we're telling the wrong story about body positivity

flattening a complex idea doesn’t make it wrong — it just makes it easier to dismiss.

This week, The New York Times published a video essay by former body positivity influencer Gabriella Lascano, titled “Confessions of a Former Body Positivity Influencer.” The piece seems to be traveling fast, in part because it offers a narrative I KNOW a lot of people already have queued up in their heads: the idea that body positivity began as liberation, curdled into ideology, and now needs to be rescued from its own greasy excesses.

Lascano’s story is personal and painful. She describes building a career around loving herself at any size, only to feel that the language of body positivity eventually boxed her in, making it harder to talk about health, weight loss, or fear without being accused of betrayal. She recounts the deaths of friends, fellow influencers, and the moment she realized that self-love had, for her, begun to feel like avoidance. Her conclusion is not that body positivity is wrong, not exactly, but that it has “lost its way.” She posits that a saner middle ground must exist, one that allows people to love their bodies while still wanting to change them.

Her piece lands at a moment perfectly primed for it: weight loss has been newly medicalized, even more culturally legitimized, and — thanks to GLP-1s —reframed as both accessible and responsible.

The timing does a lot of the argumentative work here.

Before I get into it, I want to say that I truly understand the allure of her framing because I’ve felt it myself. I’ve spent years trying to hold two truths at once: that bodies are not moral problems, and that bodies are also sites of fear, grief, desire, and change. This is not a comfortable place to live, intellectually or otherwise. I know how seductive it can feel to resolve that tension and try to collapse it into a tidy, clear-eyed story that finally lets you exhale.

But that collapsing, that desire to push everything into one clean narrative, is where the limits of this perspective start to show.

Because what Lascano ultimately describes isn’t just a movement that “lost its way,” but a long, familiar process of flattening. Distinct ideas, practices, and histories were slowly collapsed into one another until “body positivity” became a catch-all explanation for everything that happened to the people associated with it.

This is easiest to see in the way the piece links body positivity to physical decline. Lascano’s own weight gain — and the illnesses and tragic deaths of other fat influencers — are framed not just as experiences that occurred within a body-positive context, but as outcomes of it. But weight gain, diabetes, and heart failure don’t materialize because someone believed their body deserved dignity. Treating them as ideological consequences collapses lived complexity into a morality tale. It’s a familiar story from weight-loss culture, where bodies are read as evidence of virtue or failure and outcomes are retroactively assigned meaning.

It’s all very powerful emotionally, but weak analytically. It revives an old logic under the guise of concern: that fat bodies are not just risky, but reckless, and that believing you deserve respect is itself a health hazard. That doesn’t interrogate stigma. It reinscribes it.

That same collapse shows up again in the essay’s treatment of body positivity taking “extreme” turns. Many of the practices Lascano points to — refusing weigh-ins, questioning BMI, bristling at the casual invocation of “health” — are framed as evidence of denial. But those practices didn’t emerge from fat people’s collective desire to ignore reality; they emerged as defensive strategies in response to it. It’s a response to decades of being lectured without diagnosis, dismissed until weight loss occurred, and managed by a medical system that routinely conflates correlation with causation, treated fatness itself as the symptom, and has repeatedly shown itself to be racially uneven in who it listens to, treats, and saves.

But once everything is collapsed into a single story, boundary-setting starts to look like delusion instead of self-protection. The essay subtly but decisively shifts the frame from “medical bias exists” to “people are ignoring reality,” and from “health discourse can be gnarly and violent” to “health is being selectively denied.” What disappears in that shift is the question of why those boundaries existed in the first place, and who they were meant to protect. The work those refusals were doing —against stigma, against dismissal, against harm — gets totally lost.

And that kind of flattening doesn’t happen by accident. It’s not just a rhetorical choice; it’s a structural one, and it's accelerated by the very influencer economy Lascano is (or was) operating inside; an ecosystem that can’t tolerate contradiction for long, and certainly can’t monetize it.

There’s an implicit assumption running through the essay that “body positive influencers” were ever meaningfully holding the full complexity of what body positivity was actually supposed to be about. But body positivity was never designed to be a brand strategy. It wasn’t meant to be optimized, monetized, or rendered endlessly legible. In short, it was a political interruption aimed at systems that required shame to function.

What most people encountered instead was something far more familiar: an influencer genre. Lifestyle, fashion, and wellness creators doing what every other influencer cohort does — selling clothes, routines, products, and versions of themselves. When your livelihood depends on visibility, partnerships, affiliate links, relatability, and a self that can be easily read and replicated, ambivalence becomes a liability, and nuance gets shaved down to the nub.

In that context, body positivity was simply everywhere it could be sold. Big brands folded it into marketing campaigns. Smaller creators folded it into sponcon. Digital media platforms hired writers (myself included) to barf out “10 Body Positive Fashion Brands You Can Buy Pants From,” “8 Sunscreens That Will Help You Achieve Self Love”–type shit. What people now point to as ideological excess often looked, in real time, a lot like late-stage trend adoption.

Seen this way, the NYT’s invocation of GLP-1s follows the same pattern. They’re presented as a kind of truth serum: now that weight loss is medically possible, we can finally be honest. But GLP-1s don’t reveal truth so much as rearrange power. They’re expensive, unevenly accessible, and deeply embedded in norms of productivity, discipline, and bodily compliance. The “middle ground” they seem to authorize is not neutral — it’s classed, medicalized, and conditional. The clarity on offer here belongs to people who can afford it, tolerate it, and be praised for choosing it.

My guess is that what many former influencers are reckoning with is not body positivity itself, but the impossibility of holding something this complex inside systems that demand you’re always saying one clear thing. Even the framing of this NYT story reflects that pressure: a movement rendered legible through a tidy confession, a clean arc, a headline that promises resolution. The result is a story that feels bracingly honest while quietly reinstating the very assumptions the movement was built to interrupt. What’s being offered here isn’t clarity so much as closure. A way to resolve an unresolved tension by declaring it settled.

But body positivity was never meant to make anyone comfortable. It was meant to interrupt the easy stories we tell about bodies and worth. The rush to move on says less about its failure than our desire to be done with the discomfort it exposed. I’m more interested in sitting with that discomfort; pulling it apart, arguing with it, learning from it. That’s where the real reckoning is: not in declaring the story finished, but in refusing to let it end cleanly.