My Big Fat Fabulous Life star Whitney Way Thore doesn’t have to look far to find fat shaming: it’s in her comment section.
The TLC reality star recently posted a glimpse of the types of comments she receives — including taunts for her to “kill herself” — on Facebook, along with a video that does an amazing job of taking down the cruel “Dear Fat People” video comedian Nicole Arbour posted last week.
“Fat-shaming is not a thing. Fat people made that up. That’s a race card with no race. ‘Yeah, but I couldn’t fit into a store, that’s discrimination.’ Um, no, that means you’re too fat, you should stop eating,” the YouTube stars says in the video.
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That’s just not true, according to Thore. The No Body Shaming campaign founder has experienced it firsthand. “It is the really nasty spawn of a larger parent problem called body-shaming, which I’m fairly certain everyone on the planet, especially women, has experienced,” she says in the video posted to Facebook.
“Are you going to tell a doctor that they’re being mean and fat-shaming you when they say you have f***ing heart disease?” Arbour adds in her video.
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“Heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, anxiety, depression — these are illnesses that affect millions of people worldwide from skinny to fat and everything in between,” counters Thore. “…I have polycystic ovarian syndrome. While PCOS is not the only reason I turned from [a] 130-pound 18-year-old to an over 300-pound woman, right now, it is a really big contributing factor.”
With all of that said, Thore’s main point is her best: You can’t — and shouldn’t — worry yourself with the way others look. How other people choose to live their lives is not our business, and no one really knows another person’s story or what they’re going through in life.
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“The next time you see a fat person, you don’t know whether that person has a medical condition that caused them to gain weight. You don’t know if their mother just died. You don’t know if they’re depressed or suicidal or if they just lost 100 pounds. You don’t know,” she continues. “Let me hammer this one home. You cannot tell a person’s health, physical or otherwise, from looking at them.”
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