The strange rise of body shaming people who lose weight

There is a bizarre new trend online, one that would have confused absolutely everyone only a few years ago. We spent decades normalising weight loss. Davina McCall sold more fitness DVDs than some musicians sold albums. Every mum I knew growing up was on the Atkins diet. Magazines were obsessed with slimming plans, beach body challenges and transformation stories. The entire fitness and diet sector still remains one of the most profitable industries on earth. Losing weight was never taboo. If anything, society encouraged it to an exhausting degree.

And yet, suddenly, losing weight has become something you must explain, justify or apologise for. Body positivity, which originally existed to challenge narrow beauty standards and stop people being bullied for their size, has somehow evolved into a movement that punishes anyone who changes their body for health reasons. We have lurched from one extreme to another. Once upon a time, women were shamed for gaining weight. Now they are shamed for losing it.

Meghan Trainor…

Meghan Trainor is the most obvious recent example. She has spent the past year sharing her health journey after pregnancy. She talked about working with a dietician, changing her lifestyle, exercising with a trainer and, yes, using Mounjaro after her second pregnancy. She spoke openly about gestational diabetes and how she wanted to feel healthier. These are all perfectly normal, respectable decisions for any adult to make. And I think it is absolutely obscene that the bullying she received forced her to have to explain the obvious of why she wanted to lose weight. Yet she has still found herself explaining why she is thinner now, as if the world is entitled to the same body she had at nineteen when she released All About That Bass. A teenage song written before adulthood, marriage, pregnancy and health complications has somehow become a contract she is expected to keep.

The fact she had to go on a podcast to reassure the world that she is still body positive says more about public expectations than about her.

What has intensified all of this is the arrival of modern weight loss medication. Ozempic and Mounjaro are helping people who have genuinely struggled for years, often for reasons rooted in biology rather than willpower. These medications are not quick fixes and they do not replace lifestyle changes, but they finally give people a viable tool that makes losing weight achievable. The fact that using medically approved treatment to improve your health is now treated as something shameful is absurd. If anything, it shows how detached the conversation has become from real world health. No one benefits from scolding people who are trying to reduce their risk of diabetes, heart disease or mobility issues. For many, these medications have been life changing, and the moral outrage surrounding them says far more about public insecurity than about the people using them.

The taboo around wanting to be healthier

Somehow, stating basic biological facts has become a political fault line. Being overweight is not healthy. Being underweight is not healthy either. This is not controversial. It is physiology. And I say that as someone who lived through the opposite end of the spectrum.

Growing up, I was painfully skinny. Not through dieting, not through disordered behaviour, simply because that was my natural frame. As a teenager I could eat absolutely anything. I once demolished the old Nando’s platter when it was £19 for a whole chicken and four sides. You cannot even get a chicken wrap for that now. But despite eating constantly, I just could not gain weight. I heard every joke under the sun. People told me I would blow away in the wind. I was told there was nothing left of me. I was told to eat a burger on a weekly basis. Someone once pointed at my legs and asked what the two strings hanging out of my skirt were. They were my legs. I was just a skinny teenager who loved sports and genuinely could not put on weight no matter how much I ate.

Which is why the current conversation feels so dishonest. People rightly criticised the fashion industry for promoting unhealthy levels of thinness. In the same way, it is perfectly rational to say that promoting morbid obesity as aspirational is also irresponsible. Variation in body types is good. But pretending that every body type carries the same health implications is simply untrue. You know the conversation is broken when people are asked to claim that something medically risky is a viable lifestyle.

How weight loss became the new scandal

What makes today’s backlash even more contradictory is how selective it is. Losing weight used to be celebrated. Now, if you were once part of the body positivity space, your weight loss becomes a moral offence. The accusation is always the same: hypocrisy. The argument goes something like this. If you once celebrated your body while bigger, then losing weight means you no longer accept that body. If you made money as a plus size influencer, then choosing to be healthier is apparently a betrayal of the ideology.

Written down, you can almost see how someone without critical thinking skills might think that makes sense.

But it misunderstands the entire purpose of body positivity. The movement was never a pledge to remain one size forever. It was never a vow that your body could never change its shape or health profile. Being positive about your body at one size and also being positive about it at another size is not hypocrisy. It is consistency. It is the same body. You have not traded yourself in for a new version. You have adjusted the one you have.

The critics behave as if body positivity was supposed to be a museum exhibit, perfectly preserved and never altered. In reality, it was supposed to be a tool that allowed people to stop hating themselves. Not a rule book.

When body positivity forgets about health

Here is the obvious truth people avoid. If you promote a lifestyle that is objectively unhealthy, there will always come a point where reality collides with the ideology. Being positive about your body does not magically change your blood pressure, your hormonal health or your mobility. If someone eventually decides that the risks are too high and wants to be healthier, that does not undermine the movement. It fulfils the very principle the movement was created to encourage: taking care of your own body without shame.

The idea that wanting to feel better, move better and live longer is somehow in conflict with body positivity is absurd.

The people actually living the values are the ones being abused

The strangest part is that the people who genuinely embody kindness within the movement are often the ones attacked the most. One of the sweetest things I have ever stumbled across is the Plus Size Park Hoppers TikTok group. A group of friends who review seating, accessibility and comfort at Disney parks. I do not go to Disney and I have no desire to, yet I find them absolutely lovely. They help people with larger frames. They help people with disabilities. They help people with anxiety by showing what rides and seats look like before you get on them. They are warm, helpful and do more for actual inclusivity than most of the influencers doing thinkpieces.

And yet they are bullied constantly. The comments are ruthless. They are mocked for existing, despite being a perfect example of what body positivity was meant to be: supportive, practical and kind.

Where the conversation went wrong

Somewhere along the way, body positivity became rigid, ideological and performative. If you stay the same size, you are praised. If you evolve, you are vilified. It has become yet another purity test. The irony is that the movement originally existed to stop people policing bodies, yet those who claim to defend it now police bodies more aggressively than anyone.

Bodies change. Hormones change. Health changes. Lives change. No one should be forced to remain one size for the comfort of strangers on the internet.

A healthier version of acceptance

What we need is a version of body positivity that protects people from cruelty, not from science. A version that allows people to evolve. A version that does not treat health decisions as political statements.

No one should be shamed for the body they have. And no one should be shamed for wanting a healthier one.

If Meghan Trainor has to defend losing weight after pregnancies and gestational diabetes, then the loudest voices in the body positivity movement have forgotten what the movement was ever meant to stand for.