no matter my weight (i have had several dramatic weight changes in my life due to mental health) i am STILL
CHRONICALLY
in pain.
and even if it could help, my baseline is so low, it would cause more pain for me to lose a large amount of weight
and EVEN SO i am still trying to lose weight to decrease the pressure on my joints, trying desperately not to slip back in to eating disorder territory that i've been deep in for YEARS
flattening a complex idea doesn’t make it wrong — it just makes it easier to dismiss.
This week, The New York Times published a video essay by former body positivity influencer Gabriella Lascano, titled “Confessions of a Former Body Positivity Influencer.” The piece seems to be traveling fast, in part because it offers a narrative I KNOW a lot of people already have queued up in their heads: the idea that body positivity began as liberation, curdled into ideology, and now needs to be rescued from its own greasy excesses.
Lascano’s story is personal and painful. She describes building a career around loving herself at any size, only to feel that the language of body positivity eventually boxed her in, making it harder to talk about health, weight loss, or fear without being accused of betrayal. She recounts the deaths of friends, fellow influencers, and the moment she realized that self-love had, for her, begun to feel like avoidance. Her conclusion is not that body positivity is wrong, not exactly, but that it has “lost its way.” She posits that a saner middle ground must exist, one that allows people to love their bodies while still wanting to change them.
...
Because what Lascano ultimately describes isn’t just a movement that “lost its way,” but a long, familiar process of flattening. Distinct ideas, practices, and histories were slowly collapsed into one another until “body positivity” became a catch-all explanation for everything that happened to the people associated with it.
This is easiest to see in the way the piece links body positivity to physical decline. Lascano’s own weight gain — and the illnesses and tragic deaths of other fat influencers — are framed not just as experiences that occurred within a body-positive context, but as outcomes of it. But weight gain, diabetes, and heart failure don’t materialize because someone believed their body deserved dignity. Treating them as ideological consequences collapses lived complexity into a morality tale. It’s a familiar story from weight-loss culture, where bodies are read as evidence of virtue or failure and outcomes are retroactively assigned meaning.
It’s all very powerful emotionally, but weak analytically. It revives an old logic under the guise of concern: that fat bodies are not just risky, but reckless, and that believing you deserve respect is itself a health hazard. That doesn’t interrogate stigma. It reinscribes it.
That same collapse shows up again in the essay’s treatment of body positivity taking “extreme” turns. Many of the practices Lascano points to — refusing weigh-ins, questioning BMI, bristling at the casual invocation of “health” — are framed as evidence of denial. But those practices didn’t emerge from fat people’s collective desire to ignore reality; they emerged as defensive strategies in response to it. It’s a response to decades of being lectured without diagnosis, dismissed until weight loss occurred, and managed by a medical system that routinely conflates correlation with causation, treated fatness itself as the symptom, and has repeatedly shown itself to be racially uneven in who it listens to, treats, and saves.
But once everything is collapsed into a single story, boundary-setting starts to look like delusion instead of self-protection. The essay subtly but decisively shifts the frame from “medical bias exists” to “people are ignoring reality,” and from “health discourse can be gnarly and violent” to “health is being selectively denied.” What disappears in that shift is the question of why those boundaries existed in the first place, and who they were meant to protect. The work those refusals were doing —against stigma, against dismissal, against harm — gets totally lost.
And that kind of flattening doesn’t happen by accident. It’s not just a rhetorical choice; it’s a structural one, and it's accelerated by the very influencer economy Lascano is (or was) operating inside; an ecosystem that can’t tolerate contradiction for long, and certainly can’t monetize it.
There’s an implicit assumption running through the essay that “body positive influencers” were ever meaningfully holding the full complexity of what body positivity was actually supposed to be about. But body positivity was never designed to be a brand strategy. It wasn’t meant to be optimized, monetized, or rendered endlessly legible. In short, it was a political interruption aimed at systems that required shame to function.
was doing a first aid course and it kept talking about how when applying first aid to a child you have to ask the PARENT for consent and how the child's consent is not enough unless you cannot reach the parent. and then immediately after there was a unit on shaken baby syndrome, and then mentioned abuse as a common source of children getting injured. and they didn't see the irony there. i later asked the instructor what to do about parental consent if the medical emergency was from the parent abusing the child and she was like "you still need to obtain parental consent. you can report the abuse though" not even acknowledging how fucked the whole system is. i hate it here. youth rights now
I hate you Ozempic craze I hate you 'heroin chic' I hate you weight loss ads on public radio I hate Burn Fat Fast ads every thirty seconds I hate you I hate you I hate you
once you notice how society, specially social media treats fat people you find yourself asking "is this video really "cringe" or is the person just fat"
Hey, pushback is fine, but the idea should be oriented towards coalition building. Pitting one group's oppression as bucking against another's ("most oppressed") seeds the opposite. Fatphobes are fatphobes - we want to see YOU do well, not to see you "win" at any cost, you know?
What you call the O slur, most people years ago would call the natural state of the body. Fat people are the single most oppressed minority, more oppressed than children and smokers.
Most people are genetically supposed to be at least 300 pounds. This is a fact.
It’s not mental illness to support fat people. It’s mental illness not to
I’ve heard accusations that this is a troll account. Not true! This blog is 100% sincere. Fatphobia is the most serious oppression in the world right now, and I think it’s important to highlight it.
This did it for me. This sealed the deal on this person being a troll.
"The most serious oppression in the world"? Do you live under a rock? Genuinely, are you a straight white wealthy male (would say man, but these reads as boy) who never considers anything past the reach of his own hand?
