Making fun of fat people isn't funny

Rummaging through my drafts today, I found one I had written some 4 months ago but never published. The post was about how it's difficult to find anything that isn't low-fat here in the US and how low-fat food items in the grocery store irritate me to no end. They will take the fat out of anything that never even had fat to begin with. For example, fat-free vegetable broth. As if the broth available earlier had chunks of fat floating around in it. The post also made fun of fat people. It ridiculed the notion of inadvertant weight gain, pooh-poohing the very possibility that one didn't need to be a lazy slob for one to turn into a bouncing lardball. It also touched on the fact that in an ideal world, similar to low fat foodstuffs, one should also be able to selectively choose only low fat people to reside within one's field of vision.

The way I have been brought up, I considered fat to be responsible for the good taste of everything delicious I have ever eaten. Which is why it took me a long time to come to terms with this unholy trend of eating low-fat crap here in the US. Whenever I saw anything with low-fat written on it, that inevitably turned me off. Low fat hamburger meat. Low fat yoghurt. Low fat butter. And I used to think butter was 100% fat. I scoured the shelves looking for something that proudly proclaimed "bursting with fat and lots of it". In my opinion, low fat, along with low-calorie and low-salt foods have stripped life of its essence and innocence.

But that was 4 months ago. That was a time in my life when my body was in great shape. I was working out everyday for an hour, lifting weights. I felt good, I was slim and "low-fat" was a mere twinkle in my eye. Then, I travelled to India in december. My work-out schedule got screwed and 3 months after returning back, I still have to lift anything heavier than a case of beer. Meanwhile, lots of weight gain has occurred.

Which is why my earlier post ridiculing low-fat things sudenly doesn't seem as funny anymore. It seems out of context and a frivolous waste of space. In fact, looking back, I'm amazed at how callous I used to be. Looking at fat people merely as objects of caricature. How could I have been so insensitive? And who was I to cast aspersions upon a low-fat diet? Why shouldn't people be able to curb their intake of fatty foods if they wished to? What right did I have to impose an unhealthy lifestyle of indiscriminate fat consumption upon these people who, as I now know, are more to be sympathized with, than being mocked?

Naturally, I deleted the post. I do not agree with its central thesis anymore. And now I probably should go through all my posts and check to see if I have ever spoken of the obese in an unbecoming manner and delete any that I find. It is not nice to make fun of fat people. You could turn into one someday.