These videos made me cry. Thank you F-Word for posting it.
My whole life, I have mostly felt like no one got it. Most people didn’t believe that I was harrassed CONSTANTLY and that that harrassment was bad enough that I spent years wishing I would just die. The things the weight bullies said to the fat kids were so much like what I grew-up with. Seeing this made me finally feel heard.
In the last video, where they show how things could be better and different without the weight bias… that really made me tear up… cuz it is what I always wanted, but never got as a kid. I had happy tears just to see some kid (even if it is a dramatization) getting the treatment I always wanted.
It was meaningful to me that average sized and thin professionals could describe the fat stigma experience so thoroughly. Sure, maybe I get validation from other people who were overweight as kids, but a lot of the time even fat people don’t relate to the constant and horrible bullying I went through. It was really lovely to see people of all ages and sizes telling a story that I’ve felt for too long has only been my burden to bear.
My bullying experience:
I was called a pig and a cow even when I was at a normal healthy weight. I was constantly told how much I smelled, because I was fat. There were the earthquake jokes. I learned to take any kindness sarcastically as the kids would do something “nice” to me, just to prove how stupid I was for thinking they would ever be nice to me. My things were stolen and broken. Songs were made up about me that I still remember. There were many kids (and it was a small class in a teeny rural community) who never missed an opportunity to remind me how fat and worthless I was. It was like they couldn’t allow me to just walk by them even once and not tell me how disgusting I am. I even had this one teacher, who was a jerk in general… but when the other kids made fun of me, sometimes he’d join in on the laughter as if it was valid to treat me that way. I’m not sure what was worse: the teacher who joined in the laughter or all the teachers who turned a blind eye to the constant abuse.
To make things more difficult, I came home at night to a rageaholic and abusive step-father who also liked to focus on weight. There was no escape for me for many years… and the worst part was that I felt completely alone with the experiences.
When I went to my mother about the bullying at school, she told me the other kids were just jealous. Yeah… really helpful. Her advice encouraged me to do things that only made things worse… like treat people as if they were jealous and “less than” me. My step-father constantly told me how huge I was, so there was no way I was expecting sympathy from him… I am going to send my mother the link those those videos, so maybe she can understand why I was unsatisfied with her pat responses to my cries for help.
Or, maybe she won’t get it. I’m not going to tell her I’m sending this for XYZ purpose… as that will put her on the defensive and is no help at all. But, if I send her a “neat link” that I love… I think that might be able to slip through a crack in her wall of denial. We shall see…
I have been lucky to have not experienced must weight bias in doctor’s offices, even when I was well within the obese range. Perhaps, I was sufficiently self-hating enough that they didn’t feel they needed to heap more criticism on. Who knows.
My heart goes out to those of you who have experienced any kind of weight discrimination. It’s just heartbreaking to think of…
But, I feel some consolation in finally hearing in video form professionals stating that if dieting was so very effective that we wouldn’t have so many fat people walking around… the reasons for obesity are COMPLEX and treaing people with disdain only makes the situation worse… overweight and obese people may eat very healthily AND exercise and may still be fat. It’s not about a lack of character! I want to see more videos like this… especially on mainstream TV. Maybe it’s not hugely likely right now, but one can hope.
Readers and friends: Do you have stories about weight discrimination you have experienced? If you do, please share them! Maybe a bit of sharing and venting will be cathartic for all of us.
–AngryGrayRainbows
Angry Gray Rainbows 
Hi there AngryGray,
I too found the videos to be quite provocative. Thank you for drawing my attention to them.
I was never overweight by any objective measure…. the weight bias I experienced was much more subtle. My family is very much weight biased and merciless. That scene where the young fat girl goes to the doctor and the boy comments rudely on her appearance was very familiar. My mom made similar comments about overweight people as if they couldn’t hear. I remember being so mortified when I was in hospital for ED treatment (about 4 years ago) and my mom came to visit. The first thing she said when she saw a morbidly obese girl in the unit was, “What’s SHE doing here? She doesn’t look like she has an eating disorder…” My dad was also ruthless in his comments, especially calling my mom names like “airport fanny” or commenting on her choice of meals at a restaurant. I learned very early on that any excess weight would be mercilessly mocked and I couldn’t afford to add that to the growing list of reasons my family mocked me…. so I developed anorexia instead.
I must say that as I watched the videos I realized how the weight bias also functions nefariously to reward those who develop eating disorders and lose too much weight. While nearly 15 lbs underweight I regularly got comments about how “sexy” or “fit” I looked. Women in the locker room would ask me my “secret” and talk longingly about my nearly-boyish figure. I strongly believe that the weight bias we have in this country works against people with eating disorders of every shape, regardless of whether they are overweight.
Thanks for this very interesting blog….
love,
b
Borboleta! 🙂 Good to see ya!
Thank you for making the case for weight bias hurting people of all sizes. While, I also had my anorexic years, they weren’t the majority of my life and that POV isn’t the first thing that comes to my mind.
I also like how this point was dealt with (I believe in the 3rd video) where a thin girl talked about how the bullying made her feel bad. It makes me wonder if any of the people not being bullied didn’t like what happened to me too…
That, and I appreciate the broadening of compassion I feel as soon as I think about how EVERYONE suffers because of this discrimination. Agh… realizing this just makes it all the more heartbreaking.
Actually, yeah… I do remember the validation of my starving and purging days. I remember trying to get people to understand the ridiciulous lengths I had to go to to maintain what I had… and people generally thought it was worth it to be a certain size or shape. It hurt to not feel my urgency was heard, when I would admit certain behaviors.
Thin in and of itself is not health. I wish more people would get that through their heads.
AGR – I didn’t get as much crap as you did when I was growing up, but I still got comments from my brother like “fatty fatty 2 X 4, can’t get through the kitchen door”, and snide little put-downs from my mother about how fat I was and she hated shopping in the “chubby” sections for me because it was more expensive than the regular girls’ section of the store (yeah, like I liked those clothes soooooo much). When I was in high school (and I was 5′ 9″ and weighed about 175 -180 lbs), one of the girls called me MaryElephant (a play on my name of Mariellen, spelled funny but pronounced MaryEllen). I roller skated 3 – 4 times a week for at least 3 hours, rode my bike or walked all over town (small town, but still), and swam nearly every day in the summer. I wasn’t fat, but I sure thought I was (I look back at pictures of me then and wonder what the hell was wrong with people that they thought I was fat and just had to call me out on it). It’s no wonder that I never understood why, when I got to be an adult, men wanted to date me and were willing to actually be seen with me in public. I was always asking “What do you see in me? Why do you like me?” and not believing them when they told me I was cute and sexy and had a great sense of humor and was really smart.
Then I got pregnant, and gained weight, and could never lose it for very long no matter how hard I tried, and found out what being fat really is, and I cry for the girl I used to be and how I was treated by the asshats in my life. It took me years to figure out that the size of my clothes didn’t determine what kind of person I was, and that if people couldn’t like me the way I was (and am), then I don’t need them in my life, even if they are family/supposed friends. Getting rid of those toxic people was one of the best things I ever did for myself.
Hmmm… Vesta, thank you… your comment reminded me of my own history. I also rollskated hours for several days a week for hours on end. I biked for hours on end several days a week. I swam daily all summer. I walked the dog. I liked to clean my room. I loved basketball and was pretty damn good at the game.
And yet, I was never super-thin like the magazines promise. My smallest was being somewhere near average. Even my malnourished bulimic weights were in the range of “normal” for other people… and yet my hair was falling out and my complexion was gray.
Given all this, I still firmly believed that I was fat and lazy and undisciplined and stupid… nevermind that I always had good grades, finished papers way ahead of time, devoured books and exercised more than anyone else I can think of when I was a kid.
Sadly, I based my fat and lazy and undisciplined label on the fact that I was ALWAYS one of the slowest runners in my class. I had the same classmates from kindergarten to 8th grade and I was always the slowest. At my school, fitness was equated with ability to run miles on end and to run fast. I was never good at any of these. Instead, I took to skates like I was born on them, I swam like a fish and made baskets regularly from the 3 point and even half court line! Sheesh. Wow… I never thought all this through before!
I have also said the same thing to men… always asking why they would even want to be near me, let alone date me or hold me.
Gosh Vesta… thank you for sharing that. You’ve made me think about things that haven’t popped in my head in over a decade…. I think I’m gonna chew on this some more!
I was born looking more like my dad than my mom, and my mom used to give me a lot of anxiety about my appearance and specifically my “wrong” size. She began to tell me I was ‘overweight’ when I was only 6, embarassed to buy size 6x instead of regular size 6. She suggested that I’d have more friends if I wasn’t “Overweight”. And…(this is the worst, for me)…actually offered to PAY ME $200 if I would lose 20 pounds in 6 months. That was when I was about 13 or 14. Of course I didn’t lose the whole 20 pounds, and that failure added to my already-burgeoning shame over my body.
She was one of those moms who started encouraging me to diet when I was still a child, and said things like, “Moments on the lips, forever on the hips!”
She brainwashed me pretty successfully.
And the kids…approached me to say, “I thought Ziggy died!” Ziggy being the famous and recently deceased elephant at our local zoo.
I have thought at times that there is no worse thing to be than a fat woman in the USA. I know that isn’t correct though.
Wow, Hope. I’m sorry your mother was so fat-phobic. That is such a shame. I knew a lot of mothers who did the same things to their kids. It’s just so sad… and ironic. As far as I ever knew, diets make more people fat than anything, so these mothers aren’t even causing slimmer children.
I think we can say without being corrected that it is VERY HARD (if not the hardest thing possible) to be a fat women in the US… especially if we were raised in certain fat-hating families or communities.
I know as a kid, that when other kids compared me to elephants (cows, hippos) it just broke my heart. The funny bit is, I really love elephants. They are facinating and intelligent and beautiful. If someone called me an elephant today, I’d probably thank them and then go off rambling about some beautiful elephant I saw once… I know a compliment isn’t usually the intention when someone calls you an elephant, but I am all for reclaiming our own definitions and truths!