Thursday, January 31st, 2008...3:26 am

Five Magic Words


How many times has this happened to you? You meet a fat person, or encounter one on the internet, and when you try to helpfully explain their problems to them and maybe even give them an easy to implement solution, they interrupt you with a lot of really bad facts—often for no better reason than they happen to be true—that do nothing but confuse the issues?

Even the trained scienterrific professionals here at the Institute have encountered this problem. There’s no getting around it. When it comes to inconvenient, unfair, and contrary-to-popular-belief facts designed to take the wind out of your sails, nobody outdoes the Fat Acceptance crowd.

Fortunately, after many thin-person-hours of exhaustive research spent examining transcripts of hundreds of chatroom conversations and comment boards on celebrity news sites, we have determined the best strategy for dealing with this underhanded ploy.

As usual, prevention is the key. You have to shut down the counter-arguments before they start, and you can do that with five little words that are so effective that… well, the Institute must remind you that we are a highly scienterrific organization that doesn’t go in for mumbo-jumbo, especially the jumbo part. However, we cannot in good conscience describe these words as anything other than “magic” in their effects.

That’s right.

Five magic words.

“IT’S AS SIMPLE AS THAT”

Simply by attaching these words to the end of whatever you say, you win the argument before it begins. Let’s look at a few examples:

The Wrong Way!

  • “If you eat right and exercise, you’ll be thin.”
  • “Nobody finds large women attractive.”
  • “Fat is unhealthy.”

If you phrase your highly cogent arguments in the fashion shown above, you had better be prepared to be met with a lot of studies and evidence and statistics and real-life examples which you will then have to ignore before you can move the conversation forward in a positive direction and make any progress towards fixing another fat person.

Who has the time?

Try this instead:

The Right Way!

  • “If you eat right and exercise, you’ll be thin. It’s as simple as that.
  • “Nobody finds large women attractive. It’s as simple as that.
  • “Fat is unhealthy. It’s as simple as that.

You see? Once you’ve established that “it” (being the matter under discussion) really is as simple as “that” (meaning, what you said), no further argument is possible. This technique has decisively won hundreds of thousands of arguments, both within the online world and beyond it.

Most importantly, it can save you all kinds of time in having to scroll past and ignore counter-arguments. This is key, since as a thin person with an exciting life, great career, and many fulfilling personal relationships*, your time is valuable.

In conclusion, it doesn’t matter what the studies, the research, or even the evidence of your own senses might tell you. Not when you’ve got the five magic words backing you up.

It’s as simple as that.


*Results not typical

14 Comments

  • The next time there’s a troll activity on any of my favorite sites that don’t include the magic words I plan to respond with

    “You almost had me in your camp, but you didn’t add ‘It’s as simple as that’ so I will continue on with my fatty fat ways. If you had added those five words there would be no argument I could make against your stunning logic and analytical skills and I would have made getting thin my number one priority. You were soooo close.”

  • Found you through the F-word. Love you.

  • Many many heartfelt thanks for the tip! I applaud the Institute and its highly trained staff of scienterrific professionals, and regret scienterribly that I, alas, have been one of those immoral lard asses who have confused issues. Bad Fat Chick, bad bad bad!!

    Keep up the good work, THIN!

  • I love THINspeak. It’s as simple as that.

  • I am frankly disappointed in the Institute’s recommendation of such a bloated phrase. “It’s that simple” is four characters shorter, for a weight loss of almost eight percent. Since a weight loss of as little as ten percent can help you avoid the more harmful fat side effects such as diabetes and moral repugnance (it’s that simple!), I must respectfully suggest that all REAL anti-obesity experts employ the slimmer phrase.

  • I think I love you. Simple as that.

  • Fillyjonk, you took the words out of my mouth! That’s a very good thing, because otherwise I might have been tempted to eat them and gained more hideous weight!!!

  • What Seaneen said. And I’ll pay you to be my friend.

  • Also found you through the F-Word.

    “Especially the jumbo part.” - priceless. Best part of my day - and I got a raise today.

  • Fillyjonk:

    Thank you for your concern. While the Institute’s methods are scienterrifically proven, the fact remains that every thin person is different. Unlike fat people, they may find that the same techniques bring varying results.

    Therefore, feel free to experiment. Other useful phrases to try include:

    • End of story.
    • …and you know it.
    • Period.
  • A friend of mine who is a logic professor once asked me to write him a program that would make everything he wrote true. I offered to make him one that inserted “, or maybe not” whenever he typed a period.

  • […] entire site cracks me up, but this “article” in particular is my favorite, including the […]

  • And one more:

    “You’ve got to admit that…”

  • […] Oh wait, I know. Fatties don’t have a balanced diet. They don’t do exercise. If they did, they’d be healthy, which means thin. Let’s ignore this pish-posh about genes that’s at the centre of the article. Obesity is about lifestyle, and it’s as simple as that. […]

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