The #DOC has brought some brilliant people into my life, and Melissa Lee is one of the most brilliant. I adore her. I adore her humour, her political sass, her intelligence, and she gets me thinking with a lot of the things she shares online. She is SMART, and if there is one thing the world needs right now, it’s more smart people. I first met Melissa when she was leading the Diabetes Hands Foundation, and her compassion and advocacy skills won me over.

She is also extraordinarily talented. She sings like an angel and used to be a singing teacher. Perhaps our shared past-music teacher lives have also drawn us to each other.

Melissa has been doing her #DParodies for a number of years now, taking well-known songs and giving them a diabetes work over. They can be hilarious or sometimes a little heartbreaking. But they are always clever and thought-provoking.

Today, she unleashed a new song. I knew this one was coming; I knew what it was about. And I knew she was going to nail it.

With this parody, Melissa has addressed an issue that is close to my heart: food shaming in the diabetes community. I have written a lot about this, (here, here, here…), most recently here after I was fat shamed following a TV interview I did for work during National Diabetes Week.

I know that not everyone who follows a certain eating plan becomes militant, but I can say with all honesty that the only place where I have seen a coordinated approach to shaming people for choosing to eat a certain food group is from particularly aggressive corners within the LCHF community. Don’t believe me? Start with this tweet. Still don’t believe me? Read the comments on YouTube below Melissa’s video. By the way – the comments are all unoriginal and boring: Suggesting that someone is eating their way to a litany of self-inflicted diabetes complications, or is in the pocket of Big Food for daring to eat a cupcake, or calling someone fat? Tick, tick, tick.

I don’t care what you eat. Really. Your diabetes; your rules. But I do care if you are cruel, stigmatising or just nasty. Melissa is suggesting that people who do those sorts of things calm down. And I couldn’t agree more.