Ragen Chastain

For fat people, Weight Loss Surgery is often touted as the magic bullet that will solve everything from sickness to single-ness to stigmatization.

We are passing our unhealthy obsession with thinness onto girls and it’s causing them to have issues with food, movement, self-esteem, and body image that can last a lifetime.

It is a very difficult and dangerous job, and it does require officers to have the ability to make good split second decisions. None of that should mean that it’s OK to be incompetent, or that we should all rush to justify, ignore, or excuse incompetence, racism, ableism, and the inappropriate use of force.

People’s health and looks change over time — if you only want to be in a relationship with someone “healthy” you should probably just stay single.

With celebrities suggesting that people eliminate entire food groups in the name of “cleansing” and/or “eating clean," Dr. Jessen comments: “I’ve had many, many patients, so many of them teenagers, convinced that their healthy lifestyle and their clean-eating regime was really helping them when actually all it was doing was helping them hide their increasingly disordered eating and to cover up an underlying eating disorder.”

Alyssa Milano take note - if a fat person has to become thin to find acceptance, that’s fat-shaming. If it requires a fat suit, it’s fat-shaming.

Suggesting that we should figure out how to apply a deadly illness to fat people is ludicrous on its face for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that THERE ARE FAT PEOPLE WITH ANOREXIA.

Fat shaming is wrong in any guise, and people who are trying to be funny (and/or trying to cover for a woefully incompetent press secretary) will just have to do better than relying on cheap stereotypes, shaming, and bigotry.

Nobody, of any size, is obligated to participate in sports/exercise/movement.

In the U.S., we are living in frightening times.