My Personal Response to Fat Hate

Someone on another social media website (who shall remain nameless), recently posted the following:

Can anyone explain me, HOW fat girls can love themselves? I mean, it’s great that you can live with that, but in the deep of your soul you will always know that You. Are. Fat. Cow.

You must be a very patient, very lazy, very ignorant hero.

“I love myself because it’s me, and I don’t want to change anything” LIAR everybody wants to change anything.

“It’s my body, deal with it” SHIT OFF go to the gym and do something

You can be something better then you are now.

Your choice, anyway.

Want to be a fat strange lady? I don’t care.

Want to be a slim young woman? Awesome.

Throw out this donut or something.

All in your hands. Bitch.

I’m done here, goodnight.

I know it’s silly of me to think I can fix such ignorance, but maybe my words will at least make one person think a little bit. Here’s the message I sent this person (I never received a response):

I don’t know how many other messages you’ll get about your rant about fat girls, and I really have no reason to believe that you’ll read or take mine seriously, but I felt the need to put it out there anyways:

1. Fat girls can love themselves because we (we as in ALL people, not just fat girls) are made up of so much more than the body that we live in. People are a compilation of every memory we’ve ever had, every person we’ve ever met, and every single second of experience we have in this lifetime. We are made up of feelings and thoughts and a million other things I can’t even begin to list here. To assert that a person (or a group of people) should base their entire worth on one facet of their life is entirely small-minded.

2. You’re a female. Are you an overly emotional air-headed bimbo who is good for nothing but cooking, cleaning house, and having children? Probably not, because you are more than a stereotype. I am more than a stereotype. To assume that every single fat person is lazy and ignorant is the same thing as assuming that every single black person steals cars or that every single gay person is feminine. It’s plain out discrimination. Lazy people come in all body shapes, and fat people have all kinds of different activity levels. I have ridden 265 miles on my bicycle in the last 2 months, and I weigh 326 pounds. And I’m okay with that, not because I enjoy being fat, but because I know that the most important thing is that I am making healthy choices for my life. Whether or not I lose weight isn’t important to me; living my life in a way that I am happy with is.

3. Just because you can’t understand how someone could possibly think something doesn’t mean they are lying, and it doesn’t mean they are wrong. All sorts of different people think all sorts of different things, and you will meet so many, many different people over the course of your lifetime…and very few of them will see the world like you do. Please don’t fool yourself into believing that your worldview is any more important or right than anybody else’s, because if you do you will deny yourself some of the most mind-expanding, wonderful, world-changing experiences a young woman such as yourself could ever have.

4. “You can be something better than you are now.” You know what? I agree with you on that point. I think every day is a new chance to improve one’s life, and whether that improvement is physical, emotional, intellectual, artistic, or any other thing, this thought has the potential to be beautiful and wise, if it can be taken out of context of all the poison that surrounds it. You’re right. It is every single individual’s choice on how they live their life, and to think that you are better than someone because you make different choices is arrogant.

5. I am sad, truly sad for you, that you live in a world where most people think it is unacceptable to look any other way than thin, and I’d like you to know that it wasn’t always this way, and it won’t always be this way. The things that society decides are the most ‘beautiful’ change all the time, and someday, you may not fit that standard anymore. And if that day comes, I truly hope that you will still find some reason to love yourself, because I believe that you, too, have the opportunity to be something better than you are now.

Your choice, anyway.