This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.

[Trigger warning for fat hatred, body policing, and bullying.]

BBC: Tell loved ones they are overweight this Christmas.

LOL FOREVER! Yes, please do that. Please everyone tell me that I am fat this Christmas, because I DON'T KNOW. There is no gift like the gift of treating me like I am totally fucking stupid.

(Btw, you'd think a vast international news organization like the BBC might have heard the news that not everyone celebrates Christmas, but APPARENTLY NOT.)

Leaving aside all the myriad problems with this approach—that it's heinously cruel, that shaming doesn't work even if it weren't heinously cruel, that one cannot know another person's health simply by looking at them, that it presumes gluttony and ignores systemic and all other individual causes of fat, including disability and disease—I just want to quickly note that the narrative of every story like this one is that not-fat people should assume their fat friends and family members are all psychologically damaged wrecks who need someone to tell them to care about themselves.

Now, some fat people are indeed fat as the result of disordered eating resulting from emotional trauma of one description or another, but that is not a safe or fair or reasonable conclusion to axiomatically draw about anyone.

And, further, if a fat person is indeed fat as the result of disordered eating, the last goddamn thing they need to hear is how fat they are and why don't they take care of themselves and blah blah blah, especially from the people who may very well be the source of emotional eating in the first place.

I will never stop being amazed by how we are encouraged to regard all fatties as people overeating to fill an emotional void, then interact with them in abusive ways that create emotional voids.

If I were concerned that another fatty whom I love was eating to fill a void, I would seek to fill that void full up with love, not deepen it with sanctimonious codswallop. Fuck.

[H/T to Shaker Emily.]