I’ve spent the majority of my life as a fat woman — but not all of it. I was of normal size up until I was 21 or so, and then the weight came on. Then, for a brief time, I was close to a normal weight (but still overweight), just a few years back.

I’m fat. I know I’m fat.

If it makes you uncomfortable to read that, please know that I’m not degrading myself; I’m simply addressing a physiological fact. I know there are probably some of you that found that statement unsettling; and perhaps it’s because being called fat is often an insult. While it doesn’t happen often — thank goodness — I’ve been a victim of ‘fat shaming’; a rather trite phrase that’s just recently entered common vernacular, along with any number of other ‘shaming’. Dog shaming, for instance. Or, so help me, there’s even slut shaming.

Indeed.

The idea is that I should feel ashamed to be fat. If someone insults me, and it’s shaming, then perhaps the world thinks I deserve it because I’ve done something wrong. In a society that’s extremely weight-conscious, being fat has become an indictment of personal character. We might call it ‘fat shaming’ in 2014, but make no mistake: this has been around for as long as the diet industry has been making big money off of making people feel badly about themselves — and before.

Personally, I’ve grown insensitive to it. I deal with limitations every day; things that people of normal weight don’t often think about. I don’t see them as insults to me, personally, because I know I’m not of normal size. My size is much a fact of my existence as my eye color and my height. The difference is that it’s a physical attribute that I am in the process of changing.

Still, it amazes me that there seems to be a disproportionately large number of people who feel it’s okay to make fun of fat, like it’s a competitive sport; just yesterday, a local radio station posted a photo on Facebook of a morbidly obese woman who decided to pose naked and cover her private bits with American flags the size of your hand. At the time I dropped in, there were over 500 comments, most of them making fun of her, calling her ugly, disgusting, silly.

I’m not sure what possessed the woman to pose for such a photo in the first place; it could have been a private photo that unfortunately found its way into the public domain. This is one of the reasons I don’t have my progress photos posted in a public place; I fear that someone will misuse them. It’s one thing to be on the butt-end of a critical attitude in person; quite another to have someone take a photo out of context and turn it into something of ridicule.

I’ve had insensitive things said to me; some of them on purpose, some of them not meaning to insult me. I actually had someone say to me, after his wife told me that she was proud of the weight loss efforts I’d made, that he was glad I lost weight because he thought I was fat and ugly before. Believe me, his wife scolded him for saying that — but I think that he probably just said what many people thought.

During my previous large weight loss, I was amazed at the number of people who came forward to say they were proud of the efforts I made; but I was flummoxed the how many of those same people made comments that illustrated, to me, that somehow my previous fatness was a reason to exclude me, and that the simple act of losing weight meant that I was rejecting being slovenly.

I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir; if you’re reading this, you likely know that being fat, in itself, isn’t a character flaw. Being gluttonous is another matter; it’s another form of excessiveness, and yes, it’s a problem. But many of us that are fat didn’t get here by slamming down chocolate shakes and entire cakes in one sitting; the news stories of extreme obesity, where bedridden people are being fed six cheeseburgers at a time, are an extreme rarity — and they do the rest of us with weight problems a disservice. They feed (!) the idea that being fat can only be a result of gluttony. Therefore, people who are fat got that way because they have no self-control and are entirely selfish. So many people think that if you’re fat, you somehow deserve to be humiliated; that’s despicable.

I don’t hope to change anyone’s mind by writing this; it’s just a reflection of what I’ve been thinking about.

As a fat woman, I’m working toward resolving my issues. If someone says I’m fat as a statement of fact, I’m cool with it. Unless and until I lose a lot more weight, it’s still part of my physical description. I will charge on and fight the good fight, regardless of anyone else’s opinion of me.

But if they call me fat in hopes of insulting me, of insinuating some huge character flaw on my part because my size doesn’t jive with their own personal idea of beauty, then I know where the character flaw really is.

I can lose weight — and I am; yes, it’s difficult, but I suspect it’s a lot easier than changing a repugnant personality.