Dear Prudence: My Fatphobic Ex is Now a Public Guru

[minoanmiss]

A while ago I (cis woman) dated a man “Chris” who was a particular type of doctor at the beginning of his career. During that time he was quite specific about weight—my weight, my mom’s weight, his ex’s weight—and would do things like buy me a nice dress in the size he wanted me to be, but not my actual size and make comments about how 130 pounds was really too big. He was also openly dismissive of people’s mental health—again, mine, my mom’s, his ex’s—to such an extent I really questioned why on Earth he chose the field he did. It took a long time for me to recover from that breakup, but I did.

Now, however, Chris is quoted pretty regularly in a major news outlet as some kind of expert in weight reduction and it really bothers me. I have also found myself going back to behaviors such as weighing myself daily and counting calories—things I haven’t done in a long time. In a further twist, my once-in-a-while therapist used to have professional interactions with him and thinks he is brilliant, so we can’t talk about him and the anger that comes up when I see his quotes about eating and weight. It gives me flashbacks to him calling my mom obese and her crying about it. Yes, I totally hear all the fat-shaming and I am NOT about that and want to get out of the loop of thinking I have to be under 130 to be an acceptable human form. What should I do? Write to his university? Leave a voice message reminding him of things he said? Ignore it? Send him a teeny tiny t-shirt?

—Stepping Off the Scale

Congratulations on losing [insert Chris’s weight] pounds. (Sorry, I recently saw someone celebrate a divorce on Instagram using that construction and I had to borrow it.) He sounds like he was an awful partner, and I’m glad you are recovering from the breakup. You don’t need to say anything to him or his university. Keep the teeny tiny t-shirt. We don’t care about him anymore, we care about you and how you can go back to having a healthy relationship with food and your body. Find a new therapist who you can talk to about this creepily, scale-obsessed emotional abuser as much as you want, and make the appointments more regular than once in a while.

Comments

[xenacryst]

That ... was an answer? REALLY? They thought that printing a brief, glib, possibly even fatphobic joke (I mean, that's on the border of funny/not-funny where you really want to be certain it's going to land properly) was going to be at all helpful? That not mentioning actual resources, and only vaguely handwaving in the direction of a new therapist would be something that LW would find useful? Holy forking shirtballs. With advice columnists like this, who needs Abby?