14 DAY TRIAL // If you get your daily entertainment online, you’ve probably heard of a series of viral videos grouped under the title “Fat Girl Dancing.” The “fat” dancer posting them, who has already gotten millions of views and the much-coveted 15 minutes in the spotlight, is named Whitney Thore and she tips the scales at precisely 380 pounds (172.3 kg).
She is clearly overweight and she knows she’s unhealthy. At the same time, she also says that her weight isn’t a reflection of her being “lazy,” as most people seeing her would rush to assume, because it’s caused by an endocrine disorder.
Whitney is hoping she will be able to set the record straight on her new TLC reality series, called My Big Fat Fabulous Life, which starts airing this January.
How Fat Girl Dancing got fat
Anyone looking at Whitney can tell that she has a weight problem, she’s not about to deny that. However, she didn’t get to where she is by sitting around and stuffing her face with junk food, by being “lazy,” she says in the first trailer for the series released by TLC, which you will find embedded below in full.
Whitney has Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS), which is an endocrine disorder that makes her gain weight very quickly and which makes it all that harder for her to lose it. She started packing the pounds in her freshman year in college, when the disorder wasn’t even diagnosed and she had no idea why her body was acting up this way.
What followed was predictable: Whitney, once a slender 115 pound (52.1 kg) dancer, sank in a deep depression and stopped dancing as the pounds kept piling on. It wasn’t until recently that she decided to dance again, and she filmed herself during rehearsals as motivation.
From here on, the rest is history, as they say.
New show is about empowering women, doing away with prejudices
My Big Fat Fabulous Life starts airing in January and will see Whitney in the home she now shares with her parents, while she continues dancing and struggling to lose weight. She will also be getting more involved in activities meant to raise awareness on her disorder and body acceptance.
“There's P.C. terms for everything these days, but fat people are fair game. Someone has to fight for us!” she says in the trailer. “I hate people thinking that I'm lazy.”
“I love all the positive things that came out of the videos, but it doesn’t change that right now, I’m the heaviest that I’ve ever been in my whole life. So I need to lose some weight so that I can do everything in life I want to do, and hopefully I can do that through dance,” she continues.
She will have TLC cameras on board for the journey, so here’s another positive thing to come out of her decision to post her dance videos online.
In case you’re out of the loop on this one, you will find one of her first dance videos embedded below, right under the trailer for the TLC series. Will you be tuning in when it airs?
