Dan, we all know you're a transphobic, fat-hating, anti-Christian bully. Don't try to throw up a smoke screen.

As a fat guy who grew up fat in Georgia, I wouldn't mind the response being a little more tolerance from the teachers when the bullied kids fight back.

it's been their solution to gay bullying, should be good enough for the fat kids to right?? If only the nerds could stop being so smart, and the band kids could lose the talent, school could be a magical happy place, full of happy well adjusted popular kids..

It Gets Fatter.

'Fierce Fatties', I thought that was a different type of site for a sec.

"If only the nerds could stop being so smart"

I actually did have some teachers recommend that to my mom (basically, I should stop asking so many questions in class if I didn't want to get bullied).

Parents shouldn't let their kids get fat. Alerting parents that their children are at risk for diabetes and other illnesses - as well as being ridiculed - is not 'victim blaming.'

You're not going to change the fact that fat kids are funny to healthy kids, so at least let parents know that they have the power to help their kid not become the butt of many, many fat jokes. It sucks, but it's true.

@6- I had a similar issue. But it turns out the kids weren't angry w/ me for being smart, it was for being tedious and annoying. When 24 kids are bored with something and one keeps slowing things down, they get pissed. I didn't have the social awareness to recognize that.

I think this fundamental obliviousness is at the heart of most of the antagonism aimed toward 'Nerd, band, theatre types' No one was jealous of us being smart, or afraid of us for being different. They were annoyed at us for trying to tell them about Dungeons and Dragons, when any normal person would have realized they didn't care, or dressing like a 4th grade child when they are trying to form an adolescent identity.

That doesn't make it ok.

Somebody needs to show these kids how to give bullies the finger!

The ads that I saw weren't about bullying. The lines "Mom, why am I fat" and "It's hard to be a little girl if you aren't" could just as easily have been interpreted as waking parents up to the health problems that fat kids face.

Yes, bullies should have their behavior adjusted, but as a multi-year bully-ee, if there had ALSO been something that I could do to make myself less of a target, I would have been very, very interested.

@8 pretty much. The other kids probably WERE jealous of my intellect, but I was also doing things with which they had a legitimate beef. Thing was, I was also constantly asking my teachers "What am I doing wrong?" and all I ever got was "Stop reacting to it; if you ignore it; they'll stop. Nothing about the gross jokes I was telling or the other stuff I was doing wrong.

Damn, I really wanted that fierce fatties site to explain why companies don't make fat clothes for fat people. I hate that a XL or a XXL is just a big tee, while fat people are all bulbous.

Also, why aren't fat people used to model fat clothes? I think fatties get that they are fat, you don't need to try to trick them into thinking they are skinny and would look good in these clothes.

No, they shouldn't bully fat kids. Because now they know what might happen.

@12,

Marketing research shows that fat people won't buy clothes shown on a truly fat model. The research was performed with a size 12 model and a size 22 model. The ad with the size 12 model sold more units than the ad with the size 22 model (they were modeling the same article of clothing).

@ 4: Bwa ha ha! And I say that as a really fat person.

I dunno, my take was that this was more targeted at the parents rather than the kids. Of course, you can't control who sees the ads, but I wonder what a cost-benefit breakdown would reveal. My brushes with the parents of obese children have largely indicated that many of them are oblivious to the damage that's being done to their children and that their actions frequently exacerbate their children's problems. I see so many comments on news sites that "parents can't control everything their children eat!" and stuff like that, but if you keep a house stocked with healthy food and no junk (chips, candy, ice cream), you definitely limit their opportunities to eat unhealthily. I mean, really, how many of these morbidly obese kids are living in houses that are free of junk food? You really do have to shock the parents to get their attention. So I have mixed feelings about the ads.

They're really harsh ads, but the only one (of the ones I've seen) that is unacceptable is one where a little girl says that she doesn't want to go to school because the other kids make fun of her, followed by the phrase "Being fat take the fun out of being a kid". That is total bullshit victim blaming. There was another one with a (somewhat) fat kid sits down in front of his morbidly obese mother and asks her sadly "Mom, why am I fat?" which is slightly shady because obviously the child has body image problems and the only solution offered is changing the body.

The others were pretty in-your-face fear ads but they were basically directed at parents, warning them of dire health consequences for their kids if they continued to be overweight. You can argue about the need or the effectiveness of the ads, but they didn't seem bullying, at least not to the kids.

You write like there are considerate intelligent people from Georgia. Weird.

The trouble is that some parents can get freaked out by the whole thing. My mum put my sister on a serious diet when she was *9 years old* because she was afraid she was getting fat. It was 'for her own good', 'so she wouldn't get teased'. When I look back, she wasn't actually fat, just pre-adolescent filling-out. But my mum drummed it into her head that she had to watch her weight from then on. 30 years later, my sister still has massive body-image problems and psychological issues with food. Shaming people is *not* the way to go.

@19: I ache for your sister. I'm so glad you shared her experience with us, though, because I think it's a very common one. If shame were what it took to lose weight, I'd be a feather.

@18 No, it's not like there have ever been considerate, intelligent people from Georgia. Except Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And Rep. John Lewis. The staff of the Southern Center for Human Rights. I could keep going but eh, you have access to Wikipedia.

Come on. Two of the first churches to be kicked out of the Southern Baptist Convention for being open and welcoming to the LGBT community were in the Atlanta area. Judging all of Georgia by the suburban and rural areas is like judging all of Washington State by Bellevue and eastern Washington.

But back on topic, thank you for saying this, Dan. As someone who was both bi and fat as a teen (I grew out of the latter, but not the former), I appreciate your speaking out against all these kinds of bullying.

I think many of the commentors aren't getting that fat does not = unhealthy. There are plenty of skinny kids that eat just soda and chips who are doing serious damage to their bodies while there are plenty of fat kids who are active and eat well that are still fat. The "science" behind weight loss is shady at best and really only serves to get people to buy into the 9 billion dollar+ diet industry. Weight is not just about intake, and extreme dieting more often than not results in weight gain, and to add to that it is thought weight is up to 70% determined by genetics. Besides the fact that this does not all address the issue of access to "healthy food" or government policy that keeps crap processed foods cheaper than fruits and veggie. Weight is not just personal responsibility and eating less, the human body unfortunately is never that simple.

If shaming worked, there would be no fat people, no smokers, no alcoholics, no drug addicts. Obviously shaming does not work. Plus, these are kids we are talking about. Those ads are basically giving permission to bullies to shame kids of a certain body type. Why not instead having an ad campaign encouraging all kids to be more active and to eat healthy foods. Show kids of all sizes and races engaging in fun activities together. That puts the emphasis on health, not on size. People of all sizes can be healthy--or unhealthy. There is not a set in stone equation between body size and health.

@23,

It is disingenuous to say that just because there are unhealthy skinny kids, and some "healthy" fat kids, that there is not a correlation between fat and health. Overweight is linked to a host of problems, and unfortunately FA is not going to get anywhere with the general public if the overweight and obese pretend that diabetes, hypertension, and just plain not being able to physically be active aren't problems linked to overweight. Or at least that overweight and its comorbidities are not linked to an underlying cause (such as poor diet and lack of exercise) for the majority of people, even if the "why" (why the poor diet/lack of exercise) varies and people should be more compassionate about that.

I was overweight as a child, and it was the result of poor eating and exercising habits. The same was true for my peers; the fat ones were consistently the ones who ate more and did less, even if they were healthy in other ways (for example, one of the most overweight girls at my school was vegan... but to her that meant living off of chips/candy). Fortunately, I was only slightly overweight (20lbs or so) and had not been carrying the weight so long that it was difficult to lose. Still, as a former fat kid I do not find these ads too offensive. You could interpret some as victim blaming, but others are hopefully sending a message to parents to do more for their child's health. I was miserable being overweight, even though my mother was supportive and never tried to change me. I wish she had taken a greater interest in protecting my health, not only because of the bullying, but because the longer you carry around the weight, the harder it is to lose, physically and psychologically.

Also, @24, actually shaming WAS how we got rid of smoking in this country. By changing it from a cool habit to the mark of a social pariah and making it virtually impossible to do anywhere public, smoking decreased dramatically. Unfortunately you can't quit food, making shaming unrealistic, but hopefully more pressure will be put on parents to not let their kids become massively overweight or obese.

Fat is a health issue, not a rights issue.

I will never treat fat people as deserving of automatic disdain, but I will never select one as a doctor, lawyer, mechanic, etc. I have been fat, and I fight it all the time. My wife would not love me less if I gained weight, but I would be a rotten prick for dying younger and leaving her alone.

Go ahead and be fat, go ahead and hate me because I do not think it is any different than not showering because I will outlive my detractors.

Same here 11 and 8. I realize now the part of the problem was my own actions but I really wish someone would have given me some actual advice on how to interact with my peers instead of just telling me to sit down and shut up.

As a step parent of a heavy kid, I can tell you I fight every day to make sure my s-kid eats something that is healthy for her. I have tried my damndest to get her to eat salads with low-fat dressing, fruits, veggies, and cut back on the carbs. But sharing her with her a mother and paternal grandmother who feed her all the candy, ice cream, and junk food she wants because "she's not with us that much, so why should I tell her no and make her hate me?" does not help!

I can tell you until I am blue in the face that parents can guide their children to try to get them to make healthy choices when they snack / dine, but we are not in control of them every moment of the day. Also, a lot of kids' idea of "playing outside" means taking their gameboys outside and sitting on the ground trading pokemon crap. It's a struggle every day to get her to exercise and make healthy choices when it's cheaper and easier to feed her mac 'n cheese and let her sit and read a book instead of running and playing outside. Don't tell me all this crap falls on the parents. It's a family effort. If grandparents and other parents would all get on the same page with healthy eating and exercise instead of looking at the custodial (or non-custodial sometimes) parents as "punishing" the kid for forcing them into doing some kind of physical activity and not letting her have that second piece of French silk pie, maybe the fight against childhood obesity wouldn't be so hard of a struggle.

I love my step daughter. The last thing I want is to make her develop an eating disorder or shame associated with her weight (because that didn't work with me). I want her to love herself and want to be healthier, but it's hard without the support of her other family members. My husband and I can't do it alone, and I'd hate to keep her from seeing her grandmother because she won't keep my s-kid from eating all the ice cream treats in one sitting. We are doing the best we can to get her to make heatlthier choices with food and get at least 30 minutes of exercise. I don't want her to be a life-long Weight Watchers member, and my MIL doesn't understand that she can't feed her all the same stuff she fed my husband as a kid because he swam for about 5 hours a day, 6 days a week (he was on the swim team for 11 years), and she is not.

@8: I agree with you in general, but with this particular teacher, it was really more that she wanted me to shut up because I was correcting her and it was making her look stupid (because, well, she was). So she really did want me to dumb myself down, not just allow the class to move on to new material/give other kids a chance to talk.

No one has ever developed a way to make fat people thin. Really. Everyone thinks that it's a very simple thing, but if that were so, wouldn't everyone be thin? No empirical study of weight loss shows more than a 5% long-term success rate for any weight loss method. That means that in five years, 95% of people not only re-gain all the weight they have lost, but generally end up approximately 3-10% heavier. That includes weight loss surgery patients.

The good news is that there are several studies showing that fat and unhealthy are NOT the same thing. Studies show that a person's level of exercise, regardless of how much they weigh, is the primary determinant of health. Genetic factors play a very high role as well. Stress (like in stigma and shaming) is a very important factor in developing many illnesses normally attributed to weight, but for some reason we blame the weight alone.

Trust me, kids know when they're fat. If they ever interact with our culture in America, they're not allowed to forget it. Shaming, bullying, and weight stigma have shockingly bad effects on health. For instance, eating disorders amongst kids younger than 12 have shot up in the last decade. Think about 9 year olds being hospitalized for anorexia before you condone weight-shaming in children. Childhood depression and other mood disorders have increased dramatically. Children who aren't even overweight for their age are developing a poor body image that will haunt them throughout their lives.

If you're interested in an alternative model for health instead of a fruitless pursuit of weight loss and panicked screaming about epidemics, (see the recent news from the federal health agencies that Americans actually haven't been getting any fatter for the last decade. Weight has not increased in any age category), use your search engine to look for HAES (Health at Every Size). You'll notice that a lot of the health specialists involved with promoting HAES are those on the front lines of eating disorder reasearch. They know that the old system of shaming and blaming is only going to do more harm.