Taliana

We’re starting our “metabolism” module at med school this week, and I’m dreading it with every fibre of my being. You see, I am going to be a doctor, and I am fat.

I’m not the type of fat you feel after you’ve had a big lunch, and your usually flat belly is protesting against the waistband of your jeans. I’m the real kind. My BMI hovers a couple of points below “morbidly obese”.

I worry a lot about what people will think of me as a fat doctor. For the smartarses among you, of course I’ve tried to be non-fat, it goes without saying. The thing is though, bodies don’t really like weighing less all of a sudden and are pretty good at reversing things in the long run. Mostly my body settles back to the same size 18 shape eventually.

I am always aware of my fatness, but perhaps more so here at medical school. We are training to work with bodies, and mine is a type of body we warn our patients not to have. It is the first thing described in every list of ‘modifiable risk factors’. A colleague suggests “just don’t let yourself get too fat” as we talk about preventing a certain type of cancer. A final exam question asks us to list four poor health outcomes associated with obesity. I sit through lectures with slides that have sniggering titles like “how BIG is the problem?”

The fact that Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian Mckellen are best friends in real life makes me so happy

I saw Sir Patrick speak a year or so ago and someone asked him about their friendship.  He told this story about how I think they’d once or twice worked on the same production but had had very little interaction, and that when he’d been a kid, he’d utterly looked up to Sir Ian, who had had an established theater career at a very young age. 

People assume that they’ve been friends since they were young, which makes sense given the sort of work they’ve done and their career trajectories, but no. Sir Patrick basically had a giant hero-crush-from-a-distance on Sir Ian for most of his life AND THEN on the set of X-Men, their trailers were put next to each other and they were significantly older than anyone else on the set, so they started spending their downtime together. 

And became inseparable.  And this is amazing. 

2: [accented] “I’m Liberian.”

Margaret Cho: Trolls Who Call Me ‘Fat And Ugly’ Are Admitting Defeat

Margaret Cho has a simple philosophy for dealing with degrading comments about herself: If you’re debating a woman and you stoop to calling her “fat” or “ugly,” you’ve already lost the argument.