Fat people are lazy and not worthy of being loved.

Hey guys, this is a guest post by my dear friend Aaron!  For those of you newer to my blog, Aaron is one of the key people in my journey who is always there with an encouraging word or a challenge to my way of thinking.  He is one who has helped me to see my beauty despite my size or weight.  He is one of the few people I feel most safe with and most comfortable to be myself with.  I am blessed that he would agree to write a post on here.  Enjoy guys!  I cried a little bit when I read this!

It seems so foreign to think that this was a belief system that subconsciously governed the way I related to people until my early 20s.  As a child I heard how my mother constantly blamed my father not losing weight on him just not trying hard enough and saw distance develop between them because of this.  I adopted this perspective as a truth and somehow felt justified making the same judgment about anyone I saw who was overweight.  (There many other “truths” about the world that I decided at a young age and my “recovery” from those perspectives is probably fodder for a whole blog of its own.)

While judgments like that no longer dominate the way I relate to the world without even knowing it, I am still a judgment machine.  I was thinking today that if I had to pay a fine for every time I judged someone, I would be in debt beyond hope of ever paying it back.  Fortunately I am getting much better at instantly realizing those judgments and then confessing them to God and repenting for disrespecting a creation that He knit together and loves dearly.  It is still way too easy to walk down the sidewalk machine gun blasting judgment at everyone I see.  How dare I diminish the worth of something that He places so much worth on?!?!  The ultimate insult to a creator is to say that what they have created have no worth.  Thinking about it now makes me feel nauseous.

WORTH!  While I am not a psychologist and cannot claim the backing of any studies –  in my experience, lots of internal conversations (aka judgments) about worth seem to surround people who struggle with weight.  There are judgments that others make about overweight people similar to those that became automatic for me.  There are also judgments that overweight people make about their own worthiness because they think they need to somehow arrive at a target weight before they can start considering themselves worthy.  Perhaps even judgments that overweight people made about their worth at some point in the past that contributed to them becoming overweight.  All of these judgments are lies!!!  Worth is not something that we earn or bestow on others, it is something that is intrinsic to each of us.  I believe that this is true because I believe that God created us fearfully and wonderfully, but even if you don’t share that belief I hope you can at least agree that everyone has dignity that should not be disrespected through blind judgment.

To me, the “Road to Beautiful” is not about a journey where the destination is beauty (one “method” of determining worth) but rather a journey of acceptance of beauty that is already there and has been there all along.

My responses to Kim’s posts are usually in person or via email/text so I don’t leave fingerprints on her blog often but I have been blessed by many of your responses and by reading your stories on your blogs as well.  One beautiful element of blogland is how it places worth and value on anyone telling their story.  I love stories and have begun trying to appreciate each person as the caretaker of an incredible story that has the potential to bless me and countless others.  You and your story have worth and impact.

Grace & Peace,

Aaron