This is something that came up several ways in several places today so I wanted to address it. It’s the concept that someone can “act fat.” The three situations that I saw were:
Someone ate a lot and said that they “ate like a fat kid”
Someone had a slow run and said that they “ran like a fatty”
Someone described skipping their workout as being “fatty for a day”
Dude, no. Here’s what actually happened:
A thin person ate a lot.
A thin person ran slowly.
A thin person skipped their workout today.
Being fat is a body size/composition, it is not a behavior or group of behaviors – fat people have as wide and varied experiences and choices as any group of people who share a single physical characteristic. There are people of all sizes who eat “a lot”, run “slowly” (or not at all) and skipped their workout today (or don’t workout ever). There are people of all sizes who eat “a little”, run “fast”, and didn’t skip their workout today. These are all totally valid choices, they are also all personal choices that are nobody else’s business.
When people say that they are “acting fat” what they are actually doing is acting like the kind of asshole who stereotypes people based on how they look. This is actually two layers of crap. The first layer is the mistaken idea that our personal choices around food and exercise should be judged at all, the second layer is that we should associates specific ways of behaving with broad appearance-based categories (ie: fat and thin.)
Our body sizes and our behaviors are two different things, neither of which should be up for public comment, or be anybody else’s business unless we ask them to make it their business (anyone wishing to make a “but muh tax dollarz!” argument should check out this post.) When a thin person chooses not to exercise they are not “acting fat” any more than when I train for an IRONMAN I’m “acting thin.” We’re just different sized people doing (or not doing) our own personal stuff.
Own your choices – if you are a thin person who eats a lot, runs slowly, is skipping a workout, is licking donuts (that you already own!), etc. that’s all fine, but it has absolutely nothing to do with fat people, so kindly leave us out of it.
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