Welcome to Group Project, a series on the many ways young people are building and engaging with community. From queer resistance to finding new hobbies to forging alternate paths, working together is more important than ever. Here's how young people are getting off their phones and seeking community IRL.
I could name names, but I probably don’t need to: We’ve all noticed our favorite plus-size social media influencers shrinking before our eyes.
Amid the rise of GLP-1 weight loss drugs, many formerly fat influencers who built their career on talking about their bodies are now losing weight. Some of those influencers are documenting that journey (and some are getting paid for it), while others are quietly downsizing, simply withdrawing from the plus size or body positive content they once posted. This has, unfortunately, come alongside a cultural resurgence of fatphobia. Thin is “in” again online, fatphobic TikTok trends have racked up views, and being skinny is, once again, being held up as an inherent value.
Many people who follow formerly fat influencers have expressed confusion, disappointment, or even anger after their favorite figures lose weight, and that’s sparked an entire debate around bodily autonomy, weight, and what influencers do and don’t owe their audience. But that conversation might be missing the point. As weight loss drugs boom and thin comes back in, formerly fat influencers losing weight represents a different kind of loss for their followers. Amid this cultural phenomenon, it’s not just weight that we’re losing, it’s a form of community. In fact, it has little to do with weight at all.
Emma Zack, who founded the size inclusive vintage shop Berriez, says that she’s been “having this conversation almost every day with friends.” That conversation, Zack says, is about the many influencers who built their following during the 2015 to 2020 era of body positivity online. It was a time when size inclusion was starting to be demanded, when fat representation online was becoming more common, and when plus size people started finding community centered around influencers who preached self love at any size. In 2022, creator Ratnadevi Manokaran verbalized that to Refinery29. "There was a growing understanding [of the ways fatphobia had hurt us all] and a sense of togetherness,” Manokaran said. “It was as if we were all learning from one another, about something we had all just come upon.”
Now, Zack says she’s watching that community disintegrate, and it’s disappointing.
“It’s so disheartening to me,” Zack says. Berriez has fostered what Zack called “the most special community ever,” one in which plus sized people are placed at the center of the shopping experience rather than pushed to the margins. At Berriez, people lift each other up and feel comfortable shopping. Now, Zack says that some of the influencers who once championed her store the most are losing weight and leaving the people and brands they cheered on behind.
Lydia Okello, a writer, model, and digital creator, says this abandonment isn’t actually about body size at all. It’s about values.
“Each person is an individual. I don’t believe it’s my right to tell someone [my opinion on] whether or not they want to lose weight. But I have seen influencers who talked a lot about accepting their body where it was, or appreciating how they look regardless [of weight] really flipping the script and using the way they looked previously as a negative contrast to where they are now,” Okello says. “That part is what I really disagree with.”
Okello has noticed that when influencers lose weight, the bulk of negative comments on their posts don’t have to do with the actual weight loss. Instead, it’s people who once found representation, community, or meaning through what the influencer represented feeling abandoned by a stark shift in tone or opinion.
“I think the audiences that are feeling abandoned, in my opinion, largely the feedback is not, ‘I’m mad that you’re skinny,’” Okello says. “The feedback is, ‘why are you acting like the body that I have is not worthy any more?’”
Zack points out that whether or not someone posts about their body online, they don’t owe followers an explanation for their personal choices, especially as it relates to their weight. But it can be a difficult line to toe, Zack says, when someone has made a living off body positivity and then suddenly and silently debuts a brand new body.
“It’s this weird dichotomy, when a plus size influencer who has made their entire business on being plus size gets thin, we’re not entitled to talk about their body changes. They don't owe us this explanation,” Zack says. “However they’ve built their entire platform on body positivity. So when they’re getting thin and ignoring it, what’s going on?”
Transparency, Zack says, does make a difference, particularly because of the many misconceptions about weight and weight loss, and the stigma that comes with being fat. When influencers lose weight and don’t disclose that it was through medical intervention, Zack says it can contribute to “creating this false expectation for plus size folks” that weight loss is solely about willpower and lifestyle changes.
Research has shown that most diets don’t work in the long term. Most people who lose weight on diets gain it back, and one to two-thirds of dieters end up at a higher weight than their starting one. In fact, researchers say that dieting is a predictor of future weight gain. And, the New York Times reported in 1999 that the idea that weight loss just requires willpower was outdated then, nearly 30 years ago. Still, misconceptions around weight and weight loss are rampant, perhaps reinforced by social media narratives.
Some influencers who have lost weight aren’t explicitly negative about their former bodies, and refreshingly, there are influencers who lose weight and refuse to speak poorly about their former bodies. But overall, Okello sees a clear breakdown of authenticity. “The fat acceptance movement specifically was, in its origins, about treating fat people with respect and dignity and as equal members of society, whatever they decide to do with their bodies,” Okello says. “Seeing this shift has really underlined that a lot of people were not really in it for that part.”
For Zack, this is all part of a longstanding obsession with thinness and diet culture that has always existed, but waxed and waned over the last few decades. Wray Serna, founder of the size inclusive fashion brand Wray, also says this is part of a larger cultural picture — one indicative of our current era.
“We’re in a time when we have a [Presidential] administration which is trying to control us in every sense. I think it’s a broad cultural message people are receiving that is about control, about conforming, about making yourself as ‘perfect’ as possible. I think it’s deeply rooted in patriarchy. I think it’s deeply rooted in racism,” Serna says. “I think it’s important to pay attention as an individual to how these messages are coming through. But it’s impossible for them to not affect you. We’re getting it from everywhere.”
Serna is selling her final collection after announcing in March that Wray is closing because of her personal health issues (she stresses that there is quite a lot of demand for the larger sizes she sells, and that sales are not the reason for her closure). But despite her brand closing, Serna, who wears straight sizes herself, says she’s still dedicated to making the fashion industry a more inclusive space. Just because she doesn’t wear plus sizes, and just because her current project is ending, Serna sees no reason to turn her back on the community that she formed, and that lifted her up.
“[Fashion] was such a disappointing industry … until I opened up my sizing and discovered this whole other side of fashion that I didn’t even know about,” Serna says. “That was one of the most surprising things that could have happened. It made me believe in fashion again, in humanity again. I found that community to be so welcoming and kind. People who were excluded by [racism], the LGBTQIA community that was feeling excluded. [All these people] started coming to me and my brand. I can’t speak for them, but it seemed like it was a welcoming place.”
In a time when Okello says that a “fat person who is not trying to pursue thinness [is seen as] morally dubious at best,” finding the spaces that still foster this welcoming community is critical. Though it once centered around a handful of influencers, Okello says it’s worth actively seeking out fat-affirming spaces, like a local fat acceptance group, a new influencer community, or even just some friends who don’t participate in diet culture. There’s comfort, they say, in being around people who just get it.
For Zack, and for many of her customers, that space continues to be her store.
“We just had a customer an hour ago,” Zack says. “She said, ‘I’ve never been to a place where every single thing fits me and I feel so good in everything.’ I try to foster community where people put stuff on and feel good about themselves.”
