Shame on weight loss, Ozempic witch hunts. Body shaming is 360

In February, Rebecca De Oliveira underwent weight loss surgery. She mulled over the decision and struggled with her therapist. And she kept it a secret from almost everyone in her life for months, even after the surgery.

“I believe that everyone can feel good and love their body, regardless of size. I don’t believe fat people all die and they all need fat loss surgery. How could I use my platform to try and empower people in bigger bodies to get comfortable and then do what I campaigned against?” says De Oliveira. “How can I say, ‘Everyone loves Lizzo,’ but I have to be skinny? That really weighed on my shoulders. I felt like a chosen one.”

About three months ago, De Oliveira finally shared the news on Instagram with the 40,000 people who follow her account, which mostly focuses on the floral arrangements she and her team create for her company, Blush & Bloom. The lengthy caption explained her reasons for the surgery — a desire to be more active with her child, to feel less pain and tension in her body — and explained that it was the culmination of intensive therapy to address deep-seated struggles with food. unload. She ended it with: “Having said this, I will always believe in health and beauty, regardless of size…This is my body. This is my life. This is my choice, and this is not the easy way out.”

She was pleasantly surprised by the response. “I think it took me 10 days to respond to every DM I received from people considering the surgery or saying words of encouragement,” she says. And it felt good to “take the Band-Aid off” from this major life change. “If you see me now and notice a change in my body, you don’t have to comment,” she says.

That De Oliveira felt such a strong need to justify this personal medical decision speaks to the peculiar position we find ourselves in when it comes to our bodies: ashamed when we gain weight, but also ashamed – at least in some circles – when we do. want to lose it.

There has always been shame, of course diet culturefavorite weapon. Sometimes it’s a blunt instrument of strength — those early 2000s tabloid covers that gleefully catalog the “worst celebrity beach bodies” — but most of the time it’s a more stealthy poison. Being told “we don’t make that in your size”; seeing celebrities in bigger bodies getting the cover of the magazine, but shrouded only in voluminous capes.

For a short period of time, it felt like fat shaming might have found its match in the body positivity movement. Finally, there was representation and celebration of bodies that deviated from the thin, white ideal. Celebrities started speaking out about how they’d been harmed by unrealistic body standards, brands expanded their sizing to great fanfare, social media told us cellulite was something to embrace instead of circling in accusatory red in the aforementioned body spreads on the beach.

But then the pendulum started to swing back: TikTok trends heralded a return to ’90s supermodel bodies of the “heroin chic” era, as if we could just trade Kim Kardashian’s old curves for Kim Kardashian’s new protruding hip bones. Kim Kardashian. Some brands quietly began to pull their extended sizes from stores. Weight loss drugs like Ozempic, intended to treat diabetes and chronic obesity, were suddenly everywhere.

Celebrities, including some who described their struggles with Hollywood’s narrow body ideals, lost significant amounts of weight. And we condemned them for it, using the language of betrayal and hypocrisy (see: Mindy Kaling conversation) or lusty concern, like the kind that accompanied Ariana Grande’s “shocking” weight loss in April.

“We should be… less comfortable commenting on people’s bodies,” Grande said in a TikTok video addressing the speculation, before noting that her “previous body” was the result of an unhealthy time . “I was on a lot of antidepressants and drinking and eating badly and at the lowest point of my life,” she said. “You never know what someone is going through.”

Emily Foucault can tell. Now a blogger and content creator, she grew up a dancer, strong and comfortable in her body, not struggling with her self-image like some of her peers. As she got older, she gradually began to gain weight. She has several complex chronic medical conditions that forced her to stop dancing and prevented her from exercising, causing her to gain more weight.

“I was very uncomfortable and I could see that people I had known for decades, who I had danced with, would also be uncomfortable with me,” says Foucault, citing the way friends viewed her, the assumptions that people made about her eating habits. . She’d always been a leader—the first to jump into the water at a cottage, for instance—and now she was hanging back, her self-confidence gone. “I really had to work to tell myself I was okay in this body,” says Foucault, who praises her partner’s unwavering support. “Even at my biggest he loved me more than I loved me.”

However, during the pandemic, a serious illness led to dramatic weight loss — and a chorus of compliments. “Everyone thought it was good, and even when I told them it was bad, they still thought it was good,” says Foucault. “It was ‘Wow, you look great’ or ‘This is the healthiest I’ve ever seen you.’ Even the people who knew I was sick said I looked great.”

As someone whose weight fluctuates and keeps fluctuating, Foucault has only one wish: to be normal. “Because of my health, I live from day to day and I am in the moment. I can finally just… be.”

That state of body neutrality could actually free us from this double bond of shame. But if you’re struggling with your weight — losing weight, gaining weight, just being a little too aware of it — you’re having a normal reaction to a toxic culture. “It’s the environment that needs to change, not the women,” says Dr. Shelly Russell-Mayhew, a registered psychologist and professor who directs the Body Image Research Lab at the University of Calgary. “We live in a context where women are traditionally valued for being graceful. The perfect ideal changes over time so industries can get your money’s worth and weight becomes more important than health.

If you find yourself judging a woman for taking Ozempic, for example, Russell-Mayhew suggests trying “to accept that people are managing this toxic environment in the way that’s best for them.” None of us are immune to public discourse. “It’s really hard to navigate, and there’s no ‘right’ way to do it.”

“I don’t think anyone will sit down and tell girls that you’re going to have a hard relationship with your body, and that it’s because of these macrostructures that you’re just a part of,” says Elizabeth Tingle, a researcher at the Body Image Research Laboratory. (These are, to name a few, capitalism, patriarchy, the fashion and beauty industry, ageism, racism…) Instead, we are left to our own devices and try to understand why it is so difficult for us is to feel at home in our bodies. “It’s helpful to realize that this is very common because then the response is less about changing yourself,” says Tingle. “The anger and the change must be directed outward, not inward.”

How you feel about your own body also affects how you judge other people’s bodies. “The root of the root of the problem is that in our culture, the power we feel most comfortable extending to women is based on their looks and their sexual appeal,” says Tingle. “This can make us competitors for the power grabs that society wants to give us. We could view each other as a threat, as we are used to, or as “a sister who has gone through girlhood and therefore has some body resentment.”

It’s an exhausting mental hamster wheel that most of us are on, from thinking about our bodies, working on our bodies, to boredom. “Who wants to do that for decades?” says Tingel. “I know from personal experience that recovery from not just eating disorders, but diet culture and preoccupation is absolutely possible.”

Sarah Laing is a Toronto-based freelance contributor to The Kit, writing about celebrities and culture. Follow her on Twitter: @sarahjanelaing

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