your weight loss journey is not the problem, actually

a reframe for fat influencers who think people care that they're getting thin

For anyone who reads this newsletter but does not semi-regularly rot on social media like I do, here is some context for what you’re about to read.

Recently, I’ve seen an uptick in content from fat or formally fat influencers explaining why they are either A) rejecting the body positive community and its ideas or B) on a weight loss journey or C) both. The messaging they’re using ranges from insidious (it’s never too late to take care of yourself) to overt (being “morbidly obese” is a problem) and even a lil bit sneaky (get ready with me while I try on a new clothing haul in a smaller size and perhaps opine on why being fat was hard for me personally).

I don’t think there’s any coincidence that these these messages are popping up now, as conversations about representation and tolerance for fat bodies slides backwards (along with fashion, but that’s a different story for a different time). We are, after all, in the Ozempic era (I wrote something about this about for Teen Vogue, if you’re interested). But any time I see a post like this, whether its sent to me or I come across it organically, I find myself composing a strongly worded letter, and recently felt like it was time to organize and share that letter here. To be clear: This isn’t about any one person, but a message I’ve seen countless times that needs a reframe.

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Dear fat or formerly fat influencers on a weight loss journey,

I’m just going to get right into it: No one is upset that you’re losing weight. 

The choice to do so is yours and yours alone. Everyone has their own shit going on, their own demons to contend with, they’re own metrics for what feels good and bad. The vast majority of people don’t sit around channeling negative thoughts toward a stranger’s personal decision to make their body smaller. If anything, most of us get it. I know I certainly do. 

Luckily for you, though, there are many, many people who see weight loss as a commendable goal, something worth celebrating. In other words, you’ll quite literally never be unsupported in your journey. You’ll always have cheerleaders and a deep well of positive sentiment to draw from. You don’t have to earn validation for losing weight — it’s already built into the compensation structure of being a human, paid out whenever you mention your goals or show up 20 pounds lighter to a social event.  

In other words, the idea that there’s a threatening, nebulous entity dishing out criticism to you personally for making one of the most socially acceptable choices you can make —being a fat person who decides to become skinny — is a tough sell. Even tougher is the idea that in order to combat these criticisms, you have to make a public statement or series of statements discussing the validity of that choice.

But also, this isn’t about you. 

Try as you might to center yourself in the conversation, your choice to use your platform to either support or disengage with body positive messaging is about so much more than just yourself. When you align with a community and use its ideas to find your own voice and build your own presence within it, you’re just one voice in solidarity with a large collection of voices, all presumably supportive of a similar politic. 

Consequently, when the time comes for you to make the personal decision to reject that community while still speaking to the same people you found there, you’re not denouncing your own personal ideas in favor of something different. You’re denouncing the ideas of the collective, ideas that were never yours to solely own, uphold, rigidly follow or reject in the first place, ideas that have helped countless people sort through complicated emotions and educate themselves and perhaps even improve their quality of life. You’re taking a belief system intended to support the majority and disparaging it, simply because it no longer works for you. It might not always be crystal clear in the content you create, but that self-centered mindset is there, even if you choose not to acknowledge it. If it feels at all unclear how your messages are missing the mark, here are some considerations:

Before you make a glib TikTok about how you would “prefer not to be morbidly obese,” consider how body positive and fat acceptance communities have done and continue to do the work to dismantle the damage of stigmatizing language, along with the myth that fatness is an automatic death sentence. 

Before you dismiss gentle movement and health at every size as the only things you were “allowed” to do while a part of the community, consider how those ideas have radically reframed people’s relationship to exercise and caring for themselves — and while you’re at it, let go of the self-imposed idea that the community at large, which is firmly rooted in the idea of bodily autonomy, limited your ability to choose for yourself. 

Before you encourage people that it’s perfectly fine — great, even! — to change their bodies in order to meet non-scale related goals (fitting in a plane seat, more clothing options, better treatment at the doctor’s, for example),  consider how, actually, we’ve heard all of that before, countless times in countless iterations, as inhabitants of an unrelenting diet culture that promises the world at your fingertips if only your fingertips weren’t so goddamn fat. Consider, too, how much more additive it is to the conversation to call out ways that systems can and should improve and evolve to make life better for everyone. It doesn’t mean you can’t confidently make the choice to lose weight for yourself, of course — it just means that you don’t have to use your platform to undermine the idea that existing in a fatphobic society is, in fact, the problem. 

Whatever your approach, publicly rejecting an entire community and ideology whose sole purpose is to improve how we relate to our own bodies isn’t brave, nor is it radical. If anything, it’s revealing; it implies you only ever felt it existed to serve you, exclusively.  When it didn’t feel right anymore, you loudly removed yourself under the false premise of autonomy and choice and the moral pursuit of health — but actually, you decided that your personal feelings about your own fatness mattered more than the message. And all of this allows you to seamlessly glide into a weight loss echo chamber that’s been far more destructive than the community, and (on the surface, at least) look virtuous while doing it.

I’m not saying this isn’t complicated. It’s wrapped up in our very beings — literally. It is truly bizarre to think about how, for better or worse, our bodies have become the physical manifestations of discourse, and ultimately then whatever we decide to do with them feels like it’s subject for debate. However, if you zoom out from yourself and your personal choices a bit, you’ll realize that using your platform to reject an entire set of principles isn’t just unnecessary, it’s insidious. You’re disguising your rejection as a new kind of message, one progressive and important enough to share to however many followers you have and rally them in support of the brave new path you’re claiming to pave. Sadly, your message isn’t new at all — it’s diet culture rhetoric repackaged with a glossy coat of bodily autonomy, the same bodily autonomy you learned from the community you now claim to reject. It’s one thing to leave a community or change your mindset — it’s another thing entirely to abscond with the best silver and take a loud shit on the doorstep on the way out. 

next time in fat hell: ideas to feel good in your body (for 30 minutes at least)