To the trolls … suck it!

(plussizebabydolldress.blogspot.com)

Trigger warning: Fat hate and disability shaming.

General warning: Sarcasm against trolls

Between FFF and my own blog Adventures of a Part-Time Wheeler, I’ve gotten a few comments from trolls (at least one of whom doesn’t think they are … go me!).  I could probably ignore them, but my schedule has me busy enough that I feel like addressing the comments will at least shut my neurotic brain up on things that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

My orange tabby Bela who tries to sleep away trolls

Our first is an anon here on FFF that didn’t even give a pseudonym:

Obese people die 30-40 years sooner than healthy people, that’s a statistical fact and there’s no escaping it. I’m thin and healthy, therefore I’m going to outlive all of you by several decades. Enjoy!

Cool … this means my fat great-grandmother is going to live to be a 120-130? She’s almost 91 now … that’s awesome! That’s a Star Trek-like life span. Go Grandma go!

Aside from the sarcasm … thin =/= healthy and fat =/= unhealthy. Despite significant congenital disabilities (one of which makes it really hard for my body to process cholesterol properly), I’m healthy and fat and disabled. The end.

Our second gem is from my blog.  This person from Florida (yup, I track IP addresses) is “A Concerned Citizen”:

This is shocking and depressing to read. I stumbled across your blog and am simultaneously saddened and disgusted. How on earth can you claim to be some sort of dancer when you admit that you cannot walk and are now to the point where you actively seek to avoid it (i.e. avoid “being ambulatory”)??? Walking is the most natural human activity there is. There is nothing “abelist” about it. In the whole of human history up until the last 30 or so years there have been no human beings that were so fat they could not walk. This is an issue related to diet and exercise, plain and simple. It is not genetics. It isn’t your spinal injury. It’s your diet and activity level. You can peddle all the excuses you want, but at some point you need to look in the mirror and realize that your greatest enemy in life is looking back at you. There are quadriplegics who are literally incapable of movement and they maintain a reasonable weight through a normal human diet. You are literally eating yourself to death and as your activity level lessens (due to your extreme obesity) your march toward literal death will only accelerate.

I almost didn’t think you were serious posting about “spinning” class. While I applaud your effort to do something beneficial for your body, I cannot fathom how you reconcile the utility of this activity with your simultaneous and literal abandonment of walking â€" the most basic human physical activity. This would be something like having celery sticks for dinner followed by an entire cake for dessert. The latter activity entirely negates the former.

The absurdity goes further â€" you’re some sort of exercise or kinesiology major. How can anyone possibly take you seriously? You’re supposedly an expert about human movement but are so fat you can barely move yourself. The irony, oh, the irony.

You can label me and those like me as “abelist” or “fat shamers” but you should know that while I accept your right to destroy yourself, you are encouraging others to not only accept but also embrace and engage in self-destructive behavior. That is shameful. Being obese is bad for your health. The medical research on this point is compelling. At your size your heart is most likely enlarged from struggling against the added circulatory stress that results from you having the biological mass of 2 or more normal human beings. You should be shamed, just as a drug addict or alcoholic should be shamed for his addiction. You are addicted to food and physical inactivity and, like a drug pusher, you are encouraging this addiction among others.

In the end, you can deny the obvious and serious health consequences that follow from your choices. But your beliefs are irrelevant when confronted with the objective reality of your situation. For example, I can jump from the roof a tall building believing completely that I can fly but the reality is that I will accelerate toward the earth at about 9 meters per second squared and go splat. Likewise, as you continue down your path your path you can deny the consequences that await you all you like, but they will not go away, an early and avoidable death awaits you.

Think about the choices you make. You can delete this post from your blog, I expect you will, but know that this is what normal human beings think about the morbidly obese. Your so called “fat activism” is not winning hearts or changing minds. Instead, it inflames those of us who choose to exercise and eat healthy and in moderate amounts. We understand you lack any and all self control but when you demand that you be accepted and lauded as normal and attractive we are insulted because we care about our bodies, we actually exercise self control, and we put in real effort to look and be healthy. If you want to eat yourself to death and ride around on a scooter because you’re literally too fat to walk then fine, but don’t ask the rest of us to fucking applaud you for doing so.

So many gems in this one. First of all, saying that walking is natural is ableist. The end. Congrats you win the Asswad Olympics. Besides that, anyone who reads my blog knows that I haven’t “abandoned walking.” I use something that physical therapists call “pacing” in that I make careful choices about how much I walk so I am physically capable of doing things that make me a happier and healthier individual (like dancing and spin class).

Oh, and in regards to having the gall to call myself a dancer with a spine injury? I present AXIS Dance Company, a mixed ability dance group.

While this clip doesn’t have any fat people, they do have fat dancers that are involved (and if I lived in the Bay area, I would take classes with them all.the.time.)

Secondly, there are a plethora of fat people who have logged their food intake online so other people can look at it, which usually results in people crying “liar” or some such.  There’s also a lot of research that invalidates the calories in/calories out paradigm.  I’m not going to dig up the research for you (PubMed is free) and I’m certainly not going to post my food diary.

Speaking of food, since you mention that my physical activity is worthless because I use a scooter to get to the gym … celery is tasty and so is cake. There are fat people who like celery (like me) and thin people like cake. One food does not negate another … it’s not that the cake dissolves all the nutrients in celery, all the while laughing at you.

I am a kinesiologist who studies physical activity and, because of the scooter, am able to be back to exceeding the national recommendations for physical activity. BECAUSE OF using the scooter. BECAUSE OF pacing and choosing to use my very limited spoons on something that matters deeply to me: being physically active. I use a scooter because my peripheral nerves (the ones that go to the legs) are severely damaged because I broke my spine dancing, and then fat-shaming twits of doctors decided to tell me to hold off on having it fixed until I lost weight. You know what? I even got some injury to my spinal cord because of this bullshit.

On that thread, people do take me seriously as a physical activity scholar. You know why? Because I talk the talk and metaphorically walk the walk. I talk about how physical activity adoption is hindered by fatphobic attitudes like these in society. I talk about the fact that if people don’t like what they’re doing in terms of physical activity, they won’t stick with it … especially if they only adopted physical activity for weight loss instead of health. I cite research that shows that physical activity is important for people of ALL SIZES and ALL ABILITIES for health promotion (spoiler alert: sedentary thin people have a very similar morbidity/mortality profile to sedentary fat people … there’s some objective evidence for you). I could go on … but long story short, if people didn’t take me seriously in this field, I wouldn’t still be in this field. I’m not a masochist.

Oh and regarding your ending, dear heart (sarcasm, if you miss it) … as someone who fits one of the Good Fatty stereotypes because of my choice to be physically active and eat healthily (which you must think I’m referring to salad with a gallon of ranch dressing at each meal because you think I’m eating myself to death), I “believe” in the objective reality that 95% of diets fail and that this attribution of your current “health” and “ability” to your theoretical thinness is completely misguided. Additionally, if you think I lack self control, there’s no way I would have been able to be at this point in my education (check out the Fuck Yeah! Fat PhD project in response to a shitty tweet about the same misconception).

I’m not asking for you to applaud me â€" quite the opposite actually. I want fat people like me, and fat disabled people like me, to be treated as humans. Not as walking/rolling death symbols. Not as thinspiration or inspiration. AS PEOPLE, just like you, who make choices in life to get through the day-to-day. Just because I’m physically active doesn’t mean that physical activity is either physically or mentally good for everyone (hint: health is multidimensional and multimodal). Just because I choose to eat a baked sweet potato for dinner (yum) doesn’t mean I’m more or less human.

Didn’t your parents ever tell you that if you don’t have anything nice to say, then shut the fuck up and mind your own business?

Filed under: DT, DW, EX, FH, MBL, Themeless Thursday, WL - Repost by plussizebabydolldress.blogspot.com -
From::http://fiercefatties.com/2015/01/20/to-the-trolls-suck-it/