I found myself watching this short video shared by actress Valerie Bertinelli, some of you may know her from the sitcom One Day at a Time, some of you may know her from her cooking shows on Food Network yet I completely fell in love with her from the time she was in Hot in Cleveland where she shared the top billing with Jane Leeves, Wendie Malick and the incomparable Betty White. In that short video yet absolutely heartbreaking to watch she responded to an internet troll who casually, without a single care in the world has shared on one of her social media pages that she should drop some weight. She went on to say how extremely hurtful and inconsiderate it is to comment on someone’s weight when you know almost next to nothing about the person you’re directing those comments to and most important completely unsolicited. She mentioned how difficult it is for some people to control their weight and how factors such as the genetics, our health, our diets can impact our ability to lead a healthy life and maintain a healthy body weight, at the end of the day we all want to be happy and it broke my heart to see someone as sweet as Valerie to see how hurt she felt to read something like that, she asked a question I’ve been asking a lot, where is the empathy, where is the compassion. Commenting on someone’s weight, especially without being asked, is not helpful. I grew up being scrawny and skinny, people would call me names, as if being girly and feminine did not give people enough ammunition, I had to be skinny too, I was called a skeleton on batteries, most likely nowhere near as bad as the terms have been used against people that have been experiencing overweight problems but they never knew that my family and I struggled a lot, at school we had to pay all these fees for our cleaning staff as a tip because the school couldn’t pay them enough and I wasn’t able to do that and I remember being shamed for it, I would say how we’re unable to buy food, it caused my parents a lot of frustration and angst to know their children don’t have enough to eat in a time where the wages were stagnating and the cost of living kept going up. Ignorance and shortsightedness can hurt a lot of people and as hurt as she was I’m happy she spoke up, she validated what many of us have felt but were too depressed and sad to be able to speak up and share the struggle they were going through. On a side note, I absolutely adore Valerie and hope someday to able to interview her. I want to know more about her time with the Hot in Cleveland cast, what it was like to share the screen with other powerful ladies, what it’s like to have a cooking show on Food Network and so much more. But in the meantime, we are reflecting on what it’s like to be a little more considerate of other people’s feelings.