The Naked Truth: If Tyra’s Fat, What Am I?

Tyra Banks is fat. What? You didn’t know? Yeah, she’s HUGE. Her fat is muffin-topping out over the waistband of her jeans. She can barely fit into her size twelve pants. She’s so fat she—

Oh my God. I had to stop. I couldn’t keep that fat charade up. I think I might’ve just thrown up a little in my mouth at how disgusting that whole first paragraph even sounds.

You can think whatever you want about Tyra, her daytime talk show, and America’s Next Top Model (one of my favorite guilty pleasures), but please … stop calling Tyra fat. Come on, people, the woman is not fat.

I think it’s especially disheartening to hear other women perpetuate this silliness. Shame on you! You’ve broken the bonds of the female sisterhood by attacking a woman who’s gained thirty pounds on her ex supermodel frame, which was no doubt grossly underweight in the first place. Cut the woman some slack! She’s probably been on a diet her entire life. Let her have a few cheeseburgers, for God’s sake. I think she’s earned it.

You attackers out there, were you ever a supermodel? Were you ever on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue? Did you ever make millions to parade down a runway in a skimpy Victoria’s Secret thong? Have you ever continuously denied yourself every culinary pleasure on the face of the earth because your bank account depended on it? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

More importantly, how do you think all those impressionable young women out there are going to feel when they hear you calling an ex supermodel fat, especially when she still looks ridonculously gorgeous at her current weight? I have a pretty good guess of exactly what they’ll think, because the same thought ran through this five foot ten, thirty-seven-year-old “girl’s” head: “If Tyra’s fat, then what am I?” (Cue fifteen-year battle with assorted eating disorders for oh, let’s say about a million young girls.)

A few months ago in People Magazine, Tyra’s stats were listed as five feet ten inches tall and 161 pounds. I just Googled “average weight for five foot ten woman” and found a bunch of sites that show the recommended body weight for a medium-framed woman being between 140 and 155 pounds. So if Tyra’s a medium-framed woman (and as gorgeous as she is, she might even be a large-framed woman, but we’ll go with this for now), she’s six pounds over the recommended weight. There are a lot of factors that go into determining if a person is officially overweight—body fat, body mass, pounds, etc. I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure an extra six pounds doesn’t make someone fat. (Unless, apparently, you used to be a supermodel and you live in the good old US of A.)