Before I lost weight, I thought about taking out my digital camera and taking off my clothes in the bathroom to take a naked photo of myself in the mirror. Clothes add a layer of uncertainty to progress photos. Do you look better because you’ve lost weight or because you’re wearing better fitting clothes? And even though I disliked all the excess fat, it was somewhat fascinating to see how all those inflated fat cells shape a human body.

However, I decided the best way to prevent naked photos of myself from being plastered on the Internet was to never take naked photos of myself. Playboy, please stop offering me millions of dollars. I simply won’t do it, Hugh. So I kept my clothes on. I’m a modest person and have never felt completely comfortable being naked around other people. It’s not necessarily because I think I look bad or good, I just don’t think people should look without my permission, period. People who don’t have this level of modesty never understand us people who do. [...]

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It’s fairly common knowledge that you have to be skinny to be a model or an actress, but do you have to fight the battle of the bulge to become president? And I’m not talking about having a World War II service record. A recent Newsweek article says that Al Gore’s waistline might be an indicator of whether he decides to run for president and that “the theory is that slimming down will be a signal he intends to run.”

Would we elect a fat president? A president’s health and fitness is always a campaign issue, so one could argue that an obese candidate would be more likely to die in office. But I think the aesthetic issue is more important. I seriously doubt we’d elect a candidate in a wheelchair today, but Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to wheel himself into office because the TV and Internet didn’t exist. If we were to elect a fat president, they’d have to be damn charming or charismatic to compensate for the perceived negative of being overweight. Bill [...]

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One of the things I like about the online community is that no one knows if you’re fat or thin, male or female, black or white or purple with pink polka dots, unless you tell them. And even then you could be lying, unless you took a nap in the same room as a toddler with magic markers. However, if you’re an asshole it becomes apparent pretty quickly, which it did when I was reading a TV blog many weeks ago.

On this blog there was a post about an actress donning a fat suit for a made-for-TV movie and one of the first comments was that fat people were outcasts by choice. The argument was that fat people choose not to exercise, choose to eat large portions, and choose to eat unhealthy foods. Thus they choose to be fat and are personally responsible for becoming the type of person that the world generally discriminates against.

Is being fat a choice? I’d have to say yes and no. But reflecting on my own period of being overweight, [...]

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