. Nobody cared what the assigned seating was, generally. One day we had a newcomer who looked at his ticket, then stared down at me and demanded, "My ticket says 3B!" I was too humiliated to admit to him that 3B was the only seat on the plane that had a seatbelt long enough to fit me, so I just moved and let his scrawny ass sit in his assigned seat. I weighed 17 stone at the time.

When Gwyneth Paltrow was making the movie Shallow Hal she spent some time in the fat suit they made for her. She was shocked that people treated her very differently - they were either rude or simply didn't see her.

Wrap your brain around this: has someone ever been mean to you simply because you are tall, or blonde? Not just mean, but have they dogged you, beaten you, threatened you, done everything possible to make your life miserable and cause you to fail at work, school or some other pursuit? That's what it is like to be fat. There was never a shortage of such fat-haters around me. When I was 14 I finally got down to 135 lbs. and a size 6/8 (that's like 9.6 stone - I'm getting good at this) at 5' 5" tall. Out I went in my skinny jeans and a size small T-shirt and some random teenagers walked by me shouting obscenities (relating to being fat). It was at that point that I figured, "If all this exercise and dieting got me to this size & weight and they STILL think I'm fat, then screw it. This is too painful to maintain only to still be going through that."

So if someone comes up to me and blurts out, "You're fat!" I answer them, "No shit?!" Don'tcha just love people with a talent for stating the obvious? The next time YOU have the urge to insult someone for being fat take a moment and ask yourself whether THEIR BODY is any of YOUR business.