Can you explain how mama June’s weight loss was unhealthy? I don’t really get it.

marrymejasonsegel:

the obvious physical answer is that she hacked off a piece of her organ, starved herself and then had to cut off pieces of her skin because she forced her body to change faster than it should have. And her body is already suffering for it

the mental reason is that, according to her and in her own words that you can see on her reality tv show, she did all that in order to get back at her ex Sugar Bear. She uses the phrase “revenge body” continually. If your main motivation for doing all of this to your body is to get back at a man, you’re not doing it for your own self. If it was about her health, she wouldn’t have needed to go as far as she did.

the reason that most effects the people surrounding her: with the exception of one, all of her children are overweight. That’s literally what they gained their fame from. And it was one of the most endearing things about their family’s story—that these people who didn’t fit society’s suffocating standards of beauty loved each other and found each other beautiful and celebrated each other anyway. But now that Mama June has done all this, it not only puts all that into question but it leaves the children in a place where suddenly, through their mother’s words and actions, bodies like these are not acceptable. In the show, the kids talk about it. You can see interviews with June and Alanna (Honey Boo Boo) where Alanna is miserable sitting there, looking at her feet. The media has already used June’s momentum and “progress” and used it as a tool to attack her daughters. Literally almost every single story about them mentions the fact that the daughters are overweight and that “hopefully June can pass on these healthy lifestyle changes to her daughters”. What kind of pressure does that put on a teenager? On an 11 year old? In a normal house it’d be horrible, but in a house that is in the spotlight right now specifically because of this drastic weight loss? i can’t imagine what kind of internal self loathing could be growing.

the reason that has to do with the overall body pos movement: like I said before, she—and her people—framed this as a complete vanity move. It was to get back at her ex by looking “better”. The show is literally called “From Not to Hot” and when you frame her “before body” aka her fat body as the “Not”, while also framing her new, size 4 body as “hot” it frames fat bodies in general as undesirable or wrong and thin bodies as acceptable. It’s a message that is completely false and it’s a message that destroys lives. It’s the root of fat shaming, of weight based bullying, of mental abusers hiding under FA titles that take advantage of fat women who have been told their whole lives that they will be lucky to get somebody, anybody, to see them as sexy or desirable. And she and her people are making money off that corrupt message.

 The show itself also details how her life as changed, in other areas, “for the better” since “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” ended. She’s more economically stable, she’s gotten rid of a man who treated her poorly, she’s gained some independence as a woman and a single mother, and she’s started to put effort into things like makeup and her hair (or rather, she can now afford to pay a stylist to do that for her). So what the show does is link those old life descriptors, like “poor” “taken advantage of” “dependent” “sloppy” and linked it directly to her being fat. The entire show is like “LOOK AT MAMA JUNE! SHE’S RICH AND SKINNY NOW!”

And it’s also those economic factors that present an unsafe and unrealistic reality for people who want to lose weight–maybe for health, maybe for vanity. She was only able to do what she did because she’s got money now. Because she can pay for a trainer and a nutritionist and she could afford the out of pocket cost of the weight loss surgery as well as the excess skin removal surgery. And when people see the kind of progress she’s made, and they don’t have those resources, they can go to unsafe lengths to achieve it.

TLDR the weight loss industry in general is a sham and dangerous and it was super messed up for her and her people to go about it the way they did.