Dear So & So You Are Fat

Jen­nifer Liv­ingston, 37, an anchor/reporter at WKBT-TV in La Crosse, Wis., received an email last week from a viewer crit­i­ciz­ing her size. The email, in part, read as follows:

Hi Jen­nifer,

It’s unusual that I see your morn­ing show, but I did so for a very short time today. I was sur­prised indeed to wit­ness that your phys­i­cal con­di­tion hasn’t improved for many years. Surely you don’t con­sider your­self a suit­able exam­ple for this community’s young peo­ple, girls in par­tic­u­lar. Obe­sity is one of the worst choices a per­son can make and one of the most dan­ger­ous habits to main­tain. I leave you this note hop­ing that you’ll recon­sider your respon­si­bil­ity as a local pub­lic per­son­al­ity to present and pro­mote a healthy lifestyle.

Jennifer’s hus­band after read­ing the email spoke up for her on his Face­book page. And more impor­tantly Jen­nifer decided to speak up and offer her own voice, she is above in the video. And in stand­ing up for her­self she stood up for all women who are neg­a­tively judged based solely on appear­ance, at all ages of our lives.

And she stood up for me. Now, she didn’t know she was doing this. I have never met her and never saw her until I came across this story. But when she exer­cised her voice, she reminded me that my voice matters.

See I can relate to receiv­ing anony­mous (or semi-anonymous) com­ments on my weight from some­one  try­ing to “help” but the words do not help instead those words cause injury to one’s spirit and sense of self.

At the start of the school semes­ter I picked up my course reviews for the win­ter term. I receive for each class both a sta­tis­ti­cal result sec­tion and a qual­i­ta­tive set of responses filled out by stu­dents. Many stu­dents write noth­ing, some write highly pos­i­tive feed­back on every­thing, a few oth­ers pro­vide con­struc­tive crit­i­cism that can be used to help bet­ter the course, and still there is the occa­sional down­right hurt­ful. The anony­mous per­son who thinks his/her words, because there is no name attached, can take to task what­ever per­sonal fail­ure they per­ceive in the other. Usu­ally I have largely pos­i­tive com­ments with a few con­struc­tive crit­i­cisms thrown in for good mea­sure. I take the com­ments seri­ously and hope they can assist me in improv­ing my pro­fes­sional work.

Well, like I do every time I get my responses back, I read them right away.  As I headed to my class to teach, I leafed through the writ­ten com­ments and I saw one that caused me to stop in my tracks.

As I read it I could feel my face begin to flush. And if I am hon­est some, shall we say, less than polite words came to mind. Because as I read I was informed: I was “lazy” as was evi­dent by my “fat” appear­ance, which I should con­sider doing some­thing about. Yes, this stu­dent decided that out of all the things he could prop­erly pass on as course feed­back my weight was the most imper­a­tive to address.

Now, I am not with­out knowl­edge of my own weight. My weight as I have men­tioned before is an issue I have strug­gled with intensely after the birth of my fourth child and the health prob­lems, includ­ing post­par­tum depres­sion, I expe­ri­enced dur­ing that time. I was not dur­ing the class nor I am now obese, but it is com­pletely true that I was very over­weight at the time and needed to lose more weight while get­ting in bet­ter shape over­all. (And I am still on the jour­ney to improved health). Still even if I were obese at the time, or any other num­ber of appear­ance related items, it was not the student’s place to write about my body. It had no bar­ing on the work. None. Not one ounce.

Now, I don’t claim that oth­ers should not notice appear­ance or care about someone’s health. Obvi­ously as a result of sim­ply being human and liv­ing in the world around me I am aware that all who know me, have known me, or will meet me that how I look is some­thing they will see. I know that impres­sions are made not only on what we do dur­ing a par­tic­u­lar act (e.g. speech, expres­sion of self intel­li­gently, orga­ni­za­tion, tone etc…) but also how we look to the other while we do the act in ques­tion. I know health is highly impor­tant, when we feel good, when our bod­ies and minds are in shape, and we care for our­selves we con­tribute not only to mak­ing our­selves bet­ter but those around us better.

I get that.

I do.

But when peo­ple jump to con­clu­sions based on appear­ance, when they think they know why some­one is “the way they are” based on appear­ance, they miss out on under­stand­ing the other. And worse they may add to mak­ing that per­son unhealthy, because if some­one feels bad about who he/she is it will and it does effect that person’s over­all health. That per­son isn’t moti­vated more by being “called out” on their weight, they aren’t moti­vated by being told they are not “suit­able role mod­els” and they aren’t moti­vated more by being told they should stop being fat & lazy. No, none of that moti­vates any­one in a pos­i­tive way unless moti­vat­ing me to dive into a bag of chips was the goal. Moti­va­tion is about feel­ing good and increas­ing that feel­ing in ourselves.

Fur­ther, it is the only the outer shell one sees with our body or our “look” not how we ended up where we are, who we truly are, or how our story will end. My stu­dent knew noth­ing of how I got to where I am. Noth­ing of the hard work I have put in to reclaim my health (work I was putting in at the time of his harsh words) and as a result how far I have come from where I once was. No, none of that was con­sid­ered. Instead the mere fact that I was not (and I am still not) a per­fect fig­ure was duly noted.

When I told Mike of the response I had got­ten. He said “There’s one in every bunch” and to “Ignore it, you’re beau­ti­ful.” And he was right. I am beau­ti­ful. I am loved and I am not a num­ber on a scale.

I only hope that the kids or adults out there who have heard the same words or worse about some aspect of them­selves that instead of let­ting those words pull them down they real­ize they too are beautiful.

Tagged as: beauty, bully, getting healthy, health, inspiration, motivational, weight, work