Fine, I’ll Say It: I Hate It When Plus-Size Celebrities Lose Weight

Just because young people know most media images are retouched doesn’t change the fact that they feel impacted by their presence.

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 fu**ed-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 internalise those ideas, the worse our body image is.”