You’ll have to watch my Instagram stories (added to highlights) if you care to know which particular fat celebrity’s dramatic weight loss post inspired this — but honestly it doesn’t matter. This is something that frequently happens to fat people as they gain visibility, and it’s something we can allow ourselves to process with nuance.
So, here’s the thing:
It can be really heartbreaking when a fat celebrity endeavors to fundamentally change their body/make themselves dramatically smaller. There is no way around that. We have so little fat representation and visibility in the arts, it’s hard not to take it personally when that representation is taken away. For a moment — their beauty, their talent, was ours to take pride in.
Bodies are not stagnant. They change throughout our lifetimes for all kinds of reasons. Asking anyone else to stay in any particular body, for any reason, is not aligned with fat liberation. It’s easy to feel like you have a claim on a fat body that has made you feel more at home in yours — but you don’t.
Things to have compassion for:
Someone climbing higher in a deeply fatphobic industry like entertainment is enduring pressure from every gatekeeper they interact with. They are likely having roles and contracts offered to them with weight loss contingency clauses, contracts of which everyone who works for them gets a cut — therefore even their most trusted team/advisors are invested in them becoming smaller.
If they are compulsively working out or leaning into disordered eating patterns in order to achieve their goal, they are in mental anguish. They are thinking about little else other than how much food they are allowed to have and whether they have “earned it”.
Things to understand:
They are eager to reap the rewards of the punishment they have endured. They are seeking the mainstream praise and validation they were never given in their fat bodies. They will be eager to show off the work they have done to conform. They will undoubtedly make silly, dangerous comments like all you have to do to lose weight is take a bubble bath instead of eating. They will conflate health with deprivation. They will soak up every affirmation that the pain was worth it, and live in fear that they won’t be able to maintain it.
We can make space for our grief, have compassion for what they are enduring, and also let their predictable, conformist show-and-tell behavior and food moralizing bounce off of us without harm.