If you've never been fat, you just don't get it

On Remi Bader (and everyone else)

Instagram screenshot | Remi Bader

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Culture writer Kyndall Cunningham from Vox emailed me this week asking for my thoughts on the backlash to influencer Remi Bader’s¹ weight loss surgery. I’ll share the link to her story when it’s out, but want to expand here on one of the questions Kyndall asked: What are the critics of Remi’s choices missing in this conversation?

Her critics are pissed, according to Grace Conneely-Nolan in the Quinnipiac Chronicle, that Remi has “turn[ed] her back on the community that made her famous,” which is, I guess, the online body positivity community.

Well, in 2023 Remi told The Cut that she “never asked to the be the face of a movement” and said “I don’t like being called body positive,” so let’s start there.

Remi built her fan base partially from making “realistic clothing haul” videos when she was a size 14-16, and would call out brands for not having plus sizes. As her following grew she worked with brands like Victoria’s Secret Pink and Revolve to expand their sizes; she helped Revolve expand its size chart up to a 3X. From The Cut:

“But I also started getting backlash from the body-positive community,” Remi said. “The whole plus-size community on TikTok went against me, saying things like, ‘I can’t believe she’s getting credit for this and she’s only going up to 3X.’ And so I went back to Revolve right before the launch, and we ended up pushing to a 4X at the very last minute. Still, people in the community weren’t happy.”

Another reason why certain people in the plus-size community aren’t on my side is because I will openly talk about being unhappy with my body. When I say, ‘I’m not the happiest right now,’ or ‘I don’t feel great,’ people will say ‘Remi’s fatphobic.’ But I’ve gained probably 80 pounds over the past few years. I’m only 27 and I’m getting a lot of health problems.”

What does “body positivity” mean at this point, exactly? Because while I continue to define it as “the movement to accept our bodies, regardless of size, shape, skin tone, gender, and physical abilities,” Remi’s detractors seem to define it as something like “the movement to ensure famous plus-size people are perpetually enamored of their bodies and never lose weight.”²

So what community has Remi turned her back on, here — the one that lobbed shit at her for “only” expanding the size range of a major corporation by 3?³ The one that condemned her for honesty about her bodily experience?

Here are some essential truths: It can be incredibly difficult to be fat in this world, so fat people do what they can to cope with that difficulty, and some fat people are willing and able to cope in different ways than their critics might.

Apparently body confidence and self-acceptance — which Remi said she couldn’t always access anyway, which is normal — were not the only coping mechanisms she needed, so she had weight loss surgery. What I think Remi’s critics are also missing is empathy for that decision. If they’re not or have never been fat, they can’t fully empathize, and if they are fat, I think their fear stands in the way of their empathy: They fear that body confidence and self-acceptance can’t be enough for them, either, so their only choices are scary ones: surgery, weight loss meds, punishing diets, or resignation to hating themselves forevermore. I understand these fears because I was fat for several years of my life.

Since I was fat, I also understand why anyone might do anything to not be fat anymore. It’s not that the desire for a not-fat body is necessarily healthy, morally upstanding, politically correct, ideologically pure, whatever. Perhaps it is none of those things. But fat acceptance, fat justice, fat liberation et al. movements exist explicitly because the world is hostile to and deeply uncomfortable for a lot of fat people. Pretending this is not the case invalidates their lived experiences and the work of these movements.

What Remi’s critics are missing and what a lot of people seem hesitant to admit, though, is that these movements — while they are necessary correctives for anti-fat biases and are helpful for many people — can only go so far for some of us. Most fat people, I believe, are deeply wounded by what they’ve experienced in their bodies, and any fat person who is a public figure is subject to a level of scrutiny, judgement, and shaming inconceivable to most people. Oprah was the target of similar criticism in 2023 when she told People magazine she uses a weight loss medication. I wrote:

But money and power do not necessarily heal a person’s most painful psychic wounds — wherever you go, there you are and all that — and if those wounds concern their public-facing body, fame only deepens them. Nothing about Oprah’s decision surprises me.

I think it’s likely that some of Remi’s self-love moments were a kind of “fake it ‘til you make it” effort — that’s not a criticism or an accusation that she’s a phony; I mean that she was trying on a way of feeling better in her body that was available to her at the time and was optimistic about it, so she shared the good word with her audience. I’m sure she did feel good about herself and her body sometimes, but clearly the moments of struggle were more profound than the moments of joy, so she’s coping how she can now. Why does this piss people off so much?

Conneely-Nolan wrote in the Chronicle article linked above that, “No one cares that she lost weight; it’s about the lack of transparency.” I beg your pardon, but be so fucking for real right now. Caring when celebrities lose weight is practically our national pastime. People went nuts when Adele lost 100 pounds and she never positioned herself as a body-positive icon and didn’t speak about her weight. She was just a big woman in public, which apparently means she represented and upheld the interests and ethics of entire cultural movements whether she liked it or not. Oprah was transparent and people still got pissed. Be real about why you’re mad. Here’s why I think it is:

People care when celebrities and public-facing people lose weight because they rely on external figures to inform and support their own body image and body-related values. This is a huge mistake, whether we’re talking about famous people, Olympic athletes, or influencers like Remi. There’s nothing wrong with being pleased by representation of bodies that look like yours, or taking cues from others about how to feel better. These things have to be a supplement, though, to the real work of feeling good in and about your body: identifying your own values and acting accordingly.

Relying on someone else’s body and behaviors to help you feel good about yourself will probably break your heart. Other people act upon their bodily autonomy for all kinds of reasons you’ll never understand and aren’t entitled to understand, and while I don’t mean to be too harsh here, in the so-called Ozempic Era you should probably get used to “body positive” influencers losing weight and develop some understanding about why they might make that decision unless you’re determined to drive yourself insane.

For most people the calculation is simple even if it doesn’t strike you as noble: it’s still really hard to be fat and until it gets meaningfully easier culturally and systemically, which might not happen in our lifetime, most people will take the shortest route to relief. That’s not lazy. That’s mostly about trying to lessen emotional and physical pain.

If, like me (and in some cases Remi), you’ve not experienced your health falling apart in your 20s because of your rapid weight gain, you’ve not grappled with the interminable hell of an eating disorder that drives you to annihilate yourself with food, you’ve not had things like “fat bitch” screamed at you on the street while minding your own business, you’ve not been able to visit anywhere from the doctor’s office to holiday dinners with family without the great problem of your body being up for discussion, you’ve never felt your sleep quality, libido, and energy almost entirely sapped after gaining 30 pounds in half a year, and you’ve never felt like you are constantly wearing your greatest insecurity and deepest wound around your neck like a neon sandwich board, you just don’t get it. If you did, maybe you wouldn’t be so fired up. And if you’ve experienced those things and still take issue with someone’s intentional weight loss, you might be feeling kind of left behind and are using righteous rage and projection as coping mechanisms. Been there! They don’t work!

Hard-to-swallow pill, I know, but you really have to just get over it and be OK with people doing what they’re going to do with their own bodies. Wouldn’t you want the same? If you spend more time developing your own unique brand of body positivity, self-acceptance, and embodiment than you do about whatever other people are doing, this will be so much easier anyway. I dunno, man. Not to be all “The problem is the phones!!!” but as always, it’s kind of just about getting off the damn internet⁴.

I think Remi should do that too. Look, the post-weight loss experience is not all glittering bliss. It’s weird as hell. It can make you self-obsessed, vain, and insecure in entirely new ways. Not a headspace you want to bring to the world wide web, tbh.

Weight loss made me obsessed with my looks. Now what?

Remi wrote in her Instagram post above, after she’d lost weight: “All I can say is if my thoughts aren’t even caught up with my body yet, how can I speak on it? How can I say anything to make anyone feel better when I don’t even know how I feel?”

Oof. The ones who know, know. She needs time and space to figure out how she feels in her changed body far away from the cacophony of other people’s opinions. And you, reader, deserve time and space to figure out how you feel about yours without the cacophony of other people’s ~ body journey ~ content⁵. Do yourself a favor and take it.

1. Who I just this second learned went to the University of Delaware like I did, go blue hens bawk bawk

2. If you’re looking for influencers who are vociferous advocates for visibility and justice for fat people and are less likely to pursue intentional weight loss if that’s the moral purity test you need them to pass, you should not be following vaguely “body positive” or “self-love” influencers like Remi. You should be following specifically fat acceptance and fat liberation activists like Aubrey Gordon and Virgie Tovar.

3. Before Remi, Revolve only went up to an XL.

4. She says as she writes on the internet

5. Including mine, if you don’t like it!