Is the body positive movement on its way out?

Some signs is leading people to believe that the Body Positive movement is on its way out. Body positivity may have been a trend for people to profit from until the love of skinny returned. With this shift in priority, there may not be a lot of space for fat people to feel beautiful and celebrated online.  For those of us who lived through the time when Renee Zellweger was considered brave for gaining weight to reach 136 pounds for her titular role in Bridget Jones's Diary, this shift back to the old ways is terrifying. The shift is seen in the lack of plus-size representation online and the use of Ozempic and other weight-loss injectables.

The End of the Plus Size Model/Influencer

Plus size model and influencer Tabria Majors recently posted an Instagram reel about the erasure of the plus size model. In Majors’ reel, she talked about less work being available for plus-size models like herself.  A brand she has worked with is no longer selling their extended sizes. The models in her community have lost weight in a short amount of time, so they can continue to work in modeling. All of these changes were noticeable to Majors within a year.

Natalie Craig, another plus-size influencer, wrote an article for Cosmopolitan titled “My Fat Liberation is Not a Trend.” In this article, she also details this change.

“If it’s any indication of what’s to come, many influencers – who previously used body positivity to build a career and land brand deals – are coming right out and telling us how they really feel. Over the past few months, I’ve seen some of my fellow fat content creators getting weight loss surgery or clamoring for newly FDA-approved weight loss drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro. It’s painful to see people carelessly abandoning the body positivity and fat liberation movements that they built communities on, diminishing the change we’ve worked so hard to catalyze.”

Some popular plus size influencers have decided to focus on their health and come out to distance themselves from the Body Positive movement, believing that they were promoting obesity. To hear an insider say a talking point many fatphobic people say is quite disheartening.

The Body Positive movement is a modern iteration of the Fat Acceptance movement that started in the 60s. The Fat Acceptance movement was a response to diet fad culture being forced upon people and the constant mistreatment of fat people. In 1969, The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) was created in New York City by Bill Fabrey and Lew Louderbach. There was also a group created in California by feminists called The Fat Underground. In this organization, they wrote the Fat Liberation Manifesto in 1973 which demanded equal rights for fat people and called out “reducing” industries, like the diet industry. The Fat Underground was a more radical group than NAAFA . Instead of saying Fat Acceptance, they used the phrase Fat Liberation. At this time other marginalized people like people of color weren’t included in the movement.

The movement continued to grow in the 70s,80s, and 90s. In the 80s, fat activists would appear on talk shows critiquing the diet industry, and in the 90s there were protests popping up around the country. In the early 2000s, fat activists used social media to promote positivity towards fat people, which became known as Body Positivity. Being a visible fat person online became its own type of activism. Women of color and queer people really led the way for Body Positivity online.  A famous viral piece is Sonya Renee Taylor’s poem “The Body is Not an Apology.”  The poem is filled with powerful lines like “the body is not to be prayed for; it is to be prayed to.” This poem had such an impact that it made Taylor a voice in the movement.

Once this movement became more mainstream it started to include more mid-sized bodies or imperfect bodies that aren’t visibility fat. Mid-sized people aren’t affected by the actual harm fatphobia brings, but the Body Positive movement made it popular for all people to share love of their insecurities online.  This doesn’t sound like a bad thing, but the mid-size community overshadowed the actual fat people in the community.  This leads us to where we are now.

The Catch-22 of Ozempic

Ozempic and other weight loss injectables like Mounjaro are what a lot of people are using to lose weight. These injectables were created to help people manage health conditions like obesity or diabetes, but people have solely taken the drug for weight loss. This accessible and easy way to lose weight means that more people can live a thinner life. What’s the use of the Body Positive movement if all people can achieve the most socially acceptable version of themselves with just an injection?

In Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s The Cut article “So Was Body Positivity ‘All a Big Lie’?”, she explores the contradiction of wanting to be a body-positive person, but feeling at peace when you finally lose weight and fearing gaining it back. The Body Positive movement, and the fat liberation movements before it, don’t discourage taking care of your health or losing weight. They discourage the pressure from culture to lose weight.

We can’t deny the positives of drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro: reducing blood sugar for diabetics, lowering the risk of heart attack and stroke, and there is also evidence that Ozempic helped people cut smoking and drinking.

Model Gabriella Athena Halikas took Ozempic to reduce her PCOS symptoms. Halikas mentioned worrying about her fans feeling disappointed in her weight loss. Creators like Halikas are in an impossible situation, she’s a representative to so many people and she’s disappointing them by making a decision that is ultimately for her health. At the same time, we can’t ignore the reason everyone is drawn to Ozempic. The talk of reducing blood sugar and reducing a chance of stroke is not the marketing point for Ozempic; it's the promise of being thinner. The fact that there is a shortage of this drug because so many people bought it to lose weight shows that we have a fatphobia problem. Everyone is scared to gain weight.

If more influencers lose weight, who will be the creators that uplift the people who are still fat? If more influencers opt out of being plus size, will the fashion industries see that there is no use for big sizes in their brands? The whole movement hasn’t been dismantled yet, but these changes leave a lot of questions.