Who gets called “brave”- and who gets erased?
A recent New York Times opinion video frames a former body-positive influencer as “brave” for rejecting weight-inclusive messaging and pursuing intentional weight loss in the name of health. The caption suggests that with the rise of GLP-1 medications, the body positivity movement is at a crossroads.
That framing is compelling. It is also misleading.
The body positivity movement faced its reckoning long before weight-loss drugs dominated headlines- when it was co-opted, sanitized, and repackaged for mainstream comfort. Thin, white, conventionally attractive influencers became its face, while the fat, disabled, Black and brown activists who built the movement were pushed to the margins.
What we are witnessing now is not a crossroads. It is a familiar cycle.
Body positivity was never meant to be a daily affirmation practice. Fat liberation was never about convincing individuals to feel confident. These movements emerged to challenge systems of oppression, including the ways fatness has been pathologized and punished to uphold racism, misogyny, ableism, and capitalist productivity norms.
Fat liberation asks us to interrogate:
- why medical bias leads to delayed diagnoses and inadequate care
- why workplace discrimination against fat people remains widely legal and normalized
- why thinness is equated with morality and self-control
- why “health” is used as a socially acceptable proxy for stigma
This is structural critique, not self-esteem branding.
One of the vulnerabilities that enabled co-option was the shift toward individual empowerment: love yourself, feel confident, embrace your body.
These messages helped many people- including me- survive shame. But they also made the movement easier to dilute. Fat liberation is not about individual confidence. It is about dismantling the systems that require body shame to function. It is anti-racist. It is anti-colonial. It is anti-ableist. It challenges the hierarchies that determine which bodies are valued and which are disposable. And those systems harm all of us, though not equally.
The storyline of leaving body positivity to pursue “health” is often framed as courage. In reality, it echoes one of the safest narratives our culture offers: that weight loss represents moral clarity and personal responsibility. This framing reinforces healthism- the belief that health is a moral obligation- while ignoring the structural inequities that shape access to care, safety, food, rest, and survival. It also legitimizes health trolling- the culturally sanctioned policing of fat bodies under the guise of concern.
This is not radical. It is familiar. It is marketable. It is comfortable for the status quo.
GLP-1 medications may feel like a cultural turning point, but the promise of a medical solution to fatness is not new. Diet culture and medical interventions have reinvented themselves for decades. Fat liberation has survived every cycle. We were here before this wave. We are here now. We will be here when the next one arrives. This is not a crossroads. It is staying the course.
If you hold a platform, an audience, or institutional power, this moment is also an invitation:
- To ask harder questions.
- To resist the ease of redemption arcs that return neatly to thinness and social approval.
- To interrogate which voices are repeatedly amplified and which are excluded.
- To examine which science is cited, which data is missing, and who funds the research that shapes public understanding.
- To question why stories that comfort dominant norms are framed as brave, while those that challenge systems of oppression are ignored, minimized, or dismissed as extreme.
You can call something radical. You can brand it resistance. But if it ultimately reinforces the same hierarchies of worth, desirability, and moral value, is it transformation or is it assimilation? Is it courage or is it compliance dressed as rebellion?
Naming harm matters. Narratives shape policy, care, and cultural attitudes. AND none of us lives outside diet culture. The pull toward safety, approval, and belonging is human. The allure of weight-loss drugs and social acceptance is real. People deserve bodily autonomy. They deserve to make choices without harassment or coercion. Accountability and empathy can coexist. We can challenge harmful narratives while holding compassion for those navigating systems that harm us all.
If you truly want to be brave:
- platform fat people speaking for themselves
- center superfat, disabled, Black, brown, and trans voices
- investigate medical bias and structural harm
- scrutinize the profit motives behind the diet and beauty industries
- explore liberation, access, dignity, and autonomy rather than exclusively focus on weight
Join the resistance not by spotlighting those who fall in line, but by amplifying those who have always been redrawing it.
Fat liberation has never depended on trends, influencers, or pharmaceutical breakthroughs. It lives in community care. It lives in resistance. It lives in the insistence that dignity is not conditional. And it lives in the radical refusal to abandon one another, even when the cultural tide turns. Especially then.
