How Ozempic ate away the plus-size movement

A body-neutral fat activist reflects on how weight-loss drugs have erased the hard-won gains of the body neutrality campaign

- Ameya Nagarajan

My Instagram feed is very curated, so [rarely see things I don’t want to. Even though I'ma fat 43-year old single woman, I don’t see weight loss, work out, or dating ads. So it took a while for the Serena Williams Ozempic ad to cross my path, and it did ina shocked reaction from one of the fat activists I follow. Curious, I looked it up.

I was expecting to be enraged, but my first reaction was bone deep sorrow, because here is possibly the greatest athlete alive, saying that, even though she won 23 grand slams and has Olympic gold medals, even though she is adored and admired for her very apparent success, it was incomplete because her body wasn’t small enough.

As a body-neutral fat activist, I think everyone is allowed to want the body they want and do what they want to get it. But as a human, it breaks my heart that what Serena is wasn’t enough, and she felt she had to do this. Maybe she had medical or sports reasons for needing that weight loss. Maybe she is, like most women, deeply stressed by the way her body changes as it goes through life and age. Yes, I am deeply disappointed that a Black feminist icon now stands for a message that will almost certainly destroy the mental and physical health of many people, mostly women and girls.

But the thing that really causes the deep grief I am feeling is that the world has, so quickly, turned away from the beautiful cause of fat liberation.