Watch This Woman's Viral Response to Her Bullies
After losing 120 pounds the hard way - through dieting and exercising LIKE 👏 A 👏 BOSS 👏 - Shauna Arocho, 27, an Illinois-based personal assistant for her disabled mother, hit up Dairy Queen to treat herself on Free Cone Day.
After she and her husband got their ice cream, Shauna decided to sit outside (because spring's here, ya'll!). It was a well-deserved celebration of Shauna's success, until a bunch of men in a car stopped in the middle of the road to shout, "Eat that ice cream, you fat B-I-T-C-H," according to Shauna, who began to cry.
"Immediately after the incident, I felt numb," she says. "I was afraid to look around in the chance that anyone else was laughing at me. I felt about an inch high."
Once she'd calmed down about 20 minutes later, Shauna explained the whole incident in a Facebook video. "I wanted people [who have been bullied] to know that they are not alone in this," she says of her motivation to post it. "I hoped that someone who is a bully would see my message, and it would change their hearts." Her video has since gone viral:
In the video, which has been viewed by 10.8 million people so far and provoked upward of 5,000 people to reach out to Shauna, Shauna sits in her car, looks into the camera, and explains, with a shaky voice, how the bullies' words destroyed her: "I just don't understand what people get out of tearing other people down," she says in the video. "You know nothing about my life or my circumstances."
At her heaviest, Shauna weighed 500 pounds, and lived off a diet comprising mostly pasta and bread. Spaghetti and lasagna were staples in her house, and she'd often begin the day with a breakfast of two or three sandwiches. "I would always eat way more than a healthy person should," Shauna says, adding that she used to devour pizza by the pie. "I’m not proud of that, but it’s the truth."
It wasn't until Shauna was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in June 2014 that it dawned on her: She didn't just need to lose weight for vanity's sake - her life depended on it. But instead of feeling motivated to change her ways, she spiraled into a deep depression. After trying several medications with underwhelming results, Shauna finally saw a counselor who helped her develop coping skills.
Still, it wasn't until two years after her diagnosis that Shauna's cousin convinced her to try Whole30, a multi-phase restrictive eating plan that eliminates entire food categories including dairy, grains, beans, legumes, and added sugars. (FWIW, the goal isn't necessarily weight loss but to "reset" your relationship with eating by isolating foods that secretly make you feel worse.)
Three months later, Shauna's health had improved enough for her to ditch her diabetes medications entirely. She now follows a paleo diet, which is similar to Whole 30 in that it outlaws all the good stuff, including processed foods and refined sugars. (So it's not like she's eating ice cream every day.)
"It's really hard sometimes," she says of giving up all the "bad" foods that taste so good - a R-E-A-L struggle that literally every dieter can relate to. But progress has kept Shauna going ... and going ... and going: She also works out five times a week, walking and biking regularly. Exercise proved enormously beneficial for Shauna's mental health, since she still struggles with depression and severe anxiety. "It's a daily battle," she says.
Now that Shauna has shed the weight, including 40 pounds she lost in the first three months of the new year, it's no wonder she felt no shame in celebrating her efforts with an ice cream cone. But her bullies clearly didn't consider how far she'd come when they decided to fat-shame her in public. "I am working every single day to better myself," Shauna wrote in her viral post. "I know that I am fat, I don't need strangers yelling out their car window for me to see that."
In proof that people of any size can keep it classy, Shauna isn't looking to avenge the men who taunted her. Instead, she hopes they, and other bullies, see her video as a wake-up call: "I just hope it makes them think twice before saying something like that," she says. "You never know what kind of place a person is at emotionally, and your words could be the words that make them decide they just want it all to stop."
Overwhelmed by the public's response to her story, Shauna recently posted another video message on her Facebook page: In this one, which appears to have been filmed in a car just like the first video, she thanks everyone for their support and says she'll continue to share updates about her weight loss journey, foreseeably so fans can stick around ~for the ride.~
Shauna also has a message for Dairy Queen - one she doesn't want distorted by her incident: "[Your] ice cream is still wonderful!"
Have truer words ever been spoken?!
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