Fat Boy or Slim?

Lately I've noticed that I don't seem to notice what anybody's body shape is. I was meeting up with two friends who hadn't met each other before at the new DFO in South Wharf where they have no phone reception downstairs. I had gone down with Lucy and the Sharon had no way of contacting us to tell us where she was. We figured Sharon must have been downstairs since we couldn't call her. In the end, Lucy and I decided to split up, and she was going to sit outside Smiggle in case Sharon came up, while I went downstairs to look for her. Lucy asked for a description of Sharon, and all I could come up with was, "Asian with long, black hair". Lucy asked if she was fat/skinny/etc. and I struggled to come up with an answer.

I guess the first big problem is that the labels "fat" and "skinny" are subjective. When asked whether someone is either, I usually compare them to people that I know are fat or skinny. When asked to think of a fat person, the only person that usually pops up in my head is John Candy (which most people don't even know, so that doesn't really help!) and skinny makes me think of Kate Moss. Everything is mostly a grey area in between. That's just for me though, and I know that other people will have different points of reference. It seems weird to say, "Well, I guess she's one and a half Kate Mosses." Not just that, but I may describe someone as what I think is fat, and the other person will have a differing opinion. When people have commented to me that they are fat and need to lose weight, I am always so surprised, because I had never considered them to be fat. I spent the last 10 minutes trying to think of somebody I know in real life who is fat, and other than a supervisor at Safeway, I couldn't think of anybody. Yet obesity is a huge problem in Australia, so it seems unlikely that of all the people I know, only one person is fat. Clearly something must be wrong with my perception of people!

I have overheard people calling me fat before, but according to my WiiFit (clearly the most reliable source of information that I have!) I'm in the healthy BMI range. Now if only people could wear wrist bands or something signifying which range they are in so that it would make it easier for me to describe them! Then again, QC says Asians are meant to have lower than normal BMI (or was it higher? It was different to the standard, anyway) so that doesn't really help.

Still, it made me wonder if I have some sort of prosopagnosia. In most cases, I can really only give a vague physical description of somebody, and even then, it's generally unhelpful. It's unfortunate, because a lot of the time, we are required to give a description of somebody in order to resolve a problem. I don't think I do have prosopagnosia though, probably just "psychohypochrondria" - the condition suffered by psychology students who feel they have every psychological disorder in the DSM IV. I just think that I find other facts about people more important. I could tell you a whole list of things about Sharon (which would make sense given that I've known her for about 12 years now), with a very small portion of that list being a physical description.

A part of this may be due to maturity. When young children are asked to describe themselves, they will usually list physical attributes or things about possessions, "I am a girl," or "I have a blue train." Then they later develop thoughts about feelings and their position in society, "I love my parents, " or "At school, my job is to look after the roses." Teens tend to describe themselves in terms of personality traits or beliefs, "I'm talkative," or "I think people who talk loudly on the train are rude." Following that, it would make sense for me to store facts about people's personalities, beliefs and preferences rather than just a basic physical description.

If you get right down to it, what use is it to categorise people into "fat" and "skinny"? Other than ice-hockey, I really don't do any other physical sports at the moment (I can't even say I do ice hockey yet, since I'm still learning to skate), and so I don't really need to filter people out based on assumed physical capability (though a friend of mine who considers himself fat still outruns me). What I tend to try to remember are likes and dislikes, which makes it easier to work out who would be interested in doing certain things with me.