Wii Fit pisses me off. I mean, it REALLY pisses me off. I bought the thing so I could exercise in my living room while the kids are otherwise occupied. And I thought it'd be fun. Sure, fun. If you like it saying "That's overweight!" and then groaning at you. Really? I didn't know the extra roll around the middle was ...well, extra? That's why I bought the fucking game.
Anyway, it's fat shaming when it weighs me is the least of my issues with it. The next thing is a "fitness goal" that isn't a fitness goal, but a weight goal. Which is mandatory. Now, I'll grant you, you can say you want to stay the same, but you still have to set it. Even if you're 4 years old. In order for Crackle to play, he has to do a body test, and set a weight goal. Ludicrous.
Speaking of shaming, if I get on the stupid thing in the afternoon, it warns me not to eat afternoon snacks! Unfuckingreal.
My next issue with it is BMI. BMI is bullshit. Pure and simple. It tells my husband that he's normal, but then warns him it's pushing overweight. Bullshit squared. My husband has very very little body fat. He's muscular though, and that makes his BMI rather high. Not proof enough for you? Check out this illustration of BMI. Utter crap. Also, it tells my daughter Snap that she's just perfect. She's quite underweight. She wears size 00. And no, she's not got an eating disorder. She's got C.difficile.
So, because I don't feel like being shamed much, I figured out what to do. I went in and changed my profile height. Added about a foot to it. Haha. Stupid Wii. Now it pleasantly tells me how normal I am. Though it still thinks I should lose weight to make my BMI a perfect 22. Normal is apparently not enough.
I really have had it with the fat shaming and fat hatred. It's disgusting. I made the mistake of watching the Wanda Sykes show the other night, and the fat shaming on there was epic. Oh fat people, how awful they are, lazy and stupid, needing a scale in front of a candy machine so that fat people can't buy candy, blah blah blah.
Here's a little piece of WTF: take a look at how sexual harrassers are portrayed. Almost invariably, they're fat men. Because fat can't be sexy. And a fat woman who likes sex?! GAH! Run for the hills. Please. Queen Latifah? That's one sexy woman! I almost cried when I saw her on a Jenny Craig ad. Fortunately, she figured out how much that food sucks and quit.
You know what? Fuck off. Fat people, we know we're fat (and hell, I'm just barely in that range at size 16, and I get it). We don't need a scale to remind us of this. We don't need the media telling us how awful we are. We don't need doctors blaming all our illness on Teh FAT ("Strep throat? Lose weight, lady! You'll get sick less!"). And we sure as shit don't need our fitness game making us feel like shit every time we step on it.
1 comment:
It is interesting to see how a drastically simplified formula originally intended for use in health care but now acknowledged to have serious shortcomings by the medical establishment has become some sort of cultural "meme" with a lifespan too long for society's own good. Interesting is probably way too weak a label, nagging is a lot better. It isn't of course the only cause of hostility, but part of a strong set of biases.
First of all no formula as simple as this could ever accurately describe what's healthy, or even what's "trendy" (which seems to be more important nowadays; humans are supposed to follow trends), only actually measuring the mass/volume/mole of fat to total body could do and I doubt that is useful to health, either. As you mentioned somewhere before, there is a genetical aspect to it (maybe multiple or a whole complex of interplaying genes, I don't know) and I heard about an additional pathological origin as well, but I am not sure how accurate that news was (I think I got it from a commercial documentary).
People who are bleating are not helpful at all, obsessive behaviour about body posture is actually very unhealthy in its own respect. Trying to stress others or shunning them is then doubly cruel.
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