A little questionnaire for you all:

How many years of your life did you put into trying to be thin? How much of your life did you put on hold while you tried to be thin? How old were you when you first remember being told you were fat? How many diets have you been on? How many exercise “plans” have you been on? How many years of your life have been taken up with eating disorders? How many people have told you that you are fat? How many people have treated you badly because you are fat? How many years did you spend counting calories, watching the number on the scale or the size label on your clothes?

Now tally the sum of all those years, all that time, all those diets, all those times you made yourself sick in the effort to get thin, all the punishing exercise regimes, all the hurtful experiences add all those numbers together.

Take that number, write it down, look at it for a minute, and ask yourself…

Don’t you think the fat haters should invest the equivalent amount of time, the same number of years, in trying as hard to be a decent human being, as we fat people invested in trying to be thin?

Fat people are not the ones with the problem, or who are in denial. Fat people are not in denial of being fat. We know we are fat, and in choosing fat acceptance, we accept ourselves exactly as we are, and we accept others exactly as they are.

You can let go of all those numbers now. Set yourself free of the pain that those numbers represent. You’re off the hook – you’ve done your part. Close your eyes and imagine that all those instances of trying to be thin, or being bullied and shamed for being fat are balloons, filled with helium. Imagine them in your hand, bobbing above you, all different colours. Now open your hand and let them all go. You don’t have to carry them any more.

This isn’t giving up. This is letting go and deciding that YOU control your life, not other people who feel they have the right to judge you. This is about deciding to live your life to the fullest you can.

People who think that fat people are somehow worth less as human beings as thin people, that fat people deserve to be shamed, discredited, their experiences denied and generally just shamed and bullied for being fat are the ones who have the problem. They just can’t get on with their lives and let people be who they are, as they are.

We are not the ones in denial, it is the fat haters that are in denial.

Denial that they are in fact… arseholes.

*Post inspired this post by Ragen of Dances with Fat.