Why is everybody losing weight and what do we do? Sincerely, a person who’s lost weight

Author’s note: when I use the term “ozempic boom” it is not a demonization of Glp-1s and the people who use them. Rather, it is a punchy term to describe the new ‘thin-is-in-era’ of the 2020’s

I started losing weight in the fall of 2023. I was severely depressed. I had been the subject of a vicious scandal, and it felt like the whole world turned its back on me. I became deeply suicidal. I cut off all my loved ones. I couldn’t trust anyone because during the scandal, former close colleagues and friends (who I’d been on pleasant or neutral terms), started to come out and make things up about me. God knows why. I supposed to kick me while I’m down? Fifteen minutes of fame? I guess I’ll never know. That resulted in my extreme isolation. I was angry every single day. Mostly because I couldn’t go out and defend myself. I couldn’t tell the world the truth because no one would believe me. I understood my position of power, and I sat in it. The old me would tend to binge when sad and depressed. I would order hundreds of dollars of food delivery and eat everything until my stomach felt like it would explode. But this time I just didn’t feel like doing that. Not because I thought it would result in my weight loss, but honestly, I didn’t care about my body. I didn’t want to feel safe. A huge part of me blamed myself for what had happened to me. “You shouldn’t be so nice Melissa”, I thought to myself. “You shouldn’t try to help everyone all the time”. “This is what you get when you let the wrong people in”. So, in my self-loathing and self-neglect I began to rot. As someone who has talked and sang about self-love their entire career, it was hard to watch that happen to myself. And so I decided to turn my extreme inaction to action.

I needed a way to process my pain through my body, so I started with Pilates. I only worked with black women instructors and learned that Pilates was actually cofounded by a black woman. I used it as physical therapy. Sometimes I cried after sessions. I found that I had lost some weight in that process, but it wasn’t as significant as it is now. Because it wasn’t intentional. I’d decided that winter to sit and record a video saying I wanted to intentionally lose weight. Why? I guess I felt like I had lost everything, and I wanted to change. After talking to a few therapists I discovered that my weight had been a protective shield, a joyful comfort zone, and even sometimes a super hero suit to protect me through life. My weight, like my hair, represented time. It stored energy. And I wanted to release myself from it. So from that moment on any weight on my physical body that was subtracted was not a pound ‘lost’ but a pound ‘released’. It was energetic for me, not vain. And yes, I’ve had my back issues that I’ve talked about explicitly. It most certainly helped in that area as well. But I’m not gonna sit up as one of these “big girl celebrities” that have had dramatic changes to their body and give you that “I did it for medical reasons” story. Because we all know yes, that exists—Yes, there’s less pressure on my joints the less that I weigh. Yes there’s less risk of certain health issues the less I weigh. But let’s be real. I wanted to change how I felt in my body. I had been holding onto so much since my father passed away in 2009. I had been holding onto relationships that were deeply abusive and toxic since 2011. I had been carrying the weight of supporting my family since 2016. I wanted to let-it-the-fuck go.

It was never about being ‘thin’ for me. I don’t even think it’s possible for me to be considered actually ‘thin’. I will always have the stretch, and the skin of a woman who carries great weight. And I’m proud of that. Even when the world doesn’t want me to be. The way I’ve been treated as a public figure since I was introduced to the world as a confident, body positive figure has been borderline emotional abuse. And it’s simply because of my weight. Nevertheless, I made it work for me. I trolled the hell out of those obnoxious memes. I was self-aware that I was the butt of every fat joke on the Internet. And yet I continued to be who I am, because it’s the only thing I know how to be. And even in being myself, no one really believed it. I discovered that people thought that I was being “performative”. Performing being body positive when I was the first body positive musician to become mainstream doesn’t even make sense. Performative only works if you know it’s gonna work for you. I had no clue because there was no one before me to show me the way. I discovered that people thought that I actually was fatphobic and had internalized fatphobia. That everything I was doing in my activism, which included hiring black women who have larger bodies, creating literal industries for plus size dancers and models and actresses was because I ‘secretly hate fat people’. (You think I’m making this up but if I had a dollar for every time an agent had “looking for a Lizzo type” on a casting I have a lot of dollars).

I was sick and tired of my identity being overshadowed by my fatness. People could not see my talent as a musician because they were too busy accusing me of making “being fat” my whole personality. I know that my story isn’t unique. I know that women in bigger bodies, especially black women in bigger bodies, have had this working against them since forever. I had to actively work against ‘mammy’ tropes by being hypersexual and vulgar because being a mammy by definition is being desexualized. It still didn’t work, they saw my body and they judged me for it. And that’s the reality that nobody wants to talk about. We’re in an era where the bigger girls are getting smaller because they’re tired of being judged. And now those bigger girls are being judged for getting smaller by the very community they used to empower. There’s nothing wrong with living in a bigger body. There’s nothing wrong with being fat. But if a woman wants to change, she should be allowed to change.

I got a lot of backlash back in 2018 because my song was in a Weight Watchers commercial. Oprah asked 2018 me and back then I was like “hell yeah! it’s Oprah”. I had no idea the implications. And I learned very quickly how using my music in a weight watchers commercial can be harmful. It was my first big lesson in public accountability. Admittedly, I’ve made some questionable posts since then (namely, my smoothie detox). But along the way I have been very conscious of how I present my ‘weight release’ to the world. I documented it. I made sure not to say how much weight I actually released because I didn’t want anyone holding themselves to a certain standard. I am fully aware my actions as a public figure can have real and possibly harmful effects on other people. But one day I decided to show my results from getting consistent lymphatic draining massages for over two years. I’d been taking photos in the mirror of the spa bathroom and I was proud of my results. I posted the side-by-side photos and I framed it as “this is my results from getting lymphatic massage”. Shortly after that, I saw a video from Jameela Jamil saying something like “yikes people are now posting before and after photos” and went on to say she’s censoring people because they are “triggering”. (I want to say that me and Jameela have had a good relationship and I like her and I appreciate what she does for the body positive community. She does real work and she actually holds people accountable) but I took it personally. Because I was guilty, I had posted a before and after photo. I didn’t see how it was possibly triggering. Maybe I need to unlearn why before and after photos make me feel good about myself? But it felt unfair, I had seen photos of Jameela when she was overweight. She posts that photo to remind us of her experience and it validates her as a body activist. But now I see her as an objectively “thin” and beautiful woman. And I thought ‘why is it OK that she gets to post old photos of her body but no one else’s body is allowed to change’? It reminded me of the box that the commercialization of body positivity had put me in. When it was our little movement back in 2013, it was freedom. The body positive movement gave me wings and I could sore to unimaginable heights. But then it started to generate big business. And just like that it became branded for everyone. Unfortunately, once something becomes for everyone, the people that it was originally created for are edged out. It’s no longer for us anymore. It’s no longer for the size 16 and up community. It’s no longer for the disabled plus-sized community. It’s no longer for the queer, indigenous, plus-sized community. I would look up the has body positivity hashtag and I would see size 8, straight, white women dominating the category.

So here we are halfway through the decade, where extended sizes are being magically erased from websites. Plus sized models are no longer getting booked for modeling gigs. And all of our big girls are not-so big anymore. I am still a proud big girl. Objectively Big. Over 200 pounds. And I love myself as much as I’ve loved myself no matter what the scale says. There may be some bad actors amongst us. Some people may have used the movement for financial gain or fame, and once it no longer served them they abandoned it. That’s ok, it was never about them anyway. We have a lot of work to do, to undo the effects of the ozempic boom. I have a lot of work to do to regain the trust of the movement that gave me wings. It is work I am willing and ready to do. What do we do? We continue to have conversations. We continue to hold each other accountable. We release ourselves from the illusion that there is only good and bad. We re-introduce nuance into our discussions. I want us to allow the body positive movement to expand and grow far away from the commercial slop its become. Because movements move..