By KAYA POLLACK – Staff Writer
In a recent viral video, YouTuber Nicole Arbour takes her comedic skills and makes the Internet cringe as she rants about overweight people.
As a young child, I was overweight. I never noticed the way people’s eyes would follow me as I passed them. I never worried about what I needed to do to be pleasing in the eyes of others.
It wasn’t until I entered middle school that I understood that I was not considered attractive: people valued my weight over my personality.
I started to hate the way my body looked. I made myself think that if I was not skinny, then I wasn’t worthy of male attention, and no one would want to be friends with me. I tried dieting and portion control, but I didn’t lose weight. I exercised, but I didn’t lose weight. Nothing was working and I hated myself more than ever.
The hardest part was when I was fat shamed by people who did not know me, or how hard I was trying to change myself both mentally and physically.
Nicole Arbour, a Canadian comedian, dancer and YouTuber, is infamous for posting many unsettling videos that are far more offensive than funny.
In her recent video, posted on Sept. 3, entitled Dear Fat People, she claims that she is saying what other people want an overweight person to know, but are too afraid to say.
In the video Arbour says, “Fat shaming is not a thing. Fat people made that up. That’s the race card, with no race… Fat shaming, who came up with that? That’s (expletive) brilliant. Shame people with bad habits until they (expletive) stop.”
What Arbour fails to realize, is that fat shaming stems from a bigger problem: body shaming. Body shaming is a destructive force that tears down one’s self confidence and has detrimental mental effects. For some reason, body shamers think that if they make a person feel bad about their weight, they will lose it without any mental or physical scarring, when in fact it is usually the opposite.
Over half of the people who took part in a survey about body shaming, for takepart.com, said they received nasty comments from strangers and assumptions were made about them just from a stare. These interactions were recorded in daily diaries.
In one part of the video, Arbour describes an experience she had with fat people at the airport.
Arbour, and those like her, make so many people self conscious about their bodies. These body shamers with their low blows and disgustingly ignorant thoughts, feel like they have a right to look at the overweight community and know what’s best for them. They don’t realize how much damage they actually do.
I looked in the mirror everyday hating the way I looked because of pressure from fat shamers. But I would have been more disgusted if I looked into the mirror and saw a fat shamer.
