The Cheese Grates It: The Queen of Soul

Aretha Franklin
March 25, 1942 - August 16, 2018

Aretha Franklin passed away today from pancreatic cancer. She was an amazing performer, and the radio station I listen to damn well better play some tunes from the Queen of Soul today while I’m working.

That should be all I have to say, full stop. Unfortunately, with the world we live in, I need to talk about some unnecessary fucking bullshit.

Aretha Franklin’s weight is none of your fucking business.

Nobody’s weight is any of your fucking business.

People of all sizes die. Every god damn day.

I don’t want to see “Aretha Franklin Weight” in my search results when I’m looking for a picture of the lady.

If a magazine is talking about people’s weight, or “best and worst beach bodies”, or any of that crap, that magazine is trash, and you shouldn’t pay money for it. People have the right to go to the fucking beach without assholes trying to micromanage their bodies.

People do not need to be deemed “fuckable” to have the right not to be bombarded with shitty messages every day of their lives. I don’t want to fuck anybody. I’d be a pretty awful asshole if I treated everyone I don’t want to fuck like shit.

“BUT THEIR HEALTH!!11!!!1!!!”

Their “health” is none of your fucking business. It’s never about “health” anyway, face it. People do terrible things in attempts to keep their body looking a certain way--things that are incredibly unhealthy. The dreadful “Biggest Loser,” or, as I like to call it, The Biggest Dickweed, was not about health. It was a weight loss contest. They pushed people until they were puking and had to be hospitalized. That is not healthy. Google Kai Hibbard. This former “Biggest Loser” contestant has your truth serum.

Extreme weight fluctuations are very damaging to the body. Ashton Kutcher ended up hospitalized for pancreatitis after pushing his body to lose weight for his role in Jobs. Christian Bale did permanent damage to his body when losing extreme amounts of weight for a role. Tom Hanks feels that his developing Type 2 diabetes was triggered by extreme fluctuations in weight for roles, although, in fairness, one has to have the gene for diabetes in order to develop diabetes.

In other words, dieting is bad for the body. Only about 5 percent of people who diet have long-term success. These are very bad odds. The more one diets, the more damaged one’s metabolism becomes. I dieted for close to 35 years, and every time I stopped severely restricting my food intake (eating normally), the weight came back with friends. I had to stop dieting so I wouldn’t get heavier. It doesn’t help that my metabolism is a mess in the first place.

I suggest bigfatscience.tumblr.com and danceswithfat.wordpress.com for more about the science of dieting and forced weight loss and stomach amputation and all that other awful crap that larger people have pushed on them every god damn day of their lives.

Aretha Franklin should have been able to live her amazing life at whatever size she was without being bombarded by body-shaming bullshit. Her weight is none of anyone’s goddamn business. No-one’s weight is any of anyone else’s goddamn business. Not even when they get to (insert arbitrary weight here.) 

Of course, only fat people die. No one who is thin dies, not ever. Certainly, no-one who is thin would ever get pancreatic cancer.

Oh, wait.

People of all sizes die. All the time. The older you get, the more likely you are to develop a condition that will kill you. Even if you have a so-called perfect body. Even if you exercise regularly and eat the “right” foods. Even then you may end up dead at an unexpectedly young age, like a nursing supervisor whom I worked with. This woman ate all the right foods, exercised, didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, attended church regularly, and still ended up dead from sudden cardiac arrest when she was 65 years old.

People’s worth is defined by their actions and intent, not by their physical appearance.

Aretha Franklin was an amazing person. Full stop.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~