Picture this: it’s 2024, and you’re scrolling through your FYP on one of the major social media wormholes when you stumble on a video of a woman dancing with her husband. She’s plus-sized. She’s glowing. For a second, you feel a warm little flutter watching her exist so joyfully. Then the masochist inside you urges you to do the thing you promised yourself you wouldn’t: you open the comments.

The top comment? From someone you actually follow—an old friend, male, in entertainment, who should know better. It reads: “Body positivity is over. If you haven’t lost weight yet, you’re lying to yourself.”

When I say I was shocked… I’m lying. Disappointed, but not shocked. Especially in Pakistan, commentary like this isn’t even controversial. It’s casual. It’s coffee-table small talk. People carve time out of their day to critique bodies that have nothing to do with them. And when it comes to women’s bodies—or really, any body that doesn’t fit a very narrow mold—everything is fair game.

As someone who’s been fat most of my life, I’ve worked really hard to not let that be the defining feature of my identity. But that’s a tricky dance. Because when you’re fat, it’s usually the first thing people notice, the first thing they remember. You become the fat girl in the room. Not the smart one. Not the funny one. Not the creative one. Just… fat. And people don’t hesitate to remind you that they noticed.

Sometimes it’s not even hostile. It’s just… loaded. It’s the well-meaning aunt who says, “You have such a pretty face,” with an ellipsis hanging off the edge. It’s the stranger on a plane who subtly shifts in their seat, as if your thigh is a personal insult. You learn early that your body is public property.

How body positivity was born—and diluted

Like most movements that began in the margins—messy, radical, necessary—the version of Body Positivity floating around today is its sugar-coated, Instagram-filtered cousin. A deformed mutant child raised by capitalism, stripped of its teeth, sold back to us in the form of Dove ads and fast fashion collabs. But the movement wasn’t born from self-love. It was born from rage. From people saying: “I am not a problem to be solved.”

It started in the late 1960s with the fat acceptance movement, led by groups like the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), and later the Fat Underground—radical fat feminists who didn’t just want tolerance. They demanded liberation. They called out medical discrimination, systemic erasure, and the lie that fatness equated to failure. This was about survival, not selfies.

When I first stumbled upon the language of fat liberation—not just acceptance, but liberation—I felt equal parts elated and heartbroken. Because by the time I found it, the original story had already been hijacked. I didn’t want to be tolerated. I didn’t want to be someone’s brave “before” photo. I wanted to move through space without apology. I wanted ease. Neutrality. That elusive, ordinary state most people take for granted—where your body doesn’t feel like a thesis you’re always defending.

Body Positivity didn’t start on the runway. It started in doctor’s offices where women staged die-ins. In zines passed between queer Black femmes who knew, long before it was profitable, that visibility wasn’t the goal. Dignity was.

But as always, radical language gets repackaged for mass consumption. “All bodies are good bodies” became a lullaby. The roar got softened, then silenced.

And now? Thinness is back. Loud and proud. Sold under new terms—“clean,” “disciplined,” “wellness-focused”—but it’s the same old gospel of self-erasure. We must remember: softness was once protest. Loving a body like mine used to be political. Now it’s just… passé.

The movement now: caught between performance and punishment

What’s left of the movement is a scattered mess of contradictions. It’s both brand and battlefield. Community and cult. A place where everyone is either selling something, defending something, or being accused of betrayal.

On one end, you’ve got thin influencers sipping chlorophyll water, hashtagging #bodyacceptance while posing in abs. The algorithm eats it up. Because thinness has rebranded, but never really left. The message is clear:

Be yourself… as long as yourself fits back into a size 4. And on the other extreme, certain corners of the fat-positive community now treat any intentional weight loss like a moral failure. A betrayal. A sellout move. There’s an unspoken litmus test: Are you one of us, or have you joined them? The idea that someone might want to feel lighter, to live easier, is treated with suspicion.

And maybe that’s fair, too. Maybe we’re all just reacting to a world that demands we shape-shift constantly—and then blames us for not staying still.

In this dizzying moral gymnasium, people are changing their bodies like they’re updating their apps. The Kardashians, once curvy icons, have shrunk back into the thin ideal, quietly redacting their own aesthetic empire. The surgeries they normalized are now being reversed. The baddies are slimming down. And once again, everyone else is being asked to play catch-up.

And now: Ozempic. The newest plot twist. A diabetes drug turned miracle injection for the rich and desperate. Just one shot, once a week, and you too can disappear.

But the paradox is rich: use Ozempic, and you’re either praised for your discipline or mocked for cheating. It’s no longer just about being thin. It’s about how you got thin. Work for it? Good girl. Inject it? Lazy. We want transformation—but only if it induces suffering. I guess we’re all masochists.

Health or performance? The thin line between consciousness and control

Let’s be honest. The fallback defense is always: “But it’s about health.”

But that is how we frame the conversation when we don’t want to admit it’s about aesthetics. Health is deeply relative. Especially for women and gender-diverse people, whose bodies are routinely under-researched, misdiagnosed, and misunderstood.

And yet, despite the complexity of the human body, we treat fatness like it’s a one-size-fits-all problem. We assume fat equals sick, and thin equals well. (Tell that to my friend who drinks Red Bull for breakfast and still weighs half what I do.)

Enter Ozempic. GLP-1 inhibitors originally developed to manage chronic diabetes are now being gobbled up for aesthetic correction. The demand is so high that people who genuinely need it can’t find it. But hey—priorities.

The cultural appetite for thinness has outpaced science. People are taking this medication like a shortcut to moral redemption. Never mind the nausea, the muscle loss, the long-term risks. We’ll deal with those later. For now, we’re just trying to look better in a group photo.

Case study: When the body becomes the brand

Take Lizzo. A woman who carved space for herself in a world that rarely makes room for people who look like her. Her body wasn’t just incidental to her fame—it was foundational. She danced, she twerked, she played the flute in leotards and lace, and people ate it up. She was the symbol of body positivity, and many clung to her as proof that the movement had “worked.” That a fat, unapologetic woman could be successful on her own terms.

But then came the shift. A visibly thinner Lizzo began posting about fitness, detoxes, “feeling good.” The applause turned into suspicion. Accusations. Some felt betrayed. Others, hurt. And then, body-shaming allegations surfaced—directed at her own dancers. The image cracked. But the question remains: Is it wrong for Lizzo to want to lose weight? To pursue wellness—whatever that means to her—on her own terms?

Probably not. But maybe the problem was that her body was never allowed to just be. It had to mean something bigger. It had to be a revolution. When your body is politicized, your choices stop belonging to you. And maybe that’s the real trap—not weight loss, but the pressure to constantly perform liberation.

On the other side of the spectrum is Ariana Grande, caught in a different kind of scrutiny. She’s always been thin, but now she’s too thin. Internet forums speculate about illness. Plastic surgery. Drugs. Race. Some say she’s trying to look more white, more fashionably fragile. Others say she’s fading into herself, literally vanishing.

No matter what she does, her body becomes a story others feel entitled to write. The irony is clear: Lizzo, too fat to be palatable—unless she’s palatably fat. Ariana, too thin to be safe. Both women turned into litmus tests for our comfort with bodies that stray from the “just right” line we keep moving.

We want them to be authentic, but only in ways we can digest. Their bodies don’t belong to them. They belong to the discourse.

Autonomy isn’t always simple

I think about that comment from my friend sometimes: “If you haven’t lost weight yet, you’re lying to yourself.” I think about how many people probably agreed with it, silently or otherwise. I think about whether he thinks that whenever he’s with me.

I’ve worked really hard to let people’s opinions of me stay their business. But when they say them out loud, they become mine, too. If the idea is to remind me that I’m fat—trust me, I know. If it’s to put me down, maybe it’s because the world has put you down so many times that making someone else small feels like a win.

Either way, I hope you ask yourself: What is it about my fat existence that unsettles you? I still have days where I flinch at my reflection. Days where I fantasize about disappearing. But I also have days where I feel soft in a way that isn’t shameful. Where I catch a glimpse of myself in motion and see art. Unique. Flawed. Beautiful.

I’m not brave for existing like this. I’m just a person. I don’t know what liberation looks like for someone like me. So much of it seems tied to my body—how it looks, how safe it is, whether anyone takes care of it when it’s sick. I don’t know if we ever get to the top of the mountain.

But I keep coming back to the same quiet question: What would it feel like to just be – not brave, not beautiful, not political – just myself?