14 DAY TRIAL // TLC has a new reality show in its list of programs: Whitney Thore, the viral star of the “Fat Girl Dancing” videos that started getting attention online about a year ago, is letting cameras into her life as she’s struggling to lose weight by doing the one thing she loves the most in life: dancing.
However, the real purpose of the show, called My Big Fat Fabulous Life, which premiered last night, is to inspire other women, no matter their shape, age or dress size, to stay active, to seek a healthier life. It also campaigns against body shaming by proving that overweight doesn’t necessarily have to mean unhealthy.
But above all, the show is all about being happy in your own skin.
Beauty and weight, concepts that exclude each other
Thore spoke to People Magazine ahead of the series premiere (video below), revealing her even more difficult struggle to arrive to the stage of acceptance she’s at right now because of the notion that beauty and weight are concepts that exclude each other.
“I had never realized how much a woman's worth was dependent on her appearance until I gained a lot of weight – and then people no longer found me attractive,” Whitney says.
This is the very idea that she’s looking to demolish with her show, this is why she agreed to have the show in the first place: she may weigh close to 400 pounds (181.4 kg), but that doesn’t mean that she’s less of a woman, less fabulous, less beautiful, or less of a human being. Neither does it mean that she should ever feel like she’s inferior to skinny women.
Whitney says she used to have a problem being called “fat,” but she’s ok with it now: “fat” is just a descriptive adjective that shouldn’t carry any negative connotations, so she’s embracing the name TLC came up with for the show. Because she is both fat and fabulous, but most importantly happy.
How Whitney got fat
Since she became a viral star, Whitney has been labeled anything from inspirational to lazy and disgusting, so she’s making a point of setting the record straight: yes she’s fat but it’s not because she’s lazy.
She was once a dancer and had a dancer’s body, but in college, she started gaining weight uncontrollably. By the time she was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS, an endocrine disorder), it was already too late because she was depressed and had started to comfort-eat.
She gained 230 pounds (104.3 kg) and it wasn’t until she returned to dancing that she finally accepted the idea that this was her body at this point, and this was what she could work with. There was nothing else to do but accept it and work towards improvement.
At the end of the day, this is the message that whoever watches My Big Fat Fabulous Life should take from it.