Trina Hall is a Dallas-based yoga teacher who, judging by her mobilization of support from fat apologists, is also something of an internet marketing genius. Multiple news outlets picked up on her heroic mission to become fat, just to disprove the evil cultural stereotypes that obesity is undesirable and alters a person’s self-worth and ability to use their body. If you read between the “you go girl” veneer of the article, you can see that Trina found out these very truths en route to a new business venture:
“Hall also found that her weight gain affected her ability to practice and teach yoga. She experienced trouble with stamina, certain poses and breath control — to the point where she dramatically cut down on demonstrating poses in her classes and would instead walk around the room assisting her students.”
This provides yet more objective evidence against the laughable “Fit any any size” movement: gaining weight prevented this woman from fulfilling the most basic requirements of an athletic activity that was also her occupation. Note that her fatness also promoted laziness — instead of demonstrating poses she would “assist” others, making her less effective at her job. She writes about her scientific approach to this courageous and illuminating experience on her blog and in the article:
“I’ve followed the brand new, yogi-approved Seat Diet. See it… eat it.”
“I changed that to eating anything and everything and all amounts of food that I desired or wanted or thought, “Oh, that would be great.” I ate a lot more every day – and I ate a lot of Mexican food. Forty pounds just came as a result of that.
It’s an interesting study in human excess that forty pounds of weight can can “just come.” Trina’s 5’5″ height and (self-reported) 175 lbs would give her a robust BMI of 29. Since she is not a muscle-bound NFL linebacker, this flags her as being significantly overweight and borderline obese.
Not to be outdone in their quest for political correctness, The NY Daily News and HuffPost pieces unsurprisingly shy away from the natural conclusion of this woman’s experience: despite what the media tells us, being fat will affect your life in a negative way.
Obviously Trina must have used her firsthand experience to realizes this and refocus her professional life toward preventing and curing obesity in others, right? Negative. A quick look at her blog reveals that the single thirtysomething has rebranded herself as “The Fat Yoga Teacher.” She shares her new business venture and mission statement on the articles and the blog:
“Instead of slaying my means of supporting myself, I want to slay the notion that people who do yoga need to look like the beauties on the cover of magazines.”
Before and After. WYB?
As we learned this week, you can’t knock an experienced hustler. Trina has identified an increasing market for fat yoga teachers who normalize the flailings of porcine customers whose gunts scrape the ground on every futile downward dog attempt. Even better, she gets to market herself liberally to this niche, receive positive media notoriety, and continue to stuff potato chips into her face while the bucks roll in. Game recognized.
The rest of us, however, must note the subtext of these articles that take a disturbing stance on fitness in our culture. It is a strong statement that someone who takes the path of least resistance is rewarded with fame, cash, and prizes, while people who actually care about their appearance are branded as disordered and misguided.
Despite the spittle-flinging protestations from the growing (ha) movement in our country to normalize obesity, we will never eradicate our innate disgust response to fatness. Whether you censor anti-fat speech or strive futilely to prove that it does not affect one’s quality of life, you cannot change the truth that obesity is elementally and undeniably disgusting and undesirable. Even if it can now help you make a quick buck.
Read More: Morbidly Obese Girl Posts Picture Of Herself In Bikini
