Dear Fat Shamers

We’re feeling a little sympathy for fat shamers today. It’s been a rough week, capped by the news yesterday that Nicole Arbour was fired from her role in an upcoming movie — Don’t Talk to Irene — because of her vicious fat shaming video, Dear Fat People. Canadian Film Director Pat Mills explained:

[I’m making] a dance movie, so obviously we needed a choreographer. We met with a woman who not only did traditional dance choreography, but was a cheerleader as well. She was fun and nice and had a lot of energy. She seemed like a perfect fit for the project. I shared the script with her. She said she dug it and was excited to come on board. And then a crazy thing happened on Saturday — I saw something on the Internet that made me never want to see her again.

I’m gay. I was bullied a lot as a kid. I’m no stranger to ridicule and loneliness. [Her video] is an unfunny and cruel fat-shaming video that guises itself as being about “health.” It’s fat phobic and awful. I was so upset I was shaking.

People with obesity lose jobs, raises, and promotions all the time because of people who make bigoted assumptions about their abilities based upon their size and shape. So clearly, we can sympathize. But if fat shamers like Arbour want to stop making themselves look bad, they need to figure out that they’re making three big wrong assumptions:

1. Eat Less, Move More Cures Obesity. People with obesity bump into something called metabolic adaptation that makes this a big lie. So this sort of advice for people with severe obesity is not much better than telling someone who’s bleeding to avoid sharp objects. It’s a good idea, but it doesn’t solve the problem.
    
2. Size = Health. A person’s health cannot be assessed merely by looking at them or stepping on a scale. Plenty of slender people have terrible diets, sedentary lives, heart disease, diabetes, and other health problems. Someone can have a high BMI and be in the best health of their life because of action they’ve taken to improve it.
    
3. Telling People They’re Fat Helps. This assumption is disastrously wrong. Subjecting someone to shame and stigma has been shown to lead to weight gain, avoidance of healthcare, and worse health outcomes. This is particularly true for people who eat in response to stress and emotional issues.

 
We hate to see haters hurt themselves. Arbour shows no sign of recognizing her mistake. She dismisses the story of the lost film gig as gossip and insists, “I’m not apologizing.”

Click here for more perspective from an interview with Arya Sharma and here for more from People magazine.

Letter Writing, photograph © Richard Owens / flickr

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September 12, 2015