Welcome back to the Learning Curve, a monthly column where we unpack the complicated experience of accepting your own body in a world that doesn't seem to want you to. This month, Nicola ponders the unease she feels when a plus-size celebrity suddenly becomes thinner — despite their body being none of her business.
I can’t look at Mindy Kaling anymore. Or Rebel Wilson. Or Adele.
Yes, it’s only because they’re significantly thinner. A wave of unease crashes over me every time I lay eyes upon a formerly plus-size famous person despite the fact that neither they nor their body have anything to do with me. Seeing a woman above a size 8 on a red carpet was nearly unheard of until the early 2010s, when Melissa McCarthy got promoted from dowdy sidekick to leading lady and Orange Is the New Black became the most talked-about show in the country. Still, comparatively few plus-size women have been allowed past the exclusive gates of fame, but when they thrive in that traditionally thin space anyway, it makes my own successes feel possible and my own body feel worthy.
But every now and then, I’ve woken up and one of the people I once felt proudly represented by onscreen suddenly felt like a stranger with more chiseled cheekbones, a flatter stomach, and a thigh gap. There’s something wrong here, my subconscious nags every time it happens, not with them — with you.
Celebrities and weight loss itself aren’t my enemies here. People lose (and gain) weight for a wide variety of reasons and it’s not always under a person’s control whether or not they do. Sometimes it’s healthy, sometimes it’s not, and sometimes it’s neither. Regardless, those reasons or the fact that it happens are none of my business — usually.
They become my business when headlines and social media posts refuse to let me gloss over Wilson’s “year of health,” during which she reportedly lost more than 80 pounds by eating high-protein meals, or how Kaling managed to become “unrecognizable” by losing weight allegedly without any dietary restrictions. Adele apparently lost 100 pounds just by lifting weights and doing circuit training, according to what my phone tells me. Sure.
These are conversations, by the way, that the celebrities actively participated in by posting about weight loss on social media and/or allowing journalists to interview them about the topic. But whether or not the celebrity participates in it, the mainstream narrative surrounding any bigger, famous person who has lost a significant amount of weight is that they look so much better now, don’t they? And they’re healthy now!
This is where the problem starts, especially when the stories are presented with pictures of celebrities before and after their transformations, as many of them are. “I think [before-and-after imagery] offers people an opportunity to think that achieving weight loss is something that’s worthwhile,” says Phillippa Diedrichs, PhD, a research psychologist who specializes in media and body image. The issue really lies in the fact that it is often suggested the “after” image is the better of the two. “It sends the message that a larger body type is not ideal and could and should be changed.”
If you’ve ever tried to lose weight “the old-fashioned way” (diet and exercise), you know how impossible it can feel simply because you don’t have time to hit the gym every day before or after the commute to your nine-to-five job. You might not have the budget to buy food that hasn’t been processed. You don’t even know where to begin with working out or eating because there’s an endless sea of information about weight loss on the internet and little of it is realistic or trustworthy. You have these struggles because you’re a normal person, one who probably has not sold hundreds of millions of records or written half a dozen hit television shows.
That’s reality. Celebrities don’t live in reality. Imagine how much easier losing weight would be if you had a full gym at home or access to a private fitness center where the machines are clean, functioning, and always free to use, where men don’t openly leer at you, and where you have your very own instructor telling you exactly what to do — not to mention a work schedule that allows you to indulge in all of these things several times a day (or perhaps even a job that literally pays you to do so). At home, your personal nutritionist prepares post-workout smoothies and perfectly proportioned meals. You might even have an appointment with a doctor to discreetly discuss liposuction or going on Ozempic.
My imaginary scenario isn’t stone-cold fact (though I will present this interview with Rob McElhenney as evidence), but these are very rich people we’re talking about and rich people can afford a lifestyle that just makes things easier — and that includes weight loss by any means necessary. But when the celebrity or the media outlets covering said celebrity depict drastic weight loss as something that can be achieved simply and quickly, you feel like a failure when you can’t lose weight after you ate nothing but chicken breast for a week and bought a treadmill desk.
Those feelings of failure can cause a cycle that impacts one’s overall well-being in the long run, according to Dr. Diedrichs. “People can have unrealistic expectations about what they can achieve with weight loss, particularly if it is being marketed as a result of managing diet as well as exercise. That presents a very simplistic view of how a person’s weight is determined.” And she notes, a person’s weight often comes down to a variety of factors such as genetics, biology, and socioeconomics, things that are perpetually glossed over in marketing and other online conversations about weight. “If influencers or different people are sending a message that we can modify our bodies simply through exercise and diet,” Dr. Deidrichs adds, the science simply doesn’t support that.”
“The science” proves that most dieting practices do not result in sustainable weight loss (if any weight is lost at all), so those of us who see a celebrity lose weight and try their reported regimens for ourselves are immediately buckled into a roller coaster of self-hatred we can’t get off of. “The basic diet response can be restricting what you’re eating, setting up unrealistic rules that are impossible to follow, that don’t lead to the result that you want,” Dr. Diedrichs elaborates. “That leads you to feeling lazy and undisciplined, or feeling like these standards are impossible to maintain and that your body is not good enough.” From that point, she adds, dieters are more likely to overeat out of frustration, which leads to more feelings of self-loathing, which leads back to square one with food restriction. In the most extreme cases, “that can mimic or be a symptom of having an eating disorder.”
And seeing someone who once looked like you suddenly adhere to thin beauty standards does subconsciously encourage you to try to lose weight, whether or not that was ever of interest to you. “Just by having images [featuring unattainable beauty standards] there, even if we don’t think that it’s achievable, still sends a message that that’s something to aspire to. And if we fall short of that, we don‘t measure up,” Dr. Diedrichs explains, citing image retouching as a common instance in which an understanding of reality isn't enough to combat the effects of an unattainable beauty standard. Just because young people know most media images are retouched, she explains, doesn’t change the fact that they can feel impacted by their presence.
I’ve spent much of my life training myself to notice the way these things negatively impact my own body image, and yet they still do — hence, why I had to leave the room when I recently caught my roommate watching reruns of The Office. Just involuntarily picturing Kaling’s before and after in my head felt like a message that I need to lose weight. I could do it just as easily as she did and therefore I’m supposed to, right?
In a fucked-up way, it kind of feels like I’m losing teammates with the “loss” of certain plus-size celebrities. Those of us who do not meet that thinner-than-average beauty standard already struggle with a lack of fair representation in the media we consume. When some of our main pillars of representation fall, that, too, can negatively impact the way we see ourselves. “By having a lack of representation, you’re sending a message that those people aren’t welcome or they’re not aspirational or they’re not attractive,” Dr. Diedrichs explains. “The more likely we are to internalize those ideas, the worse our body image is.”
And I do, indeed, internalize that, even though I don't want to. So, yeah. I hate it when celebrities lose weight, especially those who are or once were plus-size. It has nothing to do with who they are or why and how they did it but has everything to do with the ways our society and subconsciouses trick us into believing the fairy tale that everyone can and should be gorgeous and skinny. And it's certainly not that people in the spotlight should feel morally obligated to remain plus-size. It's that media as a whole should continue to highlight people of all sizes without commenting on their weight or asking for their dieting secrets.
If, somehow, there are any celebrities (or their publicists) reading this, I'm not asking you to abandon dieting or exercising or posting photos of yourself at any size. I'm asking you to consider refraining from sharing how you lost the weight the next time a magazine asks (or, as McElhenney did in that aforementioned interview, be brutally honest about how unattainable your results may be for the average person). Because, as Dr. Deidrichs explained, our brains are impacted by the false narrative that anyone can lose weight quickly and easily, regardless of whether or not we understand that it’s false.
While I believe the responsibility to stop this narrative lies mostly with the media, one also has to consider how the people seeking out and reading weight-loss content at home play into the equation. Media outlets (including Allure, mind you) determine much of their content based on what their audience is naturally drawn to and what people en masse are typing into their search engines. If celebrity weight-loss content is what brings traffic to a publication, they’ll keep making it. If this is a narrative you, too, would like to stop, then simply ignoring this type of content is a good place to start. Even hate-clicking a story about weight loss signifies your interest in it to a media company, and media companies are corporations that rely on that interest to make profits. It all feeds into one viscous cycle of clicks and content creation that won’t break until one or both parties make a choice to quit cold turkey.
Regardless of how media outlets change or don’t change, Dr. Diedrichs says increased media literacy is the solution for people struggling with these unrealistic standards on a personal level. “We know from research that if we increase people’s knowledge and understanding of what goes into creating a media image, that can sometimes disrupt the process of comparing ourselves to other people because you’ve dismissed that as a relevant target that’s actually achievable,” she says. In other words, keep in mind all that stuff I said earlier about the private gyms and personal chefs and Ozempic.
Many of these conversations about celebrity weight loss are simply another means by which women are objectified en masse, their value reduced to the appearance of their body. (Celebrity weight loss in men ignites similar harmful narratives, but let’s be honest in acknowledging that their perceived worthiness is not as closely tied to their weight.) Just by writing this story, I risk objectifying these women even further, but when we collectively fail to address the reality at hand, I think it warrants a conversation. Dr. Diedrichs agrees, so long as that conversation challenges beauty standards in a way that does not reinforce the importance of appearance, to begin with.
So the next time you’re confronted with the image of someone who meets a beauty standard you don’t, and when that shaky, barely audible voice within you starts nagging at you to be skinnier, please pause for a second and ask yourself a few things: Why is weight the first thing that set me off about this image? Am I dissatisfied with my body or am I trying to control my body as a means of trying to control other problems in my life? What are those other problems? Is forcing my body to change a realistic or healthy way to get rid of them?
I can’t answer those questions for you, but I can tell you this: Being triggered into body shame is not something we can avoid, nor is it something can we expect celebrities or the media to manage for us. But it is something we can learn to discuss and dissect to a greater degree than “she/he/they look better/worse.” Maybe if we do that more often, we’ll feel less pressured to follow in the footsteps of the rich, famous, and increasingly thin.
More from Learning Curve:
- Why Body Neutrality Hasn't Won Me Over Yet
- Why Can't I Just Watch a Fat Girl Fall in Love?
- My Hair Loss Took the Most Unexpected Toll on My Body Image
Now, see what's in the Allure Beauty Box:
