Fat Hobbitses

Over the past few weeks, I've done a rewatch of the Lord of the Rings trilogy with a friend. I've been so busy that it's taken me a while to come in here and write about something that struck me - when I originally saw the films, and when I saw them again recently.

I should tell you all that I was a Tolkien fanatic from a very early age. So I knew that book damn well. I'd go so far as to say ridiculously well. So when I first saw the interaction between Gollum and Sam, and heard Gollum call Sam "fat hobbit" as a term of disparagement, my antennae perked up. I don't remember that being in the original book. Sam *is* plump, and he likes his food...but did Gollum ever refer to it? When I first saw the films, I went back to the books to check. I was right. He calls him nasty. He calls him cruel. He never once refers to him as fat.

Leaving aside all the other things that bothered me about the films, this blog is about weight, not literature as film. But that change is so very telling. Fat is an insult. Fat is something bad. In Tolkien's day, when he wrote that book - in the 1940s and 50s), it wasn't. But now it's a way to mock someone. I mean why, really, should that be the case? Gollum is almost a prisoner, he hates Sam, who protects Frodo and is suspicious of Gollum...why is 'fat' the epithet he uses to hurl at him?

Because in today's world, being fat is bad, morally. It says something wrong about you. It can be used - it *is* used - as an insult.

There are so many films that could be held up as yet more illustrations of this attitude in our society. I remember, for example, one of the scenes in 'Love, Actually', where Colin Firth's character races across the Channel to find his love...knocks on her door and asks the man who opens it for his daughter...his daughter appears... and she's fat, plain, dowdy, and rude. Not the right daughter, clearly. And that's played for laughs. Of course she's not the one he wants - she's fat (and therefore dowdy). Why not just have a different, average sister open the door? The girl he loves is stick thin, but her sister is fat. Because apparently, we want the tension extended, we want it to be difficult for him to find his girl...and it's funny and ironic when a fat girl opens the door, because *obviously* he doesn't want her.

No wonder we all want to lose weight. This is the way the world sees us when we're not thin.

And on that note - I'm down to 146.2 now. Another 1.2 pounds and I'll have a BMI in the normal range for the first time since I was 12 years old. The scale has continued to fluctuate - I saw a low of 146.8 two weeks ago but then the scale jumped with my period and stayed up for 13 long days...but yesterday it was back again and today is lower still. I've been consistent with my food, and right now it seems to be paying off.