Woman Horrified After Seeing ‘Disgusting’ Sign Outside Gym

Exercising is an important step in taking care of your physical and emotional health and reducing your risk of certain diseases. It’s not always easy, though.

Finding the time and motivation to get to the gym can be tough on the best of days, and it can be hard to balance everyday tasks with self-care.

Personal trainers and gyms use different methods to help motivate their customers, but some of them miss the mark. Take a message outside a gym in Australia, for example.

The sign was posted outside the Kawana Anytime Fitness on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland. It read: “Are you fat and ugly? Just be ugly.”

Ashley Milian shared a photo of the sign on Facebook, seemingly finding it humorous. He captioned the post, “Anytime Fitness, Kawana…you are my new favourite thing, please never change!”

A lot of people didn’t find the sign to be funny, though. According to The Courier Mail, a woman named Debbie Peut saw the sign and was shocked and disgusted. She told The Courier Mail:

“I am horrified beyond explanation. How sad that the word ‘fat’ continues to be used as an insult and a way to define people? Why is humiliating people funny? I can tell you that as a person who is not thin or classically beautiful that this gym is the last place I would set foot in, if in fact, I chose to go to a gym to exercise.”

She added, “I wonder, do they know that people can be ‘healthy and fit’ at any weight?” Many people agreed with her criticism, but the gym stood by its message.

According to The Courier Mail, the gym claimed the message is motivating and could help people lose weight. The delivery of the message isn’t quite right, though.

Fat shaming has been an issue for decades and it’s been detrimental to women’s health and mental well-being. Crash dieting, eating disorders, and over-exercising can have severe health consequences, which fat-shaming only fuels.

A 2019 paper published in the journal of the National Library of Medicine even found that “fat shaming is making people sicker and heavier.”