How Ozempic ate away the plus-size movement

As a body-neutral fat activist, I think everyone is allowed to want the body they want and do what they want to get it. But as a human, it breaks my heart that what Serena is wasn’t enough, and she felt she had to do this. Maybe she had medical or sports reasons for needing that weight loss. Maybe she is, like most women, deeply stressed by the way her body changes as it goes through life and age. Yes, I am deeply disappointed that a Black feminist icon now stands for a message that will almost certainly destroy the mental and physical health of many people, mostly women and girls.

But the thing that really causes the deep grief I am feeling is that the world has, so quickly, turned away from the beautiful cause of fat liberation.

Only four years ago, Old Navy stores in the US had huge banners saying 0–30, all sizes in store and online. Everybody was adopting body neutrality language and trying to sell themselves as fat positive. You know a movement is really taking off when Instagram influencers are climbing over one another to claim space in it. In 2019, when I started Fat. So? Podcast with Pallavi Verma, I myself was just beginning to understand why I had all this anger and rage at a world that was dismissing me and abusing me for something I really had no control over. And yes, it really isn’t about control. It’s about genetics, eating disorders, childhood and adolescent eating patterns, and so much more we know so little about because we cannot be bothered to research it properly.

As I made the podcast, I began to see the inherent injustice in being pigeonholed and stereotyped in a second, having all these ideas attached to me with no evidence, just because people looked at my body and decided it was the wrong size. I must be fat, and lazy, and greedy; I must be stupid, and slow, and stiff—how else could I continue to choose to be in this body, one that was a literal manifestation of consumption and excess that definitely meant I would die of a heart attack, a stroke, or diabetes before I was 50? Meanwhile, I had tried every diet and exercise program I could find, including Herbalife, Omnilife, and pills that inhibited the absorption of fat in my intestines, which meant that fat sometimes just came out as it was, unannounced. I had a personal trainer and worked out three times a week. I danced. I was actually stronger than most of my thin women friends. And all my blood tests were perfectly fine.

WHEN BEING PLUS-SIZED WAS OKAY

Even though my own body and life told me I was fine, it took discovering the inspiring work of people like researcher and fat activist Ragen Chastain and Substantia Jones and Shooglet, pioneering photographers of naked fat bodies, to realize that maybe I was fine in my fat body as long as I could do all the things I wanted to, and my actual medical tests showed nothing to worry about. And then I discovered Lizzo. This beautiful fat woman, an utter dynamo, dancing in 6-inch heels, playing the flute and singing live in concerts night after night, and in a fat body she showed no shame for. Her dancers were fat too! It seemed like maybe there was going to be space for fat people to just exist in their bodies?

Then the pandemic hit, and “obesity" was named a comorbidity. We went back to living in terror. Meanwhile, people who weren’t fat found it was impossible to force that control over their bodies anymore. They discovered the joys of comfortable clothes and shoes, and no longer in the unforgiving public eye began to see themselves with some grace and affection. Which brings us to 2021, when all the big retailers in the US were selling large sizes. Indian fashion labels like Sabyasachi were trotting out plus-sized models (who were just regular people, but it was a win), and actual plus-size focused brands such as Gia, Spirit Animal and Bliss Club were emerging. Finally we were starting to claim space. I went to doctors and their immediate prescription was no longer bariatric surgery or “lose weight." It was a brave new world, where we began to think that fatness was no longer a failure, a sin, or a curse.

And just as we were as a society beginning to consider this idea, along came GLP-1 agonists. They are a truly revolutionary class of drugs, because of the way they have transformed diabetes. But when the drug companies realised they could provoke (temporary) weight loss, and formulate the drug to maximize this side effect, that’s when they took off. So now, here we are, in the Ozempic era, and it’s suddenly even more permitted than ever before to seek and approve of weight loss, and to condemn those who don’t lose weight because “what’s your excuse now there’s a pill?"

And then they began to fall—all these fat (or not thin) women who stood up and demanded acceptance, who showed us we could also be celebrities, we could also do things like win Olympic medals, all these women began to mysteriously become thinner, while swearing they weren’t on GLP-1s. Then it became okay to say they were on them. And then we have Serena Williams, opening up about how this drug is health care because it helped her lose those last 31lbs she just couldn’t before.

The pressure our society puts on celebrity women to be eternally youthful, thin, and beautiful is horrifying. I cannot blame them for giving in and trying to live up to that standard especially in our current panopticon of society where you don’t get five minutes of privacy. It’s not fair to ask them to stand as bulwarks. But it changed my life that some of them did, and it changed the lives of many others too. Which is why I mourn for the Lizzo who said “It’s lazy for me to just say I’m body positive at this point. It’s easy. I would like to be body-normative. I want to normalize my body," to Vogue for her cover interview in 2020, when Lizzo today has this to say: “When you finally get Ozempic allegations after 5 months of weight training and calorie deficit," annoyed that her effort to have a normalized body is being “devalued."

Meanwhile, what of us regular women? How do we cope with this bombardment of images and ideas that our bodies need to be perfect? On the question of what women can do, Tanvi Geetha Ravishankar, a fat activist who goes by the handle @thechubbytwirler on Instagram says, “The first step is recognising that this messaging is not neutral; it’s profit driven. Entire industries thrive on making us feel broken so they can sell us a fix. Once you see that clearly, you stop internalising it as the truth."

She urges women to build “your own comfort toolkit," perhaps by following on social media people who look like you and are living full, happy lives or by making sure you wear “clothes that actually fit and feel good, instead of punishing yourself with sizes that don’t." Acknowledging that it’s difficult to do, she recommends that you “practise separating your body from your worth. Your body is not the most interesting thing about you…it’s just the vessel that lets you live, love, work, dance, eat samosas and exist in this world."

Psychologist and therapist Itisha Peerbhoy, also a fat woman, agrees. “Most women find that left to themselves, they see beauty in their own bodies. Remaining yoked to their own experiences of body, sexuality and emotion, staying true to this deeply personal experience can drive home how personal beauty is." Peerbhoy also recommends seeking out diverse representation. Like Ravishankar, she suggests we curate our social media, and also seek community. “It leads to more conversations about living in different size bodies and how life is experienced both differently as well as identically despite as well as because of size."

Ameya Nagarajan is an editor, podcaster and fat activist based in Bengaluru.