Stop Eating, Fatty

You know how sometimes you get hungry, and you eat something? Well, after an eight hour work day and a three hour class with no dinner break, I was starving. So I walked over to the local burger joint and hooked myself up with a small paper tray of delicious beer battered onion rings and a juicy cheeseburger. Yeah, not exactly ‘diet’ food, but it’s real life, and real life can’t always be diet-friendly. As I walked with my friend Virginia back to the bar where we were meeting my friends, I ripped an onion ring out of the bag and animatedly began to eat it, because I’m a silly person, and that’s what silly people do. I believe I was eating it in a Cookie Monster type of fashion, while saying “NOM NOM NOM!”. Yup. That’s me. As I ate this onion ring, a truck drove by, rolled down their windows and yelled out “Stop Eating, Fatty!” I froze. Did I really hear what I thought I heard? No. Couldn’t be me. Why would someone say that? As my brain processed the thoughts and I verbalized them to my friend, she insisted that’s not what she heard, but I’m pretty sure I heard what I heard. “Stop Eating, Fatty.”

Lucia with the infamous cheese burger. At least it had a wheat bun!

Let’s let it sit for a minute. Just words. Three words. No big deal. Wrong. Big deal. My strong, barbed wire façade came crashing down, and my formerly invisible shield of armor had a serious dent in it. I’m a pretty confident overweight person, and I carry my weight well, so I really don’t get insulted a lot by people based on my looks – at least not to my face. This hurt. It stung. So I have this to say to the young man that yelled at me from his truck: Screw you.

I hope the fleas of 1,000 camels infest your armpits. I hope the next time you entertain a lover in the bedroom, they point and laugh in shock when you drop your drawers. I hope you one day realize how your heartless, cruel comments carry more weight than just a funny thing to laugh at with your “homies”. I hope you realize that the person on the receiving end of your immaturity has feelings, emotions and real world struggles. Guess what? This fatty didn’t stop eating. She finished the damn onion rings, and the cheeseburger too – because fat people still need to eat. Contrary to popular belief, we can’t just stop eating and hope that the fat melts away like a blubbery iceberg in the summer.

Fat people aren’t emotionless. We’re not giant masses of cellulite so preoccupied with our next meal that we can’t stop and feel the pain of an insult. My fat doesn’t protect me like a shield from idiots with open windows who decide it’s fun to yell at random pedestrians. I hope you know that behind this fat body is a tender, beating heart; as alive and vulnerable as the tiny one of yours that cowers inside your illusion of coolness. It’s not “cool” to make fun of people. It’s not funny. It’s not brave. It’s appalling, and I sincerely hope Karma meets you quickly for a follow-up to this encounter. You should know I finished my onion rings, and while you hurt my feelings, I won’t shed a single tear for you or toss and turn at night. And I will absolutely not stop eating – because this fatty doesn’t take orders from anybody.


15 thoughts on “Stop Eating, Fatty

  1. Jerk. A-Hole. Expletive, expletive, expletive.

    It is so unfortunate that people feel the need to lift themselves up by destroying others. Good for you- keep your head up and your tummy full!!! 🙂

    • I know, right?! I’ just trying to think of it as more motivation to keep going and get healthy. It was a little sting but a little reminder that in the end I need to do this for myself and nobody else – not even assholes yelling mean things from cars! Thanks for the comment 🙂

  2. I do like the curse of the fleas of 1000 camels…very VERY picturesque. You can add my personal favorite, “May you live in interesting times” to those jerkwads. OR–we can curse them to be forced to relive 6th grade every year for eternity… (cringe)

    I could keep adding to your already glorious list of bad karma points for those dudes.

    However, more importantly, I want you to remember you’re a beautiful, wonderful, smart person <3 AND you have a helluva lot more self-control than I. Had I been there, well, you might have had to bail me out of jail for my not-so-controlled actions against those guys (like kicking the shit out of their car or throwing something it at.)

    • Thanks Julie. You’re such a good friend 🙂 I just don’t get how some people can be so immature… bastard! And believe me, had I been somewhere I could have reacted, I would have. Coward had to yell it from a moving car!

  3. People can be so ruthless and despicable! I wonder what they did with the rest of their night? I have a feeling that it might have been one of the following:

    cow tipping
    drink beer and smash the finished Bud Light cans against their foreheads
    pissing contest
    going home to their controlling and verbally abusive gf’s

    Either way….I’m pretty sure it was LAME. As are they.

    Oh, and that dinner sounded AMAZING!

  4. While I still believe he didn’t say that I would also like to add that had I heard him say anything of the sort I would have gone all ghetto latina on his a$$. Trust me. I can only hope he develops a painful infestation on his tongue for the rest of eternity. Seriously though, what someone yells out of a moving car is irrelevant because you, my friend, are a wonderful, beautiful and lovely person and that’s the truth 🙂

  5. Awesome expression of your feelings, my sistah! Regardless of what he actually said it doesn’t matter because no one can make us feel inferior without our consent. 😉

  6. I once fought a dude for calling me fat. As my friend hit him too saying “SHE JUST LOST 19 POUNDS” (this was my first WW rodeo back in 2006, haha.) I laugh at it now but I still remember how that felt. He probably had a small penis though.

  7. So I’m late to the party – But WTF!! What a jerk! Don’t let the haters get you down! Karma is a bitch and someone will break them down and then they will feel horrible for being a mean person.

    Keep your head up!

  8. When I was in CSUN (you know, and weighed like maybe MAYBE 10 pounds more than I should’ve) some crazy lady at a Beverly Hills Starbucks told me “You have a shitty smile, just like your shitty figure.”

    That was probably five years ago. And I never wore that outfit again.

    But it’s comments like that which make people like us amazing. Because we learn compassion from people who don’t have any. And compassion is far more important than an awesome figure.

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