The Health Institute of Nutrition

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We hear a lot about “self-esteem” these days, but what is it? More importantly, what does it mean to you as a person?

Like anything else that ever existed anywhere in the entire world, the answer depends on whether you are thin or fat.

In thin people (sometimes known as “people of value”), the presence of self-esteem can be relatively benign, or even beneficial. A certain level of self-esteem is often associated with the ability to face the world with a smile, meet the challenges of the day, and a just plain fantastic feeling from the head down to the toes.

While extremely elevated self-esteem levels have been linked to overconfidence and general cockiness, these conditions are rarely fatal outside of certain high-risk professions. The bottom line is that a little self-esteem is generally healthy for the thin.

For fat people, though, the dangers of even a little bit of self-estem are severe. A fat person who suffers the effects of self-esteem may experience any of the following associated symptoms:

• Drastically reduced downward mobility.
• Failure to conform to society’s expectations.
• A strange euphoric sensation approximating the feeling thin people know as “happiness.”
• Delusions of attractiveness, often shared by those around them.
• A serious condition known as Insult Resistance.

Those who suffer from Insult Resistance are unable to gain the full benefit of being told that they are fat and worthless. In the most extreme cases, the fat person’s body may reject labels entirely. If the condition spreads to the brain, it’s only a matter of time before negative lines of thought begin shutting down as fast as they can start up. When this happens, it’s usually too late to reverse the damage.

Unlike obesity itself, there is no proven cure for self-esteem, so prevention is the key. Look for risk factors in your environment. Some are obvious:

• The availability of fashionable, comfortable clothing in plus sizes.
• Proliferation of fat role models in the media, including overweight American Idol winners and films such as Hairspray.
• Misguided laws and office policies which attempt to extend human rights to fat people.

…and perhaps less obvious, but the most dangerous:

• Simple, basic courtesy.

The Institute cannot stress enough that things like nice clothes and positive role models are all relatively harmless or even slightly beneficial for thin people, but severely damaging for fat people.

Also remember that if you have children who are overweight—or even look like they might become overweight—then it’s never too soon to start working on the double danger of weight and self-esteem.

Unfortunately, while fatness has many obvious and easy cures which work the same for everybody, the inherent laziness and sloth of even a fat child make it difficult for those obvious and easy cures to be successfully applied. There’s good news, though… when applied early enough, those same techniques have an almost 100% success rate in preventing self-esteem.

In some cases, the effects last a lifetime.

The above article has been certified as Nutri-Logically sound by The Health Institute of Nutrition’s Board of Scienterrific Excellence. Results not typical.