A self-proclaimed “personal trainer with a fat body” declared in a TikTok video that it’s “fatphobic” to intentionally lose weight.
Huh?
Libs of TikTok grabbed the video and posted it Wednesday to Twitter — apparently before the clip disappeared from the TikTok-user’s page, which is titled “Wellness with Ashantis.”
She calls herself — among other titles on her Instagram page — a “weight-neutral personal trainer.”
Her declaration came in an answer to the question, “Are there really zero circumstances in which intentional weight loss is healthy and not fatphobic? This is real? And I am genuinely curious.”
Ashantis replied, “I’m going to say 99.9 percent of the time, if you are intentionally losing weight, it is fatphobic.” She did leave a smidgen of wiggle room “in case I am truly, truly wrong” but added, “I don’t think I am.”
More from her response:
And here’s the reason why: I’m not saying if you exercise and happen to lose weight that that is fatphobic. I’m not saying if you start medication and you happen to lose weight that is fatphobic. I am not saying that if you’re going through any type of … illness and that is altering your body in some way that that is fatphobic. I’m saying when you are intentionally exercising to lose weight, altering your diet to lose weight, doing any activity intentionally to lose weight is fatphobic. And the reason why is because you are intentionally attempting to make your body smaller to fit into what narrative? The narrative that smaller is healthier. Even though we’ve already discussed why that’s not true.
Ashantis said all this while admitting she’s “a personal trainer with a fat body” and concluded, “So, pretty much no: There is no time in which intentional weight loss is not fatphobic. And that’s just kinda the way it is.”
Others beg to differ
Naturally, many commenters were not on board with Ashantis:
- Former MLB pitcher C.J. Wilson wrote, “Alexa, show me the mental gymnastics required to settle for bad outcomes.”
- Former UFC fighter Nik Lentz added, “Don’t worry about it…. people that think like this will self-correct themselves out of the gene pool. Just takes a little time.”
More than a few others added responses in the neighborhood of “I’m heart disease, diabetes and arthritis-phobic.”
But wait, there’s more
If you’re having a hard time wrapping your mind around Ashantis’ first clip, another one posted to her TikTok page a few days ago may cause your jaw to hit the floor.
In it she says, “It’s really interesting to me how thin people will be like, ‘That’s not fatphobic!’ in the same way that white people will be like, ‘That’s not racist!'”
Ashantis adds in the video that “anti-fat bias is a system of oppression. It stems from and works very similarly to capitalism in the sense that it is completely ingrained into our lives; it is completely embedded into what most of us believe to be true about health. But it is actually based in also racism — another system of oppression — and eugenics.”
Check out the second clip while it’s still up. Content warning: Language:
@iamashantis Replying to @rebeccanelson2018 you commented. I responded. Intentional weight loss is universal. If I interviewed 100 people, I bet at least 99 of them will say they’ve tried to lose weight. It’s a shared experience, but it doesn’t have to be. When you ask folks WHY they have tried to loose weight, many will say for their health, but what’s really behind that? Fatphobia. Fatphobia and Anti Fat Bias controls what we eat, when we eat, what we wear, what exercise we do, our relationship to ourselves, how we’re treated by others, and SO MUCH MORE! The core of it is what leads people to seek intentional weight loss. So yes – it is fatphobic, but it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. You’re just navigating the system in the best way you know how.
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