Are you ready to read exactly what not to do when someone tells you they’re getting married? This personal trainer‘s infuriating exchange with a bride-to-be will make you SEETHE. Strap yourself in…
Meet our gal and future bride, Cassie Young. When Young announced that she was engaged to her boyfriend of 10 years, her phone blew up with emoji-filled congratulatory messages from everyone she knew. It was pure joy.
Then she noticed a message on Twitter, from an unnamed personal trainer.
“This guy reached out to me on Twitter with a pitch, and it spiraled into something else,” she wrote in an Instagram post that details the exchange.
“Congratulations on your engagement,” wrote the trainer. “Hire me to help you get in shape for your wedding.”
Boy, you better watch yourself. This is shady, shady ground.
Young — who is a reporter — declined the invitation, with a perfect response:
“I am in shape! Thank you so much for the offer, though.”
Case closed, right? Wrong. The personal trainer decided he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
“I know you want to look your best on your wedding day,” he said. “If you don’t hire me hire someone else. Those pictures last centuries. Your children’s children will still have those pictures. You want to be the best you.”
Thus begins Young’s ultimate smack-down.
“I will look my best because I’ll be so happy I get to marry the man I love,” she responded.
“I know it’s probably hard for you to understand this, but it’s taken a long time for me to love my body. I am constantly shamed or reminded that I am heavy and should be embarrassed.”
“The idea of me being embarrassed by my wedding photos because I might be ‘fat’ in them and people centuries from now will be ridiculing me? That’s the insinuation and I say f**k that noise.”
But ignorantly, the trainer didn’t back down.
“You can accept how you look but you can’t be happy with the way you look,” he wrote. “You can’t lie to yourself.”
“I just wish the whole big body acceptance people would accept the fact that they are not happy with their bodies…I have been there I know how it is that’s why I can comment so openly about it.”
Young responded saying she felt “sad” that the person behind the messages was “wrapped up” by appearances.
“Not everyone wants to be chained to that insecurity,” she wrote.
“You are projecting your feelings of your former fat self into every fat person and suggesting they should feel bad, and it’s perpetuating a cycle of self-loathing that we’re being taught by society.”
Then Mr PT takes the idiocy up a notch and tells Young when she looks back at her photos from her wedding day, she will feel sad.
“It isn’t society that tells us we look bad,” he said.
“We all have a conscious. You can see yourself in your wedding dress and know you don’t like it not based off society but based off what you see.”
“When it comes to “fat shaming” you can only be shamed if there is something to be ashamed of. When you get to the point where you have no conscious then you have no shame.”
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“When I look at your Twitter and Instagram you have so many posts about food. And it’s all bad food. You love food and you know that’s not the right way to live. So you feel ashamed.”
OK, now I’m starting to wonder if we need to give this guy anymore air-time than he deserves? Even cool, calm and collected Young starts to feel the burning frustration when she realises her words are falling on deaf ears.
“I’m telling you I see someone I like, but you’re not listening. Why aren’t you listening? Because you are trying to tell me I look bad because I’m fat,” she wrote.
Instead of continuing the back-and-forth, Young turned the upsetting exchange into an empowering message (while also shading Mr PT of course). Posting the message chain on her Instagram account (that boasts over 26,000 followers) Young said:
“I’m posting this because I want every woman and man to know that it does not MATTER what you look like.”
“You are worthy. Love is out there for you. Life is waiting with open arms. It doesn’t matter if you’re skinny or fat or between the two or willowy or broad shouldered or peer shaped or like a board or anything in between. You get good stuff in life by being YOU. That’s what matters.”
SHUT. IT. DOWN.
