The Hidden Pain of On Ride Photos

A lot of people take on-ride photos for granted. They know Disney is trying to make money but most people are ok with it because they enjoy checking out their photos after the ride.  All you have to do is check out the crowd at the end of Splash Mountain to realize this.  I've even seen some familes ride a ride multiple times to try and get a good or funny photo.

There is another group of people who walk by the on ride photo display as fast as they can.  Sometimes they even turn their heads so they don't have to see them.  For those people on ride photos can acctually be painful.

I have many photos of myself when I was kid and those photos continued through my early twenties. Recently I've avoided the camera like the plague. I started avoiding the camera in my mid twenties. I use to enjoy on-ride photos but now I can't stand to look at them. 

To be blunt I'm a typical obese adult.  People who are not obese don't understand why having your picture taken would bother you.  The ones who think about it imagine that you just don't like the way you look and that's why you dont' want your picture taken.  That's not really the case.

There are two things that cause obese people to avoid the camera.  I should say there are two things they see in photos of themselves.  When I see a picture of myself I often have the same thought "Do I really look that bad?"  I only see the fat.  The odd thing is when I look in the mirror I don't see the fat. I only really see it in photos.  The second thing is the more sinister.  It's something I believe most obese people experience.  You ask yourself what happened.  You remember what you use to look like before you gained the weight.  It's hard to explain how that makes you feel.

The combination of those two items normally leads to a decision that non-obese people just don't understand.  You don't want to remember.  You want to remember the experience but you don't want anything that reminds you that you are fat. Just keep that in mind the next time you drag your overweight friend to check out the on-ride photo.