Lifestyle, Wellbeing

Ditch your ‘fat’ friends?!?

An article heading caught my eye online yesterday Wanna get skinny? Might be time to ditch your fat friends” so I started reading it and the further along I read into the article, the angrier I became. 
Since when has society become so superficial that we value a persons looks over who they are as a person?
You see according to Susie Burrell of The Punch, you should ditch your friends if they are larger than yourself, as they are likely to be making you fat.
Seriously? Aren’t friendships about what you have in common and how you get along? If we all judged people on their looks, it would be a very sad and lonely existence, wouldn’t it? “Oh, sorry I can’t be friends with you because you don’t look a particular way or weight less than me.”
What is deemed skinny anyway? My size 12-16 (depending on stores), 5 foot 10 body might be skinny to one person but I maybe seen as overweight to another. Personally, I don’t care what others think but my friends love me for who I am and definitely not for what I look like, as I do with them. My friends are all different shapes and sizes and I didn’t even think of it as a consideration when becoming friends with them. Over the years, how many of us fluctuate up and down with our size anyway? It doesn’t or shouldn’t effect our friendships.
Doesn’t it make life more interesting if we are all different? Who gives a toss what our friends look like?
How about giving credit to someone for their intelligence, humour, their love of life/ exuberance, self confidence and inner beauty. Someone who is nice and friendly, not bitchy and puts others down.
A friend should be someone who supports you and makes you feel good about yourself, no someone who criticises how you look, if you have put on weight etc.
I would rather be friends with someone I can have a laugh and good time with, than someone who carries on and on about the gym, how much weight they have lost, protein shakes,  how many calories are in their lunch, how many calories are in my cappuccino or the piece of cheesecake or slice I’m having with it (we have all had friends like this before, yes?).
Yay for thought provoking conversation and laughs over a coffee or glass of wine/ bubbles, not conversations about diets and gyms. Surely they have more to talk about then that? Or maybe not? Hmmmm…. sad really if they don’t. Oh wait, maybe they can’t have a good time for fear their botox might move and cause a wrinkle? Oh the horror of it all!
I tend to find people who are so self centred, shallow and superficial to be very boring to be honest. Go get a life, go experience more in the world… there is more to a life than eating lettuce leaves, drinking water (and nothing else) and living at the gym.
I am all for having a healthy lifestyle, I am usually careful with what I eat and exercise everyday but being so shallow to think your friends have to look a particular way is just elitist. I suppose Susie’s friends also have to have a particular income range, lifestyle and live in particular areas of Sydney (ie the wealthy suburbs) as well? Good luck to her… I’m sure she has some deep and long term friendships there.

Personally, I know I will be like these two dear old ladies when I’m their age:

6 thoughts on “Ditch your ‘fat’ friends?!?

  1. That is pretty shallow! I guess it comes down to priorities… if your larger friends really are contributing to your weight problem, which do you want more: friends, or weight loss? Anyway, blaming friends seems like just another way of avoiding responsibility, like blaming McDonalds. Keep your friends! Live and love.

  2. I love this sentence: “How about giving credit to someone for their intelligence, humour, their love of life/ exuberance, self confidence and inner beauty. Someone who is nice and friendly, not bitchy and puts others down.”.

    This is something I am trying to assist girls with every day.

    I see so many young girls with eating disorders which have developed out of a fear of not fitting in, not being accepted for who they are and how they look.

    Your image at the end is priceless!

  3. Just a side note, you can still have a laugh and be silly if you’re someone who watches what they eat and goes to the gym. The portrait you paint of the health conscious woman is really quite derogatory – not all women who watch their weight eat lettuce leaves and pump weights at the gym everyday. Sure, Susie’s article was a little insensitive, but some of your comments are as well.

    1. I'm not saying that healthy conscious people can't be good fun but I have had friends who don't talk about anything else but weight loss and everything that goes with it. It becomes quite boring after a while.

  4. I think you have misrepresented the article pretty badly. Having read the article, and being a GP who spends all day trying to get people motivated to make healthy life choices, the article is totally correct that if you hang out with people who overeat, force unhealthy food on you, are lazy, smoke and drink heavily, you are not getting support to make healthy life choices. The headline of the article is totally derogatory and misleading because I don’t think the article, or the study it reports is saying ditch friends just because they are fat. I certainly tell my patients trying to give up smoking, alcohol, drugs etc, not to hang out with friends who do whilst they are making those sorts of changes, don’t you think it makes sense around over eating or lack of exercise as well? That doesn’t mean you “ditch your friends”, but you might well invite the friend whose eating habits have been worrying you for a while to come along for the ride.

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