You aren't fat, dammit!

Women seem to have a very serious self image problem. She can have the most beautiful body in the world. She can have enough men in her entourage to start a small ground war. Still, there's a very good chance that she'll think that she's fat.

She is very vocal about this too.
"I'm depressed, I'm fat",
"I'm getting fat",
"Look at all this fat!!" (as she pulls up her shirt to reveal a perfect stomach)

She can be told a thousand times that she's not. A supermodel could come out of a limo and tell her that she wishes she had her body and she will still focus like a laser on that time last year when she went home for a holiday and her sister told her that her arms had gotten a little bigger.

She may say something about how she was thinner in high school. Nearly everyone was thinner in high school. Often times sickly thin. Most guys don't want a girl that they can grab around the waist with one hand and do arm curls with. Just because someone weighs a little more now doesn't mean that they have become fat.

There are a few reasons I can think of why a woman would complain about being fat when she's not:
1. She is insecure and wants to be told that she is not fat to reassure herself. This is probably the most common reason. Basically, she wants to make herself feel better at the expense of annoying some local male. She can solve this by growing an ego. Not easy, but doable.
2. She is doing it to attract attention to her body because she knows she's beautiful. If she is actually good looking and doesn't mind me staring at her body, I don't mind this too much. However, it should probably be prevented as to avoid falling into category 3.
3. She actually believes she's fat. She's probably used to be in category 1 or 2 but has called herself fat so many times that she actually believes it. It's been repeated so often for her own selfish reasons that it has become a permanent fixture in her brain. This too can be fixed, but it would take much time and would probably never actually happen.

However, in all its futility, I will try this one more time. Maybe one of you out there will actually believe it. You AREN'T fat, damnit!. I don't lie when I say it, those that are fat tend to not ask. But I wouldn't lie to them either if they did. Now please find a better thing to whine about, like how I can't read your mind.

I know I’m just fine. I’m 5’ tall and 100lb. The charts in the doctor’s office say that is a normal weight for my height. My jeans are size 2 (US), that’s a nice small size. I should be happy, or at least not so concerned. But in spite of all this, I still know I’m fat, or at least ugly. So I workout I try to eat less and drink more water. I try not to ask other people if they think I’m thin enough they always say “Yes, you’re fine.” But I know that they aren't telling the truth. So I work harder, just in case. It’s not really about looks, you see. I don’t care about the latest fashions, I don’t wear makeup or shave my legs. I’m not really concerned about my appearance that much. I just want to be good enough to be loved.

Once I was 130lb. Now that was fat! When I lost the first twenty people started treating me differently. They said I was a nicer person (I have a famously bad temper.) People asked me to work on projects with them more often boys asked me out more often. I never thought that it mattered. It turned out that it did matter. I must admit, that made me sort of . . . mad. So I just kept losing weight! And then I was only 87lb. (they’ll really love me now, I thought) But, 87 was “too thin” and I had to gain some back “get some meat on my bones.” So, I did. Now I’m 100 and I have no idea if that is right or not. I have no idea if anyone loves me. I wish it didn’t matter, but everyone knows it matters. I wish I was a guy, maybe then I could forget about all of this crap.

Yeah, I'm really sick of having to say this to all the women I know too. I'm pretty sure that when you tell women that they're not fat, they still think you're lying or just trying to be nice on some level. It seems to be a lose-lose situation, unless you're Suzanne Somers, Weight Watchers, or some women's magazine. The media's portrayal of the "ideal" woman is so omnipresent and so simple that it becomes more powerful than any other individual can be, and there seems like there's no way to break through to women who are overly obsessed with their image.

But I think I've stumbled on the answer. Certain women feel bad when they think of themselves as fat... but they get temporary relief when someone tells them that they look fine. I propose that we start telling women, right to their face, that they're fat. Not just sometimes, and not just the overly obsessed ones, all women, all the time. Sure, they'll feel real bad at first, but eventually it'll hurt so much that they'll learn to deal with it. They'll stop caring. Humans (just like all life-forms) are designed to adapt to their environments: if you give them two opposing truths ( "you should look like this" vs "you look beautiful the way you are"), they won't know which one is true, and which one they should integrate into their lifestyle and worldview, so they'll unhealthfully oscillate back and forth between the two extremes. If you give them a definite truth ("food and shelter are necessary", "people who commit crimes go to jail", "you are fat and there's nothing you can do about it"), they'll accept it and not try to fight it until they're presented with a different point of view ("I can commit crime and not get caught").

So since we obviously can't exert any influence over the media, the only point of view for us to eliminate is that women aren't fat. We can even make up some scientific studies demonstrating that women are genetically predisposed to being fat. And we won't say that being fat is bad -- just that every woman weighs more than the average. And they'll remove the badness they project onto it all by themselves.

And if you're opposed to this idea, it's just because you know that if women start being happy with their image, they won't spend so much time and effort trying to make themselves look like supermodels, and you won't have as much eyecandy. You chauvinistic, sexist swine.