By: Chloe Wu
News flash: 41.9% of Americans are obese. That’s a little over 138 million people in the U.S., which makes it inevitable that there will be obese teachers, engineers, businesspeople, and yes, celebrities. Remi Bader, a Tik-Tok star, weighs 240 pounds and stands 5’7’’ tall; the Center for Disease Control and Prevention considers this obese.
Last Saturday, Bader posted on Tik-Tok to describe her experience at Deep Hollow Ranch in New York, where employees denied her a horseback ride because of her weight. Not only that—ranch workers also taunted Bader for being obese. She described the incident as “very embarrassing.” Bader explained that while she understood the reason for weight limits on horses, she felt terribly disappointed in “the way [she] was spoken to and laughed at by the owner and the way [she] was treated overall.”
After the incident, a teenaged employee at the ranch posted a Tik-Tok video saying, “When you’re not a fat b—- you can ride at Deep Hollow Ranch.”
Remi Bader is not the only person who has endured mistreatment due to being overweight.
According to the Washington Post, “Among U.S. adults, weight stigma is a common experience, with as many as 40 percent reporting past experiences of weight-based teasing, unfair treatment and discrimination. These experiences are most prevalent for people with high body mass indexes or those with obesity and for women. For youth, body weight is one of the most prevalent reasons for teasing and bullying.”
Forbes reports that, “Research indicates that obese individuals experience prejudice and weight discrimination with one study finding evidence that obese individuals are perceived as lazy, emotionally unstable, lacking self-discipline and being less competent.”
The BBC finds that fat-shaming is “associated with low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.” Additionally, “the more discrimination obese people face, the more weight they often gain. This discrimination causes stress and, in turn, behavior changes that are linked to weight gain.”
This ruthless cycle may be one reason why America’s population is increasingly overweight. However, if Americans of all ages would create inclusive, supportive environments for obese people to live in, perhaps the situation would turn around.
Deep Hollow Ranch later apologized on a Facebook post.
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