When I was layed off in the dot-com bust in 2002, I blamed myself. For months I went over and over in my mind all the mistakes I had made that damaged our business and on all of the projects and plans I had when I set up our branch office that never actually came to fruition. My business career had had its ups and downs, to be sure, but this was the first time I felt like I had seriously “failed” in 18 years of working.

It took a lot of therapy and help from friends (and God) to finally get back on my emotional feet. But it was difficult because each and every time I went on a job interview there was that elephant in the room. Why was I laid off? What went wrong? Was it me? Was I damaged goods? Would hiring me bring bad luck?

None of these things was ever said, but I can assure you I wasn’t the only one in the room thinking them.

After two long, painful years of job hunting (and enough rejection to last a lifetime) I got back into full time employment many, many rungs down the corporate ladder from where I’d previously been. Ironically, the first project I worked on was in the HR department where I had to do some database work that involved dealing with the company’s salary structure.

It was astonishing to me that for all of that time that I’d been desperately searching for a job, all of these seemingly normal, not particularly spectacular employees had been chugging along, working for decent pay, getting health insurance, going on vacations and living the kind of life I’d always taken for granted. Nice as these people were, none of them seemed any more talented, clever, experienced and amiable than I was. And yet not one of them had suffered my fate.

What I also discovered in my brief stint in HR was that my suspicions had been ENTIRELY correct. The company that hired me would basically reject out of hand any applicant who was not currently employed, no matter how qualified or interesting or specially trained that person was.

It astonished and sickened me to see that people, just by virtue of their circumstances, were being branded as undesirable losers. Failures to be avoided. No matter whether the hiring managers themselves had ever been out of work, they uniformly rejected anyone who wasn’t currently in the workplace.

Now in my own case, during the job interview I had presented my weight management meeting work as “full time” employment – which it certainly was. But none of that work had any real relevance to what I was eventually hired to do. Apparently, just working in itself was the redeeming factor.

Its just so patently unfair.

And I’m writing about this here because I think all too often in the weight management biz there are also unvoiced assumptions and value judgements about people’s size and weight . Just as the unemployed are unconsciously viewed with suspicion, the overweight are equally subject to a thousand conjectures about what’s “wrong” with them and how they “let themselves go.”

This is a lesson I try to keep in mind. When someone is approaching the scale to check in with me, I’m not there to “fix them” and they are not there because they have “failed.” The vast majority of overweight people do not overeat due to being ignorant, lazy or weak-willed. Its not that there is something wrong with them. Their minds and hearts and souls are generally intact, from what I’ve seen!

Still, just as I blamed myself for losing my job and being unemployed for two years, far too many of my clients and fellow sojourners are beating themselves up and/or listening to the negative talk of society around them. Its so easy to accept the idea that a person has been “bad” by eating to excess and that their body weight is something they “deserve.”

I don’t know, perhaps the unemployment/weight gain comparison is a stretch, but for me it rings true. Although we have free will and we’re responsible for our choices, I haven’t yet met anyone who is perfect and makes all of the right choices every single time. And its not about being a “victim,” its just about being human.

Oh, and one other thing.

One of the key factors that kept me going throughout that two year unemployment nightmare was the fact that, even though I had no control over whether someone would or would not hire me, I did have control over my body (and my mouth). So at least that guy who’s resume got tossed out over and over, who couldn’t get past that first (or second, or third) interview, who walked around with the taint of the unemployed, remained very healthy.

They could “blame” me unjustly for being out of work, but I would be damned before I’d let anyone “blame” me for my size.