Health / Wellness

What Megyn Kelly Gets Wrong About Fat-Shaming

Let’s encourage people to be happy and healthy. Let’s teach them that regardless of their appearance, that they are enough.

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Megyn Kelly (Photo via Today screenshot)

Megyn Kelly and I have a couple things in common. We are both lawyers. We were both fat-shamed by a parent.  As she recently revealed, she endured this as a young law student. Endured is clearly a relative term, however, since she apparently asked her stepfather to fat shame her as a weight-loss technique.

If I had the chance to explain to Ms. Kelly the negative role fat-shaming played in my life, along with many other men and women, young and old, who share the same negative experience, she might reflect on the wider ramifications of flippantly throwing out the term “fat-shaming” as a positive weight loss technique. It certainly was not a positive experience for me.

Beginning freshman year of high school, I would come home from school to eat lunch. I loved Chef Boyardee Ravioli. Sometimes I would not even heat it up and eat it straight out of the can. My mom would come home from selling real estate and see me doing this. I would sometimes be cautioned that if I did not curb my eating, I would grow up to be a “fat pig.” It’s the type of thing her mother would say to her about food. Fat-shaming in families is often passed down generationally.  Ms. Kelly seems to imply that her stepfather had her best interests at heart. So did my mother.

The fat-shaming did not stop at home. Some of the bullies at my school apparently agreed with my mom. One day walking home from school, they physically assaulted me a mile from my house.  My older brother Mark had given me a pair of shiny, gold bell-bottom disco pants that he had worn. They fit him fine but were very tight on my “fat” stomach. The bullies thought the pants looked too tight and funny for me to be allowed to wear them. They attacked. They ripped the pants off me, tearing them to shreds and throwing them out into a busy street, leaving me only in my shirt and underwear.

Like Ms. Kelly’s experience, the fat-shaming worked! I began to restrict my food intake. And then I began to starve myself. As a freshman at Penn State University, I fell into anorexic behavior years before anyone talked about the women or men who suffered from it.  I transitioned to binging and purging. I had discovered bulimia. My bulimia continued through law school, and I would not go into recovery until 2007.

While Ms. Kelly assigns credit to her stepfather, it is important to note that I do not blame my mother or the bullies at school. While fat-shaming correlates with different mental health issues, that is not the same as cause.

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Unlike Ms. Kelly’s “fat-shaming” diet in law school, when I entered into my first year at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, I had already been traditionally and exercise bulimic for over three years. I would not be going into recovery from them for over two decades. Did the “fat pig diet” or the bullies cause that? There is no way to know, but we do know that fat-shaming has a strong correlation with eating disorders and other mental health issues.

Back in my day, something going “viral” meant 15 kids in the lunchroom knew about it. Fat-shaming existed as brick-and-mortar bullying. When Ms. Kelly so flippantly talked about her “fat pig” diet, I have to wonder if she considered that it’s a whole new world today in which fat-shaming occurs virulently in social media. Are we going to teach children that they are doing their friends a favor when “fat pig” comes out of their mouths?  Are teens and young adults now learning that if it’s okay for Ms. Kelly, it’s okay for me and others to shame in such ways?

Instead, let’s teach our kids kindness in words and actions. Let’s teach them that they and their friends are enough from the time they are in grade school on through college and law school and beyond.

Do some women want to be fat-shamed? Maybe. Perhaps some guys do as well. We need to ask how that shaming effect on someone’s self-esteem shapes their view on their weight and body as a societal value. Having just turned 57 years old, I still struggle with my relationship with food and exercise. Do I blame the “fat pig” diet of my teens? Of course not. Do I acknowledge its likely impact? Yes. The next time Ms. Kelly wants to publicly put her face on something so damaging as fat-shaming, I hope she will consider its serious influence in the continuum of life — and that is not just trying to fit into some clothes in law school. That message is both damaging and wide-ranging.  Let’s encourage people to be happy and healthy. To eat to live and not live to eat or live to diet. Let’s teach them that, regardless of their appearance, they are enough.

Postscript: Since I wrote this, Ms. Kelly has walked back her comments about fat-shaming. I thank her for that. It’s still an ongoing issue for children, teens and adults.  Let’s continue the conversation.

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Brian Cuban (@bcuban) is The Addicted Lawyer. Brian is the author of the Amazon best-selling book, The Addicted Lawyer: Tales Of The Bar, Booze, Blow & Redemption (affiliate link). A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, he somehow made it through as an alcoholic then added cocaine to his résumé as a practicing attorney. He went into recovery April 8, 2007. He left the practice of law and now writes and speaks on recovery topics, not only for the legal profession, but on recovery in general. He can be reached at brian@addictedlawyer.com.

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