Shame Spiral

Kenneth Kraus is fit.  He mountain bikes.  According to Katie Kindelan, of abcnews.go.com, he apparently has bulging biceps.  Another way to describe him would be the pretentious narcissist who felt it was his duty to email Wisconsin news anchor, Jennifer Livingston, to let her know how fat she is and what a terrible example for young girls she is setting.

You can view the whole email during this video reply from Ms. Livingston.

Kraus indicated that obesity is a choice and a poor habit to maintain. 

As if.

Her reply consisted of a four-minute rebuke of fat bullying, which resulted in a flood of support from family, friends, and fans.  In her reply, she owned her body.  She didn’t make excuses, she didn’t play the blame game, she didn’t back down.  She admitted to being overweight, even obese by a doctor’s standards (which is bullshit because everybody’s body is different), but also reminded Kraus that he “knows nothing of her but what he sees on the outside,” and that she is “more than a number on a scale.”

According to abcnews.go.com, Kraus stood by his email, claiming that Livingston can influence the children of her town to be physically and psychologically healthy by “transforming herself for all of her viewers…” How anyone can think that it is okay to assume anyone should transform himself or herself for anyone is beyond me.  Who the fuck does this guy think he is?  

I’m so glad that Ms. Livingston implied that people like him are raising children to bully fat people.  Even if his intention wasn’t to bully, he should have realized that his words were going to hurt, and when you hurt someone they feel bullied… so to that end, Mr. Kraus, you are a bully. 

The fact of the matter is, kids don’t understand intention.  They see their parent getting upset about something and then labeling that thing, the kid is going to automatically assume that anything that resembles that thing is deserving of that label.  Children emulate their parents; so if you don’t want your kid to be a dick, set a better example.

She's not laughing AT you, she's laughing WITH you.

I don’t know about you, but I’m a pretty thick chick.  I’m not gonna lie; I love food.  I don’t mean cheeseburger donuts or fried Twinkies food

Heart attack, anyone?

but deliciously healthful home-cooked foods with good (when I can afford it, organic) ingredients made with love and skill.  There are times when I will chow down on four slices of pizza and have a hefty portion of frozen yogurt, or some chicken hot dogs with thick, fluffy, multi-grain rolls and a beer.  There are even times, in a pinch, I’ll drive through somewhere like Del Taco and get a chicken burrito.  This is very rare these days, as luckily I have trained in the special art of healthful junk food (just ask, I’ve created a ton of recipes).  But for the most part I eat several small healthful meals throughout the day, and I work out three times a week. 

This is how I lived before I quit smoking (August 15, 2011), and even though I gained about 50 pounds since I quit smoking, I was still at least 40 pounds overweight while I was sucking on the cancer teat. 

He thinks he looks so cool.

I have spent most of my life working my ass off at not being fat.  Even eating a vegan diet and working out every other day, I still could not get down past 149.  I could barely squeeze into a size 11, and I know in my heart that my body is not meant to be anything less than a solid size 13.  I think that’s just fine, and so do a lot of people I know… but the majority of the world thinks even that is too fat. 

I do not choose to be fat.  I do not go out of my way to maintain obesity.  I have a super slow metabolism, and since I quit smoking it’s even slower.  Put me and ten other chicks in the same room together, 9 out of ten of us eat the same shit on a daily, and I guarantee 7 out of ten of us will be smaller than a size 13. 

Some people are just born to be overweight by society’s standards.  And even if you don’t have the so-called ‘fat gene,’ you might have other medical conditions making it harder to lose weight, like Jennifer Livingston (who also happens to be a tri-athlete and a runner) has.  According to her husband and fellow anchor, Mike Thompson, she has a thyroid condition that makes it hard to keep the weight off.  Had Kraus known that, would he have taken his stupid foot out of his big mouth?

It's not gonna fit...

I found a neat blog called The Fat Nutritionist from which I stole a quote about Livingston’s rebuttal:

“Telling someone that they are fat, even when couched in expressions of “concern for their health” is not giving them any new information. It’s not helping them. And, especially when that person is a perfect stranger, it is mostly like a transparently aggressive maneuver to shame and put them in their place.”

Her tag line, “eating normally is the new black,” confirmed my notion that telling someone they’re fat is like telling a black person they’re black.  Like, no shit, asshole… what of it?  Why is it any of your personal concern?

Ever since I was a little girl I was horribly teased for being fat even though I wasn’t considered medically overweight until I was fifteen.  I was a wiry girl, who loved tomato soup and eggs, who ran everywhere and climbed trees.  When I hit puberty I had hips and breasts, and all the little boys (when they weren’t trying to molest me) called me fat.  They cried, “boom-ba-ba-ba, boom-ba-ba-ba,” when I walked.  They cried, “don’t sit on me!” when I would become upset at their taunts. 

In reality, I was not a fat kid.  I wasn’t a fat pre-teen, and I certainly wasn’t fat up until tenth grade (thanks birth control!). I look at pictures of myself from back when I was totally ashamed of my body and I see that I was gorgeous. If only I had enjoyed it when I had it. 

Ten years ago I went to my ten-year high school reunion and the brother of a close friend made it a point to tell me how all the girls had gained weight, except for me.  He praised me for losing so much weight, and that I looked great.  The totally hysterical thing about that is that I weighed exactly the same thing as I had when we last saw each other in high school.  

Unfortunately I did (and still tend to do) what Ms. Livingston warns us all not to do, I let my self-worth be determined by bullies.  What’s especially sad is that some of those bullies were parental figures that should have been teaching me to love myself no matter what, not stigmatizing food and sending me into a shame spiral that would haunt me the rest of my life whenever I sought to enjoy something tasty.   

Today my bully wears the face of the media.  My bully shines at me from the coat hanger shoulders of anorexic models in fashion magazines (who, to be fair, are also bullied by the same magazines into being anorexic in the first place).  My bully lies in the rudeness of the man who will open the door for the tall, skinny blonde and let it shut in my face because he didn’t even see me over the glorious perfection of slenderness.  My bully mocks me from the shapeless, over-sized tunic with the large flower print that only seems to be sold to women of my size.  It’s like the rest of the world is doing whatever it can to show me that my fat and I aren’t welcome. 

Kraus, like many other people, thinks his perception of health and beauty is (and should be) a reality for all.  That is an unrealistic expectation and, now that the government has taken to supporting this type of behavior, I don’t know if we’ll ever truly be free to be ourselves.