Is It Ever Okay To Talk About Celebrities’ Weight Loss?

A few weeks ago, I told a friend something I was embarrassed to admit out loud: As the promotional tour for Wicked overtook the internet, I couldn’t stop thinking about the extremely thin appearances of the film’s lead actresses. I found myself checking the comments below posts of their red-carpet pictures and interview clips to see if anyone else noticed, too. I was simultaneously desperate to validate my suspicions that something was seriously wrong and disturbed by the growing obsession with these performers’ bodies. And I was disappointed with myself for caring and clicking at all.

Nitpicking other women’s bodies feels taboo and regressive, harkening back to a time in the early 2000s when Tumblr was full of eating-disorder tips and when tabloids furiously covered Jessica Simpson’s “weight battle” based on a single pair of high-waisted jeans. Anyone who was a teenager then remembers vividly how celebrity bodies were used as grist for a body-shaming mill, whether they were deemed too skinny or too fat. Seeing those images of extremely thin women everywhere was followed by the nagging feeling that we should be that thin, too. Here I was, all these years later, watching social media obsess about a different group of women — with jokes and speculation and sanctimonious concern and glib remarks about “how eating disorders are back” — and it all read very retro to me, very Us Weekly circa 2006.

But these days, shrinking celebrities and influencers seem more visible than ever online. The internet loves a shocking body transformation, especially if it’s unexplained by the person in question — more room for Reddit-based detective work, for speculative plastic surgeons to weigh in, and for reading between the lines of Instagram posts or lyrics. And while we know it’s wrong to focus on strangers’ bodies, what’s clear from the surrounding conversation is that when your favorite singer or influencer suddenly drops a significant amount of weight, it’s impossible not to notice. And even harder not to internalize it.

“Am I the only fat fuck left,” wrote one person on X last week, responding to new photos of actress Barbie Ferreira looking much slimmer than she did on Euphoria. Others take a concerned stance about their favorite star’s weight in the Instagram comments or the group chat (“Is she okay?”) or express dismay to see weight loss and extremely thin celebrities celebrated as the ideal. “Just seeing their images on every social no matter what is triggering TF out of me,” wrote someone else. “I don’t like that we’re ‘not allowed’ to talk about something that is right there.”

Well, people are talking about it, usually privately but increasingly publicly, and often with a resigned sense of sadness that we didn’t make as much progress as we thought during the body-positivity boomlet of the 2010s. “There was a period when bodies of different shapes were celebrated in the mainstream — it was a feel-good moment,” Elaine “Lainey” Lui told me. As the founder of LaineyGossip.com, she’s been writing about celebrities and tracking the conversation about their bodies since the early 2000s. (And not always in ways she’s proud of: “I said irresponsible things that definitely would be called out now.”) But that feel-good moment seems over. “We have dropped the pretense, and fat-shaming and anti-fatness is not as hidden anymore,” Lui said. Comments sections are full of speculative diagnoses. Lui remembered how in the early days of gossip blogs, it was normal to shame a thin actress by saying she “looks like she needs to eat a sandwich.” That phrase mostly died with the early-aughts tabloid culture, but the impulse lives on. “Is simply commenting underneath a post ‘Ozempic’ the new ‘go eat a sandwich’?” she asked.

“As a fat person, I will say, I don’t think we ever stopped body-shaming,” says Virginia Sole-Smith, the author of Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture and the newsletter Burnt Toast. She tells me the body-positivity movement that gained traction in the 2010s and started as a way to dismantle anti-fatness ultimately wasn’t effective because it put pressure on fat people to love their bodies without addressing anti-fat bias in our health system, communities, and workplaces. Then came drugs like Ozempic and Zepbound that have saved lives but have also struck a cultural nerve, carrying a stigma and eliciting no shortage of judgmental opinions about who should be taking these drugs and why.

Whatever lessons we learned over the last decade about respecting body autonomy seem to be falling away. Blame “anti-woke” backlash, blame Ozempic — but online and in real life, everyone seems more comfortable judging other people’s weight, high or low, especially when weight-loss medications are involved.

“If you go to L.A., everyone says, ‘Everyone here is on Ozempic … My dermatologist is giving out Ozempic.’ I’m like, is that okay?” says Tefi Pessoa, a TikTok star and red-carpet host who has spoken frequently about her own experiences with disordered eating and recovery.

“The casual way in which people are happy to discuss these drugs now has just opened up the floor for people to feel more comfortable openly commenting or critiquing other people’s appearances again,” says Christina Grasso, co-founder of the Chain, a nonprofit peer-support group for people coping with eating disorders in the fashion and entertainment industries.

Megan Williams, 25, has been tracking the conversation around women’s bodies online and is worried about what she sees as a “cultural shift back toward thinness at any cost.” As someone who has recovered from anorexia and been both severely overweight and underweight at different points in her life, Williams knows “it’s more acceptable to point out extremes on the body spectrum when it relates to fatness.” She also knows how dangerous extreme thinness can be and is increasingly aware of how it is openly celebrated on TikTok and X. “I think my concern is that we have parasocial relationships with celebrities, and we tend to overvalue their privacy and undervalue the impact they’re having on real-life, non-celebrity people,” she says. “If your body is being used as ‘thinspo,’ it’s important to participate in the conversation instead of ignoring it.”

That may be asking too much from celebrities who are struggling to meet unrealistic beauty standards on a super-heightened scale. In her 2020 documentary, Taylor Swift — narrating footage of herself from 2014 and 2015 — revealed that she felt pressure to starve herself at different points in her career. But she wouldn’t have been able to admit it then, even to herself. “That wasn’t how my body was supposed to be, I just didn’t really understand that at the time … I would have defended it to anyone who said, ‘I’m concerned about you.’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ Of course I eat, it’s perfectly normal, I just exercise a lot. And I did exercise a lot, I just wasn’t eating.” It was a brave and emotional admission from someone who deals with unimaginable levels of public criticism. But it didn’t change the fact that, during those years, millions of young women looked up to her and thought at one point or another: I wish I looked like her.

By virtue of being public figures in a celebrity-obsessed culture, celebrities reinforce beauty standards that contribute to our thin obsession, whether they mean to or not. They’re just one factor of many, says Cara Bohon, a clinical psychologist and executive at Equip Health, a virtual program for treating eating disorders. But “social media has really increased its presence in how we are viewing the world and viewing society.”

She said a common step in eating-disorder treatment involves “curating” social-media feeds to block certain triggering people or dieting accounts. The thinner celebrities become, the harder it is to disengage from that body ideal. “We need to have a larger conversation about the value of body diversity, of Hollywood casting, which would go a long way toward us seeing less normalization of eating disorders,” said Sole-Smith.

And less normalization of “body trends,” which are mirroring the shift toward thinness. The Hollywood Reporter recently reported that, in a departure from the BBL-happy 2010s, plastic surgeons are seeing patients dissolve their fillers, reverse butt-lifts, and request breast reductions. In doing so, they are still following the Kardashians’ hugely influential example: The sisters today look leaner and less curvy than they did a decade ago. Kourtney Kardashian now even sells a GLP-1 supplement that promises to “support weight loss.”

“A year ago, it was easier to remind ourselves, no, there is no currency in thinness,” said the Chain’s other co-founder, Ruthie Friedlander. “And now …does it even matter that I’m recovered because there’s gonna be this medication, this is going to be thrown in my face all the time, and the standard’s not actually going to change?”

Pessoa sees the online obsession with women’s bodies and weight loss as driven by a complicated mix of emotions, including jealousy. “We grew up in a society where to be thin is to be envied … it’s almost we feel as these, like, drooling hyenas over thinness,” she said, adding that she tries to speak openly about this feeling with her friends to acknowledge that it is “normal to be jealous of how thin someone is on Ozempic,” she said. “Just because it’s normal doesn’t mean that it’s right or you should live this way.”

Sole-Smith says that the internet’s fascination with extreme examples of weight loss among celebrities also helps “normalize all the other shit we do, which is actually still pretty disordered.” If a strikingly thin celebrity says they only drink cayenne-pepper water, for example, then suddenly that paleo diet doesn’t seem so unreasonable by comparison.

My friend, whom I’ll call Emily, told me that she had been overwhelmed by clips of Ariana Grande in recent months. She was a huge fan of the singer and had followed her for years. But Emily had previously struggled with a restrictive eating disorder, and the latest images of Grande helped push her back down a dangerous path. “I started searching for her on eating disorder Twitter, and there are all these threads cataloguing these tips for weight loss,” said Emily. She told me about how Grande had once posted about eating only a plate of strawberries for dinner. “I started eating a lot less,” she said. Within a few weeks, Emily realized she had a problem. She opened up to her husband, blocked pro-anorexia accounts on her feeds, and managed to pull herself out of a relapse. She had never been so clearly influenced by images of a celebrity before. “It’s not like seeing images of extremely skinny people triggers me on a regular basis — it doesn’t,” she said.

So what changed? Emily couldn’t fully explain it. But she told me she felt especially triggered when Grande released a video on TikTok last year responding to concerned comments from fans about her weight and changing appearance. “I know personally, for me, the body that you’ve been comparing my current body to was the unhealthiest version of my body. I was on a lot of antidepressants and drinking on them and eating poorly, and at the lowest point of my life when I looked the way you consider ‘my healthy,’ but that, in fact, wasn’t ‘my healthy.’” Grande asked her followers to stop commenting on others’ bodies and spoke about the pressure of being so closely watched by the public. “You never know what someone is going through,” she said.

But there was probably nothing Grande could have said to satisfy Emily. As someone who had her own experience with an eating disorder, she remembered the ways she had once denied having any issues with food. She was worried about Grande and didn’t understand why everyone else wasn’t worried, too. When the singer’s fans shut down anyone who shared the same concerns online, it felt personal. “We need to get over political correctness to have a common language for talking about this, because clearly it’s very hard,” Emily said.

That’s a conversation that’s better had offline, said Bohon, where there is more space for nuanced, constructive dialogue. She’s right, of course, but that advice is not always easy to take. Not everyone has friends or family they can turn to for healthy, nonjudgmental dialogue. And it’s nearly impossible to completely insulate yourself from body commentary online.

Friedlander agreed with Bohon. “Make time for yourself with people that you trust to say, ‘Hey, this is bringing up a lot of stuff for me that I haven’t felt in a while.’ Or, ‘Remember when we were in high school, and we looked at all those magazines, like, doesn’t this seem kind of familiar?’” It does feel familiar. And it still sucks.