Ragen Chastain

Resolution season is almost upon us, and I find myself reflecting on one of the most commonly failed New Year’s Resolutions — weight loss.

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.”

The fact that fat people are so thoroughly and constantly lied to by diet culture, and so profoundly oppressed by fatphobia, that they would submit themselves to this is not a justification for it. But that isn’t stopping J.D. Roth, the show’s creator. Not satisfied with exploiting fat people once, he is launching a new show called The Big Fat Truth in which he’ll bring back six former contestants for another round of exploitation, false promises, and weight cycling.

As a fat woman on the internet I know, “Don’t read the comments. Never, ever read the comments.” But this time was different and it was awesome!

What happens when you suggest diet behavior to a kid who’s about to grow a foot? How do you affect their growth? How to you affect their health? This is fat-shaming kids!

We could risk the mental and physical health of all the girls in the school by using fat shaming to try to control the way that they dress, or we could just let them wear some damn leggings. Seriously, how is this not a no brainer?

Companies make unjust policies all the time, and they rarely change them except by public pressure.

For many white people, our first reaction to hearing about racism is to immediately look for a reason to say “That’s not racist!” That said, in conversations I’ve had where people are struggling with this, they have asked for specific ways to work through this. So if you find yourself in this situation, here are some steps that you can take yourself through.

People are using #TheySaid to tell their stories of experiencing body shaming. Sally Bergesen kicked things off by talking about her own memory of body shaming, and hundreds of Twitter responses echoed her story.

Welcome to the resolutions flame out. It’s not so much that your resolutions crashed and burned, it’s more like they just never got off the ground in the first place. But there is hope. We can right this ride.