In a publicized annual campaign, she urges married women to try on their wedding dresses as an incentive to stay slim. \u201cThe average couple puts on 25 pounds each in the first five years of marriage. Now, you can choose to grow old and fat together, but women pay a higher price,\u201d she cautions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And why do women pay a higher price?\u00a0 Could it be because of people like Roth, who unfairly single them out for special attention – and disapproval?<\/p>\n
And daughterhood.\u00a0 Roth is especially harsh on mothers –\u00a0starting with\u00a0her own.<\/p>\n
Roth’s mother, father, grandmother and uncles are all obese. Her father weighs 300lb. Her mother is diabetic. Her grandmother needs 24-hour nursing care. When I ask what her family thinks of her crusade, she acknowledges that “it’s hurtful”, but says they are “highly supportive”. The thing is, Roth doesn’t just see her parents as victims of obesity: “I’ve been to obesity,” she says, “and I don’t want anyone else to go there.”<\/p>\n
Her suffering was apparent early on. “When I was in kindergarten,” she recalls, “no one taught me to be ashamed of obesity, but the day, on my birthday, that my mother was to bring cupcakes to my class, I put my head on the table because I knew that within minutes my mother would be there and everyone was going to know that my mother was fat. I felt ashamed. I was grateful that down the block there was another mother who was fatter than my mother.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I cannot even begin to describe how much WRONG there\u00a0is in this tale.\u00a0 Like Roth, I also had a fat mother.\u00a0\u00a0And my\u00a0mother\u00a0brought cupcakes and other goodies for class parties, too.\u00a0 Yet, when I was a child, it never occurred to me to be ashamed of my mother’s weight.\u00a0 Why would I be?\u00a0 My mother was well-known in the school and community – she was respected.\u00a0 Like most kids, I got teased periodically: about my freckles, my very curly hair, my last name (“Pratt” – which rhymes with “rat”, “bat”, “brat”, etc. ).\u00a0 But no one\u00a0EVER teased me for having a fat mother, even though everybody knew I had one.\u00a0 As far as I or anyone else was concerned,\u00a0“Mrs. Pratt’s”\u00a0weight was simply a personal characteristic, like having brown eyes or long hair.\u00a0 It was a total non-issue for me, both personally and socially.<\/p>\n
Yet here’s Roth – claiming to be ashamed of her mother’s weight\u00a0– at age 5???\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0If she was teased\u00a0about it,\u00a0I’d be willing to give her a pass: when you’re a child, it’s tough to cope with peer pressure and harassment – kids can be cruel.\u00a0 But\u00a0Roth doesn’t actually\u00a0state this ever happened, and – in fact –\u00a0implies\u00a0the opposite by pointing out:\u00a0“no one taught me to be ashamed of obesity.”<\/p>\n
In other words, her\u00a0embarrassment was based on her own childish thoughts and feelings.\u00a0\u00a0The focus of her story is what she IMAGINED her classmates\u00a0might think, not on anything they actually said or did.\u00a0 Yet she doesn’t seem to recognize that.\u00a0\u00a0Nor does she seem to realize\u00a0that – by telling this story – she’s tacitly throwing\u00a0HER OWN MOTHER – the one who made cupcakes for her birthday –\u00a0under the bus (so to speak) in order to justify her attitude about obesity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That,\u00a0my friends, is\u00a0TWISTED.\u00a0 To the nth degree.<\/p>\n
Look, when I was 5 years old, I used to worry about monsters hiding under the bed – and would experience a moment of panic if I woke up in the middle of the night with a hand or foot extending over the edge –\u00a0I was only protected if I stayed within the borders!\u00a0\u00a0 But even at that age, I intellectually understood that\u00a0my fears had no basis in fact\u00a0– I never asked my parents for help; and\u00a0the “monsters”\u00a0never actually stopped me from going back to sleep.\u00a0 And it wasn’t long before I put it behind me forever.<\/p>\n
In other words, I grew up and learned to separate which feelings were “real” and which were based on my (very fertile)\u00a0imagination.\u00a0 Roth apparently hasn’t.\u00a0<\/p>\n
By now, I think it should be abundantly clear that Roth doesn’t speak for me, or represent the fitness community any more than White Goodman does.\u00a0 Like Goodman, she’s a narcissistic, antagonistic\u00a0– and in the end –\u00a0absurd figure\u00a0who needs to get her own s**t together, before\u00a0I can even\u00a0begin to\u00a0take her seriously\u00a0as a credible spokesperson on obesity or\u00a0food\/weight-related issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you’ve ever seen the movie “Dodgeball”, then you know who White Goodman is.\u00a0\u00a0Played by comedian Ben Stiller, the over-the-top fitness nazi and owner of “Globo Gym”\u00a0is\u00a0a short […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14,24,26,28,29],"tags":[527,810,1088,1863,1236,1784],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2249"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2249"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8842,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2249\/revisions\/8842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}