145. The celebs and influencers let us down

Over the years, we’ve seen celebrities and influencers championing body positivity, rejecting diet culture and embracing self-acceptance. Many of us found comfort in their messages, feeling seen and supported in our own body positivity journeys.. 

But lately, there’s been a clear change. Some of the same people who built their platforms on rejecting weight loss culture have now started losing weight. 

Completely co-incidentally (yeh right….) the rise of GLP-1 injections such as Ozempic seems to have escalated this, and now their once-empowering messages have been replaced with posts about body “transformation” and the supposed benefits of shedding weight.

So, if you’ve felt let down by this, you’re not alone. Let’s talk about why this happens, why it hurts so much, and why your frustration is completely valid.

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Transcript

0:09

Welcome to the intuitive eating and body positivity podcast. I'm Terri and I'll be talking about all things intuitive eating, body positivity and health at every size, and shaking off weight stigma, diet culture and food rules so that we can all have a better relationship with food and our bodies. Hello, how's your week been? Has it been good? What's new with you? I wish we could actually have a conversation about this. I'd love to talk to you and be able to hear you talk back. Please promise me that when I ask you these questions and you're sat in the car driving to work in the morning, that when I say, hi, how are you? You go, oh, I'm fine, Terri, thanks. How are you? I will imagine that you'd do that anyway, even if you don't. I want to talk to you about something that comes up more and more regularly with my clients now. It's about celebrity and influencer body positivity stuff. Over the years we've seen celebrities and influencers really championing body positivity right? Rejecting diet culture, embracing self-acceptance. If you think of the likes of Lizzo, she was a massive influence for a lot of people, wasn't she? About body positivity and, you know, she's got her girls on stage who are also big girls when it comes to dancing and, you know, all of that. She really championed body positivity and then things started changing and this comes up in conversation quite a lot with my clients at the moment. So it must be more pronounced, it must be more of a thing. So I want to talk about it. I think it's important because people are feeling let down by this stuff and quite understandably so. So for a long time now, I think it's a good while, we have been seeing celebrities and influencers being more body positive. We have heard them, seen them being role models for us. We have seen them doing things that we want to do. We have heard them speaking out and giving these messages that reinforce what we're trying to enforce for ourselves. And we find comfort in those messages. We feel seen, we feel supported in a world that is obsessed with weight and beauty standards and it kind of felt like a shift was happening. Finally people in the public eye were challenging these toxic ideas that we have been fed for so long by the media, by diet companies, by beauty companies. But lately there's been this change and some of the people who have built their platforms on rejecting that weight loss culture have now started promoting weight loss. And I don't know if that's actually promoting weight loss, I don't know actually if I've got the right word there for that, because a lot of them are, they're losing weight and they're saying that it's for health reasons or they're just not acknowledging it at all, which I think is even worse actually. But we're seeing a difference in them. We're seeing this weight loss and quite substantial weight loss for some of these people. And it feels like this goes hand in hand with the rise of the GLP-1 injections, you know, things like Azempic. So now what we're seeing is these people are either losing weight and not talking about it, or they're losing weight, they're acknowledging it, but they're talking about it in terms of health benefits. And we're not gonna get into that in this episode. We're not gonna talk about the impact of losing weight on your health. We're not gonna do that. That's not what the topic of today is. What we're gonna talk about instead is how this makes you feel. When these celebrities, when these influencers go down this track and start backtracking on things that you have seen and heard and believed and feel supported by, how does that make you feel? If you feel let down by it, you are not alone. If you feel downright angry about it, you are not alone. The feeling of betrayal is real. It is not just about them changing their minds or making personal choices about their bodies because I do believe everybody has body autonomy so I'm not saying that that's wrong for them to change But it's about the way that their shift in that messaging affects the people who have once looked up to them. That's what bothers me. That's what bothers a lot of people that I've been talking to. The people who finally felt represented, you and I, who believed that they were part of a movement that was growing stronger, have now been left questioning everything. Because some role models in that, in this industry, some people who have been big voices in body positivity have now changed their tact and it feels like they've abandoned us, right? And I get it, I understand, And your hurt is valid, your frustration also completely valid. For years and years, diet culture told us that smaller was better. Magazines shamed women, especially, but celebrities for gaining weight. Social media influences pushed detox teas, crash diets, juicing, cleanses, fasting, all that sort of thing. And the message has always been the same. You are only worthy if you are thin. And then this stuff changed and more and more public figures started rejecting those narratives and they spoke out and they reassured us that we didn't need to lose weight to be happy or to be healthy and they showed us that confidence was not reserved for thin people and it was liberating and it made us feel seen. So then when those same people shift their messaging, whether that's subtly by encouraging weight loss or whether it's outright promoting some kind of restrictive eating or the injections for example, feels like a right punch in the gut doesn't it? And it makes you wonder if they ever truly believed in what they were saying. Did they mean it when they told us that all bodies were beautiful? Was it just something trendy to say at the time? Did they just jump on a bandwagon? And if they don't believe it anymore then what does that mean for us? Does that mean we were wrong to trust them? So this stuff really starts to feel personal, doesn't it? You start to question yourself for following them and believing in them and it somehow becomes, once again, a reflection on us and the things that we believed. Or if you're not questioning yourself and what you believed, it's definitely putting the celebs and the influencers in that spotlight. What are they doing? What do they actually believe? What did they actually believe? And it's not just about being misled, right? You see an influencer or a celebrity change their stance on this stuff and you feel misled. I get it, but it's deeper than that. For many of us, these people provided reassurance during some of our most vulnerable moments. We had them in our feeds so that on times where we were not feeling great about ourselves, we could go and look, see their messages, see what they were doing, and be motivated by them. They helped us believe that we didn't need to change ourselves. We didn't need to fit into society's narrow standards of beauty. And now when they start talking about this stuff as health or wellness or even just personal choice, then it sends a message to their audience, whether they intend it to or not. And that message is, well, maybe you should want to lose weight too. Does it make you question it like that? I wouldn't be surprised if it did, because you've been following everything that they've been saying for a good while probably, and now they change their voice, now they start to give a different message, and now maybe you're going, yeah, maybe I should do that too. And even if they don't say it directly, even if they don't directly say that weight loss is better, their actions speak louder than words for me. When someone once preached self-acceptance, and then they start posting about their diet or their body transformation, or they don't even start posting about it, they just start showing photos of themselves, then it's really hard not to feel like they're telling us that being in a bigger body is not actually okay after all. And This can be really damaging, incredibly damaging, especially for people who are already struggling with their relationship with food and their body. This can bring back to life old insecurities, old eating behaviors. It can make people feel like they're failing if they're not trying to lose weight. And it keeps happening. Now I don't want to, and I wanna defend them, I genuinely do not want to defend them for changing their voice. But let's look at the bigger picture, right? We're going to talk about it. Let's look at the actual full big picture of this. Now, the reality is that we live in a society that constantly reinforces this idea that thinness is equal to success, right? Celebrities and influencers are not immune to this pressure. And no matter how much they might have believed in body positivity at 1 point, they still live in a world that values smaller bodies over larger ones. And if you imagine the pressure that you've got on you in a relatively normal world to be smaller, to eat in a different way, to exercise, to look different, to wear different clothes, you know, whatever it is, you think of the things that cause that pressure on you, Then consider what that must be like for a celebrity. Constantly in the public eye, that has got to be intense, right? It's gotta be intense. People in bigger bodies face massive criticism, even when they're promoting self-love and body acceptance. And the pressure to conform doesn't just disappear because somebody has spoken out about them in the past. It lingers. It lingers. It's got to have. These people will not have been immune to it before they were famous and it's only going to be emphasized now that they're famous and I think fair dues to them for having that voice for such a long time. Maybe they've been worn down. Maybe they feel like they've got no choice but to give in. Even if they totally believe what they've stood for, maybe it just got the better of them. And they thought, actually, now here is a tool that I can use. You know, if we're thinking about the injections for example, this is massive isn't it? These injections have come up the last couple of years and now these celebrities and influencers seem to be losing weight very rapidly. You can't tell me that's a complete coincidence. So maybe these people have looked at this, maybe they've been offered it, maybe somebody has suggested it to them and they've gone, actually this feels like a really easy way to deal with this. And maybe they do believe in the body positivity messages, but maybe they also would prefer to be smaller. For these people they've probably got a lot of resources, they've probably got a lot of money, they can try this stuff, they've got the medical professionals around them that are promoting and pushing and suggesting and they've got managers that are saying, well, if you do this, then you could have this and you could be that. There's probably an awful lot of influence around these people all the time, I think. Money must also play a huge role in these shifts. The diet and wellness industries are massive, and there is bound to be a lot of financial incentive for these people to lose weight. Many influencers rely on sponsorships and brand deals, right, for their income. Not the celebs, obviously, not the big celebs, they make their own money, but there probably is a degree of the same stuff going on for them as well. But many influencers on social media, they will rely on sponsorships and brand deals for some income. And let's not be ignorant about this, brands will overwhelmingly favor people who fit conventional beauty standards. So if an influencer starts losing followers or is struggling to secure a partnership because they are no longer perceived as aspirational, then maybe they might feel pressured to change their approach, maybe. Obviously that's not totally aligned for the celebs who have built their brand based on body positivity. There are without a doubt some people out there that have built their name based on the fact that they stand up for people in bigger bodies. They stand for body positivity. There's quite a lot of people in this sort of industry that are fashion people, fashion influencers for example. So they will have built up brands, deals and sponsorships and things from people who are aligned or rather brands that are aligned with what they're talking about. However, that's not to say that there aren't these other brands knocking on their doors going, well if you could just lose a little bit of weight here's an offer for you. So who knows, who knows but there's bound to be a monetary aspect to it there somewhere isn't there? And then of course some of these people might actually genuinely believe that they're making the right choice for themselves. They're doing it for health, they're doing it for well-being, whatever their reason is. What they fail to acknowledge is that their public platform comes with a responsibility. So when they are promoting weight loss, whether that is intentional or not, they are contributing to a culture that tells people that their bodies are not good enough as they are. I think some of them underestimate how much we notice as well. So there's 1 influencer out there that I'm not going to go down the route of naming everybody's names, but there's 1 influencer out there who does a lot of clothes, clothes reels and things like fashion for bigger people. And she tends to do a comparison actually between what it looks like on a big person, what it looks like on a straight-sized person and they're quite good. But she's dropped to dress size and nobody knows why that is. She hasn't acknowledged it on her social media or anything. It may well be something medical, it may be unintentional, her body might just be changing, but she also might be actively losing weight, she might be dieting, she might be doing this and the other. We don't know what she's doing. And that is her prerogative, I guess, to not talk about it because that is not the focus of her feed. Her focus is on the fashion, that sort of thing, but her voice has for a long time now been about loving yourself, body positivity, body acceptance, all of that sort of thing. She's doing interviews on other podcasts and things, still talking about it and yet she's not acknowledging it. So whereas she has the right to not acknowledge it, she has the right to not talk about it, I also think it's unfair to the people that follow her for that kind of messaging. I think it's unfair that they follow her and see that she's losing weight and she's not mentioning it. It's really, really tough. I wouldn't want to be her having to justify my every move. I wouldn't want to be explaining why I have changed a dress size. But also she's got a responsibility As an influencer, as a big voice, as somebody who has quite a large community of followers, she has a duty of care essentially to those people following her. Now we don't know, we don't know do we, what her reasons are. It could be medical, she could have something going on, she could be stressed, she could, you know, there's lots of reasons why she might be losing weight. And we don't know if it is even ongoing weight loss. Maybe it's just a one-off kind of shift in body size. Who knows? Who knows? But it is out there for us all to see. So it's very difficult, isn't it? But they do have a responsibility. They really do have a responsibility when they've got a large amount of followers. Whether they are intentionally promoting that weight loss or not, they are contributing to that message. And I really do think that they should address it. Even if it's once just to say this is it, this is what's happening, personal reasons I won't go into it or yes I am on a diet or whatever it is I think they owe it to their followers to do that. So if you're feeling let down, or hurt, or angry, or confused, or you're questioning things, that is completely understandable. Because you have trusted these people. You have believed their message and it's really natural to feel betrayed when they suddenly change direction and leave you in the same place you were wondering where that leaves you. But your frustration doesn't mean you're bitter or jealous. It just means you care about this stuff. It means that you recognize how harmful diet culture is and how important it is to have public figures who are standing up against it. And it means that you understand that body positivity isn't just a personal preference. It is the big movement now And it's rooted in inclusivity and self-acceptance and rejecting the idea that our worth is tied to our size. So maybe you even feel a little bit sad for these people. Feel sad and confused at why they would do it and the harm that they're gonna do to themselves by going down this path. All of these feelings, very valid, right? All of these feelings, normal. So where do you go from here? How do you deal with this? How do you continue to embrace body positivity when some of these people that you've looked up to seem to have moved on from it? Well, first it's important to remember that body positivity does not belong to 1 person. It is not defined by a celebrity. It is not defined by an influencer. It does not lose its power just because 1 or 2 people that you follow have decided to distance themselves from it. It does not change the message, it does not change how damaging diet culture is, it does not change the way that you can look after yourself. So instead of relying on public figures for validation, Focus on what body positivity means to you. Think about how far you've come in your journey. Think about how your messaging has changed, what you believe has changed. You don't need an influencer to tell you that you're worthy. You already are. It's nice to go on social media and to see these people and hear them reinforcing it. But You don't need them to do that because you know that you already are worthy. All the same though, it's nice to have these messages, right? So, Consider curating your social media feed again, so that it aligns with your values. If you are following somebody whose content no longer makes you feel good about yourself, it is okay to unfollow them. If you are a big Lizzo fan, you can still love her music without following her social media. If there are influencers that you follow that you've really enjoyed up until now, but their content is changing and it's making you question this stuff, it is okay to unfollow them. And newsflash, they will not know you've gone. So you don't have to feel bad. It can feel like that though, can't it? When you unfollow somebody, you're like, oh no, but you know, I don't want to unfollow them. Don't worry about them, they will be fine. You look after yourself. So it is okay to unfollow the people that no longer make you feel good. It's okay to unfollow the people that make you question yourself again. Find voices that are consistent with this message. Find people who do continue to advocate for body acceptance, without backtracking when it becomes inconvenient anymore. Just go and find yourself some new people to follow. Post in Facebook groups if that's what you need to do and ask for suggestions of body positive accounts that you can follow. But it doesn't have to be a Facebook group. I mean, you could use any groups you're a part of, or you could post on social media yourself and say, who do I follow, give me some suggestions. There are lots of ways of finding this information. If you are in the membership of mine, for example, I know we've talked about this a couple of times but we haven't deep-dived into it yet. So, post in the group, post in our chat groups and just say, share, go on, tell me whose content makes you feel good at the moment. There are lots of different ways of finding these sources but there are plenty of people out there still singing from this hymn sheet. There are plenty of influencers and celebrities out there who do still stand for it. You just need to go out and find them. But most importantly, trust yourself, okay? You don't need to follow what other people are doing. Your body is your own. Your worth has never been dependent on the opinions of influencers. If you didn't ever hear from that influencer or celebrity again, that doesn't change your value. Just because they've changed their mind doesn't mean you have to question everything you've learnt about body acceptance and self-worth. You are still enough. You are still worthy. And you don't need to change yourself to fit in with somebody else's idea of beauty. The body positivity movement was never about 1 person. It is about all of us. It's about all of us standing together, refusing to shrink ourselves, refusing to try and make others comfortable. So if you felt let down or frustrated or hurt by the action of these celebs and influencers, then just know that I understand and I get it and your feelings are justified, but their choices do not define you. Your journey is still valid, your progress is still valid, your self-worth will not waver because a celebrity has changed their mind. So we're all good, right? If you do want to come and join a group of people who understand this stuff though and you do want to hash it out with some people who get it and who feel the same as you, I'd love to have you in the membership. I really would. This month, at the time of recording, we're going to be talking about health and how you approach health in an intuitive eating type way, in a body positive way. So that's lovely. And we've got open group coaching sessions, so that's open chat and questioning about all things body positivity and intuitive eating and sharing experiences and learning from each other and supporting each other and all that sort of stuff. And then, yeah, there's the session on health from an intuitive eating lens. And then there's the chat group and there's all the old replays in there that you can go and watch, you know, go and watch the old sessions. When I say old, I don't mean old, I mean there are some old ones in there now, but when you're in the membership, you've got all the replays from all the previous coaching sessions. So while you're waiting for a coaching session, you can watch a coaching session or listen to a coaching session. It's really good. There's a lot in there. We have talked about a lot of stuff, I can promise you. But yeah, come and join us. The link is in the show notes. I would really, really love to have you in there. Next week, all being well, there will be a guest episode. I am talking to a guy called Brett. He owns a plus size, I don't know if it is plus size when it comes to men. I don't really know much about men's body conversations, but Brett owns a company for bigger guys, clothing for bigger guys, and he's going to come and talk to me. When I've talked to him before, we have spent literally a couple of hours talking about all things men's body positivity. And it is fascinating. It is so interesting. And Brett's a really nice guy as well. He's really, really nice. He's easy to listen to. He's got a really fun social media feed. He's like TikTok and whatever. He's like TikTok and whatever. You know what I mean? He's on TikTok and whatever. He talks about life from a fat guy's perspective and I thought this might be an interesting topic of conversation because although you may not be male, I mean you might be male, my audience is not 100% females, But if you are listening to this and you are female, then you might be interested to hear this from a male perspective because it might give you an understanding of your fella's body image. Or just to be more understanding of how men feel about their bodies in the world if they're in a bigger body. I feel like I'm waffling now. Brett will say this much better than I can. So I'm going to meet with him and we're going to have a conversation and then hopefully that will be next week's episode. It's going to be great, honestly, you really are going to want to listen to it. Until then, take it easy, take care, go find some new social media accounts to follow. Drop me a message if you've got anything to say. You can WhatsApp me. That links in the show notes as well. Just talk to me, guys. Talk to me. Take care. I'll speak to you soon.