British Expat Newsletter

23 November 2005

Hello, and welcome to those who have joined up since our last newsletter.

In this issue

This week: Weight
On the website
Virtual Snacks
Sponsor
Bizarre Searches
Joke and quotation

This week

We all know that the Americans have a reputation for being a bit chunky but apparently one in five Britons are now clinically obese too.

I heard on a radio programme recently that overweight people find it difficult to get jobs. The opinions and experiences of the interviewees ranged from just a general feeling that they didn't get the job because they were fat, to a case where one woman didn't get the job and was told quite explicitly that she could have a job if she lost weight.

In the latter case the job was in the "beauty" industry and the woman was well qualified, but the employer felt that an overweight person did not project the image which the company wanted to portray. Fair enough? I don't know, what do you think?

Rumours have abounded in recent years that some airlines are considering compelling grossly overweight people to buy two airline seats. Well, I'm not in favour of airlines screwing their customers any more than many of them already do. But!... sometimes I do think it's a little bit unfair that I can't have a little bit extra cabin baggage. After all, even a 30kg bag and I together would still weigh less than some of the larger people on the plane. So why quibble that my bag is a little over the 7kg limit? Don't get me started about airlines...

Why do people become overweight, anyway? The obvious reply is that they eat too much and don't exercise enough. This seems to be particularly true of North Americans, and Brits too, perhaps. I know very few Thai words and phrases but funnily enough after "hello" and "thank you" one of the the next things I learned was "pom pui" meaning "fatso". Most Westerners are big and fat compared to the Thais.

We've all heard the news stories which tell us that some research suggests that it's genetic, and that some people appear to be congenitally disposed to put on more weight than others following a similar lifestyle. That may well be. But in certain societies (some of the Pacific islands, for example) fatness is considered physically attractive.

Being fat can also be seen as a status symbol in some places, particularly Asia. It's a display of wealth. Those of you who live in India, Thailand or Bangladesh will know that you don't see many fat poor Indians, Thais or Bangladeshis. (It's not at all uncommon to see fat "poor" Britons or Americans. Poverty is relative, of course; how many people in the West are trying to live on less than a dollar a day?)

And in the West particularly, but elsewhere too, the growth of obesity has spawned the massive growth of a whole new industry looking at ways to lose weight - the dieting industry. So not only do we waste money on making ourselves unhealthily overweight, we now waste even more on futile attempts to reduce weight without going to the bother of eating healthily and exercising enough.

It seems quite simple to me - don't eat too much in the first place, then you won't need to spend a fortune on dieting products. Easy to say, I know. I've heard it said that the easiest way for a fat person to lose two stones of ugly fat is to cut their head off.

Some people complain about smokers and how much money they cost the health system. OK, but I don't drive or have children, and I'm not fat. So I'm saving the health system quite a bit too. Live and let live?

Do you have anything to say about this topic, or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not tell us about it on the forum?
British Expat Forum: BE Newsletter discussion

On the Website

This week has been all about moving, it seems - we've added the tale of a couple moving overseas for the first time to New Zealand, a guide to what goes into making a good location for properties in the US, and the results of Currency UK's research into the up-and-coming property hotspots in Spain.

However, my musings about time and where it all went in last week's newsletter prompted Bob Fretwell to put fingers to keyboard and tell us all on the Forum about the Spanish attitude to timekeeping. We thought Bob's posting was so entertaining that it deserved a wider audience, so it's now an article on the main site:
Timekeeping in Spain

All the new articles and features are listed on our What's New page:
What's New on BE?

Each week I delve into the dark cavernous interior of the BE website to see what gems I can unearth - good things you may have missed first time around. Here are my picks for this week:

Some time ago in an earlier newsletter, we discussed how tall people are perceived as being more successful and tend to earn more money. Here's a link in case you missed it first time around:
BE Newsletter: 23 February 2005

And just to round things off, here's an earlier rant, erm I mean article, about airlines and the shoddy way they treat smokers.
Phil's Philosophy: Smoking

If you're looking for travel features on the site, a good place to start is our Expat World page.
Expat World

Virtual Snacks

This American site, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, is quite interesting and worth a look.
NAAFA website

Try this link for an interesting collection of articles about why people get fat - perhaps it's genetics. (Or too many burgers!)
Discover: Why We Get Fat

Perhaps not surprisingly information on the 'Net about fat people is dominated by the Americans. However, I was able to find a few British ones including:
Bigpeople.org.uk

and an article about holidays for fat people:
The Times Online: Holidays for fat people

Sponsor

Offshore Companies House offer fast online registration of offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands, Belize, Dominica and other tax havens, as well as quick and easy setting up of multicurrrency bank accounts. OCH, through their offshore services, will provide you with the full necessary support at each stage and will always try to offer the best possible prices. They offer attractive and inexpensive offshore packages, and their reliability and quality of offshore service say even more for them than their prices. Most of their new clients - over 15,000 in the last ten years - are referred by previous satisfied customers. However, if you can get the same service, or an offshore package which is a genuinely cheaper offer, they promise to match it!
Offshore Companies House

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

what are some pet names men call their penis
louis xiv s sexual leg [Was that one of the pet names?]
turkish breakfast slang
unlocked british jokes
animated under construction images money
feisty femmes
emaciated actress
negotiation silence
alfred hitchcock afraid of eggs
ancient hebrews homos
pulling out and latin pregnant
inglish book baby

Till next time...
Happy surfing!

Kay
Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

"The biggest seller is cookbooks and the second is diet books - how not to eat what you've just learned how to cook."
- Andy Rooney, US news commentator (1919- )

Joke

A student at Edinburgh University is terribly overweight, so her doctor puts her on a diet.

"I want you to eat regularly for two days, then skip a day, and repeat this procedure for two weeks. The next time I see you, you'll have lost at least five pounds."

When the student returns two weeks later, she's lost a stone and a half.

"Wow, that's amazing!!" the doctor says. "Did you follow my instructions?"

She nods. "I'll tell you, though, I thought I was going to drop dead that third day."

"From hunger, you mean?" asks the doctor.

"No, from skipping."