Body positivity & weight loss.
The “Ozempic era” has reignited every tired, judgmental take on weight loss: that it’s cheating, that it’s purely about aesthetics, that it’s a moral failing or triumph. But the latest round of discourse—accusing women in Hollywood of betraying body positivity, harming body diversity, and perpetuating harmful beauty because they lost weight —might be the worst take yet.
Of course, this narrative is aimed at women. Sure, people discuss men’s weight loss, but I’ve yet to see them accused of ‘hurting the cause.’ It’s just another reminder that no matter what women do with their bodies, we can’t win. We are constantly told we need to shrink our bodies for health. We are told that existing happily and publicly in our larger bodies is ‘promoting obesity’. I’m told I can’t possibly know anything about nutrition because of the size of my body. I think it’s safe to assume that in Hollywood, women are told they are too fat for particular roles and other opportunities.
The true betrayal of body positivity? Framing it as being purely about weight and suggesting it requires a commitment to never changing your body for the benefit of others.
What Body Positivity Actually Means
Body positivity isn’t about freezing people at a particular size. It’s about autonomy, acceptance, and respect for all bodies—regardless of size, shape, skin colour, gender, or ability. It’s about understanding that bodies are valuable for more than their appearance and that a person’s worth isn’t tied to how they look.
Our relationships with our bodies are deeply personal and contextual, regardless of body positivity. There is no single correct way to do it. Not all weight-loss comes with body negativity. Someone else’s body changing cannot harm your relationship with your body.
For me, body positivity means respecting my body enough not to torture it into a certain shape or size. But that doesn’t mean I’m committing to staying this exact size forever. Bodies change—because of genetics, medications, wealth, health, stress, time, support systems, or pure circumstance. Whether those changes are intentional or not, they do not affect my body’s value or my respect for it. Bigger, smaller, stronger, weaker, harder, softer—it’s still my body, the vessel that carries me through life, and it’s still worth caring for.
And, changing my body should never change how I see or judge other bodies (the awful idea that people often have that because they achieved a particular body status, everyone else could do the same if they just tried hard enough is one of the most toxic in diet culture).
The Myth of "Harming" Body Diversity
The idea that a few celebrities losing weight has harmed body diversity in Hollywood? That’s laughable. If your version of diversity is so fragile that it crumbles when a handful of people change size, then it was never true diversity to begin with.
You can’t just allow a few larger women in—many of whom were only “curvy” by Hollywood’s impossible standards and would be considered thin anywhere else—and then expect them to maintain that size on your behalf. That’s not inclusion. That’s just another way of policing bodies.
Hollywood already has countless harmful beauty standards. But one of the worst? The pressure for bodies not to change. No wrinkles. No signs of aging. No shifting weight. As if bodies are meant to stay frozen in time.
If we can push back against the idea that women must stay thin, taught and wrinkle free forever, then we also have to accept that sometimes, bodies get smaller, too.
If we only celebrate body diversity when it stays within certain limits, we’re not actually advocating for autonomy or inclusion—we’re just moving the goalposts of control.
Campaign Against the System, Not the Women
If you really do think these women changed their bodies because of harmful beauty standards, then campaign against the harm beauty standards, not the women impacted by them.
No one owes anyone an explanation or justification for their body.
Not now. Not ever.
