Things That Piss Me Off, Part The Second

The Pictures That Are Used To Illustrate Obesity News Stories.

We've all seen them, the unflattering pictures of fat people with their heads chopped off and that end mid thigh. If heads are visible the person is invariably miserable, or eating, or both.


[Image is of fat woman sitting down with no head and no legs below the knee. I assume they are pictured sitting down in order to remind people how lazy fat people are.]

I typed "obesity" and "uk" into Google new search and saved the pictures of people that came up (I didn't save the ones that were of boxes of pills). The majority of these pictures relate to the anti-obesity drug that was pulled by the EMEA last week after it was linked to a number of suicides and to depression. I'm sure, from the pictures being used to illustrate this story, the chemical effect of the drug wasn't the only thing helping to make these fat people depressed- the way they (or obese people in general) are shown in the media really doesn't help.

Below the cut is the rest of the pictures that I pulled from the net and links to where I got them from.





The BBC in particular seem determined to remind us that we should be monitoring ourselves, but that we're greedy (and not worth faces apparently, backs of heads only!)



And talking of self monitoring:

(Is it just me that wants to caption that first picture: "Measuring: You're Doing It Wrong!"?)

There are just two more images that I pulled from the search. The first is actually of a face that doesn't look particularly happy or unhappy to me but who I have no idea who it is of. The fact that it has a face on it makes me think it can't be just a random person:



While the second is a cartoon of a fat man dropping a pill into his mouth which looks like it is going to go into the mouth of the smaller, thinner man inside him. Because, as we all know, inside every fat person is a thin person dying to get out, or, alternatively, that a fat person isn't actually a person, the fat is, what, a mask? That a fat person can't be considered an actual person until they are no longer fat? FTBS.



And the links:[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]