One of my favourite sources for news is Canoe.ca. I jump over to that site two or three times a day to see what they’ve put up and today, I almost removed them from my daily feed due to an article they decided to highlight heavily in their main featured stories block regarding being fat.

Entitled Why’d You Let Yourself Get So Fat?, here is a short bit from the article:

I just don’t get it.

Why do people let themselves get fat?

There’s no possible excuse for not knowing how bad it is to be overweight.

Diabetes, heart disease, on and on. Just a great big drain on the health system.

Nobody admires a fat person. Nobody sees a fat person as attractive.

A fat person walks in the room, everybody looks and thinks, “my, he or she is fat.”

All kinds of assumptions are made. And you know what? Most of those assumptions are probably right.

The fat person lacks discipline, lacks self-control.

I couldn’t believe that Canoe would allow their site to be the host of such ridiculous, idiotic writing. While the comments have been a buzz with people both criticizing the writer and defending him, I feel like the tone of the article leans towards mean, and lacks the empathy that is needed with regards to situations such as this.

I have struggled with obesity, and I don’t need anyone to rub such things in my face. His post belittles the effort I am putting into my weight loss and just makes me angry. Maybe that was his intention, but I don’t believe that Canoe should support such small minded people on their platform.