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Well, I can certainly answer the question of how somebody fat can get a boyfriend, since I come from a forum thats 90% or more horny teenage boys who practically worship fat girls. >_>

*agrees with Korota wholeheartedly*

Your mother's comments were uncalled for...she needs a good a** whoopin' scream

Ooh, what do you do? I wanna know. XD

Well, the biggest reason people find it unattractive is their perceptions of beauty, which everyone who's posted in this thread have already stated, are skewed by the media. We're being told that to be healthy and beautiful you must be thin.

Sorry, they're wrong.

Beauty can be described by different people in different ways. To some people, a twiggy woman is gorgeous. To some people a middle-of-the-road-has-curves-in-all-the-right-places kind of woman is stunning. To some people very large, round women are what they want. It depends on the individual and a lot of times how they were raised. I was raised by an overweight mother who made sure I understood young that a person's size meant nothing. Whether skinny or fat, what mattered was the person. I was taught you never tease someone, but you especially never pick on someone because they're overweight. However, not everyone was raised like I was, or had it so ingrained in their heads that they heeded. Now, while some might be thinking, "Of course she didn't pick on them, she was probably chunky." I actually didn't get overweight until I was in high school. And then by the end of high school I had dropped it all once more, because while I respect anyone choice to remain overweight, I didn't like myself.

Now, aside from the way beauty can be translated, there's health reasons. While many have stated that an overweight person can be healthy, and you're right, I'm not disputing that, there are different kinds of healthy. Sure, the overweight dude in the corner might be able to run a marathon, but what do his joints look like from carrying all that excess weight around? Does he still have an discernable cartilage in his knees, ankles, hips, etc? And back to what some other people have said, there are many hormonal imbalances that come from being overweight. Commonly in women are thyroid dysfunction, which my mother has from years and years of being heavy. Also, in very large women, oftentimes their hormones estrogen and progesterone aren't produced adequately and/or in the right amounts, cycles etc. I've known many, many large women who's periods were either grossly irregular (and yes, that happens to women thick and thin all the time, but it has been shown to occur more frequenty among heavyset women) or even stop completely. One girl wasn't an athlete, so the physical act of playing a sport didn't hinder the process, but when she saw her doctor, and began dropping the pounds, it returned. The hormones just get tossed out of whack from having to be pumped so much and so frequently.

Both sexes can have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and like I mentioned, osteoarthritis, where the weight being carried wears away the cartilage. There's also something called sleep apnea which are abnormal sleep patterns, often arising from large amounts of weight making it difficult to breathe while sleeping. As any heavy person, it's tricky to sleep on your back. You feel like you're getting a little squished. Well, people who're large and sleep on their back most or every night could develop sleep apnea, wherein they actually stop breathing for periods while sleeping, and suddenly gasp back to life, never waking up and thus never realizing they have this very dangerous problem. So while yeah, you might be able to run up a flight of stairs, or run a mile in eight minutes, that doesn't mean your body is suffering from being too heavy. Or too thin. Many of the same, and more which are different, apply to being too thin.

Yep, it sounds like I disapprove of all large people, but I don't. I do, however, want to make sure that people understand the desire to drop weight, as well as what can be happening if you don't. But if you want to be a bigger member of society, more power to you. If it makes you happy, just be careful, get physicals every year, and keep yourself safe.

Little things..Like once we were shopping and she told me to get soda. I did, but then when I came back to the line she was in I held a coloring dye box she uses and yelled, so everyone heard. "IS THIS THE TYPE YOU USE!?" She was so pissed off, for some people who was around her..She knew from parties and they knew she said.."I never did anything with my hair. It's always the same color."

I agree, everyone's ideal weight level (healthfully speaking) is different, it's based on height, activity level, etc. What I don't get is what exactly you think is so vastly exaggerated.

There are tons of grotesquely inflated statistics that make fat out to be some kind of gelatinous cancer. Obesity is not more dangerous than ciggarettes, it is not the leading cause of preventable death in america. The statistic commonly reported for people dead from obesity each year is just the number of obese people who died of something other than natural causes. That includes car crashes, murder, suicide, poisoning, rabid wombat attacks, etc., which all are assumed to be caused directly and soley by those people being fat.

The BMI as a pure height-to-weight ratio is also utterly worthless, failing to account for bone and muscle mass, and being generally inaccurate and disproportionate.

I'm aware of that, but the degree to which being overweight causes such problems has been generally overestimated. I also get from news a general impression that being even fat is bad, and since people these days have a broader definition of "fat" there are many negative conditions attributed to people who do not suffer them.