Honey Ross - bit hard on her parents??

[Muser314]

Honey said herself that she was a teenager who hated her body. They were trying to help her hate her body less. And I'm sure they didn't tell her to aim for 9 stone. I cannot imagine jane (from what little I know about her) thinking that a woman has to be thin to have a good sense of herself.

Describing her parents approach as toxic (which I think she was basically doing) is a bit harsh. They didn't want to stand back and do nothing when she was unhappy and hated her body.

She's a spoiled, ungrateful rich kid who has never lived in the real world, and that comes across embarrassingly clearly.

She was the one who asked her parents for help to lose weight. She noticed people were giving her less compliments when she gained, so she asked her parents for a personal trainer. They also offered to send her to WW. These are recognised support tools to lose weight. Your GP would recommend similar. It's not like they packed her off to fat camp without her consent.

She is overweight because she eats too much. It's a complicated issue that many of us have experienced and have the utmost empathy about. Blaming everyone else for her unhappiness is not going to make her happy.

If you've seen the actual video clip of her talking it's not as harsh as it seems

Presumably if she was smoking or drinking or doing other things that were bad for her body, her parents would want her to stop that too. I don’t know why being very overweight is different. I would be very worried if I had a child who had a severe weight problem because I wouldn’t want them to get diabetes or joint problems. We’re not talking slightly chubby or non-skinny here as she looks to be at least 5 or 6 stone overweight. You can dress it up all you like and try to ignore the copious medical advice but it’s not healthy and will get worse the older she gets.

When I was a kid in the 90s there was a mum who stormed into my primary school having a go at the teachers for telling us that smoking killed. She was a chain smoker and she didn’t want her son to hear that smoking might be bad for her health and thought it shouldn’t be taught or discussed at school as a result. I think there is a similar level of delusion from people in the FA movement.

@InsaneInTheViralMembrane I'm at your dad and the bucket. How awful for you. (Unmumsnetty hugs)

@Chicchicchicchiclana

I haven't read any of the articles but have seen the headlines.

Everything negative I feel about this person has nothing to do with her size or weight and everything to do with her attitude. She only has a name for herself because of her parents. The life she is attempting to carve out for herself (accompanied by provocative pictures) as an Instagrammar/influencer/social commentator is just empty, meaningless, morally redundant, pointless and pathetic. Heaven forfend she would do an ordinary paid job. She's Honey Ross don't you know? The girl who is ready to mouth off everywhere and shut her own father up in the process. Will she (and others like her) ever be woke enough to really examine themselves?

This is such a good post.

Her parents have made it in that world through hard work. Now she's not only using their name to make it herself the easy way, but is hoping for headlines by discrediting them at the same time.

It must be so frustrating for her parents and I agree with a PP who said they must be walking on eggshells. There were so many opportunities available to her and she's taken the most vacuous route to fame.

@Ihopeyourcakeisshit I’m sure he did what he felt was the best thing.

I’d have preferred a Bank of mummy and daddy Ross funded PT and chef though. 😂

Ps LOVE your username!

I'll be flamed for this, but... her parents should have done more than "gently suggest". She's unhealthily obese, and there is zero empowerment in that.
How tone deaf is she that she's now calling them out for the fact that they suggested it at all?
Bit of an idiot all round, I think.

She is very very dangerously obese.

She is trying to go down the road of 'owning' it rather than changing it.

I really don't believe anyone that size is truly happy with how they are. It looks so unhealthy and tiring.

No way would anyone choose to be that size if they could snap their fingers and be thinner. I was obese and I was miserable as sin and I was a lot smaller than her. I struggled to tie my own shoelaces and I was only 3 stone over ideal weight. I got migraine, backache and PMT that made me feel suicidal. All gone since I lost weight. It would have been easy for me to go down the FA route blaming society for not thinking I am hot or whatever but I knew that I’d only be harming myself. Hopefully Honey will have a similar wake up call at some point.

In a way there is a parrallel with the transwomen are women line. Her position atm is not based on health or reality but on trying to shame people in to accepting Fat Acceptance. And the sad thing is, nobody really cares. Unless it is your own daughter, who really cares about somebody else's child's BMI?

In a way there is a parrallel with the transwomen are women line. Her position atm is not based on health or reality but on trying to shame people in to accepting Fat Acceptance. And the sad thing is, nobody really cares. Unless it is your own daughter, who really cares about somebody else's child's BMI?

Megan Crabbe, Body Posi Panda, is similar. She actually comes across as a really lovely person, but it's a similar theme of Fat Acceptance and TWAW/TWAM.

Yes, agree re Bodyposipanda. She seems lovely but I get the feeling that she has gone from one extreme to another. Eating disorders are horrific but being very obese also points to disordered eating and an unhealthy relationship with food. She has also visibly gained a lot of weight since she started.

"she's taken the most vacuous route to fame" - I like that a lot!

I’d go further than you; I think if you have an overweight child it’s bad parenting not to try to help them to lose weight in a balanced way. I hear more people say they wish their parents had helped them more as teenagers, not less. I agree that J&J were in an impossible situation.

Seems to me that she says jump and they ask how high! A bit more active parenting and less gentle nudging, might have done her some good. I don't believe that anyone should be shamed for their weight - I think that leads to poor self esteem. And if it was just about appearance I'd support FA and say size is totally unimportant. But the fact is, her health is at real risk and her parents ought to have done something before it got to this point.

She's obviously very mixed up and unhappy in herself and at the moment FA is her answer to that. I have to agree that FA is a pretty toxic movement. I was very attracted to it for a long time because I had found losing weight permanently impossible and wanted to learn to love myself as I was. There's nothing wrong with body positivity but I also ingested a lot of harmful views about the wrongness of trying to lose weight for any reason in including health and a lot of very cherry-picked science about how it is possible to be morbidly obese and physically healthy. In the end it turned out that what I needed was informed therapy from someone who understands how addiction works about why I had got to the size I had. I actually had to ask my therapist if it was safe/emotionally healthy to track calories to lose weight, and I was nearly 21 stone at the time.

I don't think she deserves the slating she is getting here, though. There are all sorts of ways of suggesting to a child that they should lose weight, some positive some not. We have no real idea how those conversations were actually approached by her parents and FA proponents will have left her convinced that any suggestion that you should lose weight is wrong and damaging. And she's only 23 which whilst not a child is still very young and inexperienced.

@MrsHuntGeneNotJeremyObviously if you look at older photos of her she is a little bit overweight, but not greatly so. It appears as if she has put on most of the excess weight in the last 2-3 years and we can hardly hold the DPs responsible for what their adult DD eats.

Her photos are shocking. She is an appalling example.

@InsaneInTheViralMembrane - I'm really sorry that happened to you, that's shocking 😢

CarterBeatsTheDevil I totally agree with your assessment of the FA movement. What I really hate about it is how it tells obese people that losing weight is impossible and they might as well give up. Fad diets may not work but eating well and exercising does. The FA claim that all diets are eating disorders is ridiculous. Binge eating which is what made me obese is dangerous and disordered yet FAs embrace it as a normal love of food. There is nothing wrong with tracking what you eat. We set clear limits with things like alcohol and nobody questions that and tries to say that binge drinking is healthy or that we shouldn’t measure how many units we drink. Food shouldn’t be different. Most FAs seem to have a truly fucked up relationship to food but hide it behind their claims that being slim or normal weight is abnormal and involves starvation

''all diets are eating disorders''. That's crazy!

A diet is just a word and often it means getting rid of habits that you weren't that committed to to start with, eating more consciously and re-learning the bad habits that weren't that important to you.

A lot of advice on weight loss does focus on health, vitality, longevity and making it sustainable - and loving yourself along the way. That is nearly always the focus I see when I read articles on weight loss.

So, yes, Fat Acceptance is a bit of a shield to hide behind. In my opinion. NOBODY should be shamed of course. That goes without saying. But trying to control other people's views on your weight is not going to work. Because nobody cares as much as the person who has fallen in to the FA movement.

What I really hate about it is how it tells obese people that losing weight is impossible and they might as well give up. Fad diets may not work but eating well and exercising does. The FA claim that all diets are eating disorders is ridiculous.

In a nutshell. It sucks that there isn't really an organisation out there addressing the real issue for very fat people, which is that you need to care about yourself and love your body in order to take care of it properly. I get very frustrated with both the body-shaming of fat people and the self-shaming by fat people that I see on here. That's not going to help! Why would you make the time and effort for the work that needs to be done to understand why you overeat and put healthy boundaries in place around eating if you don't love the body that you're doing it for? But unless you get individualised therapy, which is not affordable for everyone, you're probably going to have a choice between "you were born fat and there is nothing you can do about it and actually it would be wrong to even try" and "being fat is disgusting and you must punish yourself into being healthy".

I found it really sad that a 23 year old women is clearly so unhealthy, mentally and physically, despite the start in life I’m sure she’s been given