Why are cool people posting before and after photos

I want to start off by saying, i 100% do not care if someone wants to lose weight, even if solely for aesthetic reasons. i don’t have huge feelings about how people lose weight either - WL drugs, natural weight loss, etc. i do have feelings about the larger culture, trends, marketing surrounding bodies, but do not have feelings about you as an individual and what you choose to do. I believe in bodily autonomy and I am pretty much always very pro people doing whatever feels right for them as long as it doesn’t hurt other people, even if it’s different than what i choose to do myself.

I don’t consider myself a fat person (although i’m in the weird midsize middle ground where the BMI says i am obese), so I’m not going to tell someone who lives in a bigger body that they shouldn’t want to lose weight because I don’t know their experience and it’s frankly none of my business. I know we live in a very fatphobic society, especially these days, so i’m not here to tell someone they are wrong or a bad person for wanting to lose weight.

all that being said, i will never understand why people post before & after photos in terms of weight loss. i don’t believe losing weight is harmful to others. however, i do believe posting a side by side photo, where the sole focus is your weight, is harmful to others. and i’m not sure i see much nuance here, but i’d love to hear your perspective if you disagree.

these posts are almost always included with some caption like “started taking care of myself” or “had a glow up” or “started loving myself again”. so the implication is almost always that fat people don’t take care of themselves, work out, eat nutritious food, are hot, or love themselves. which i just don’t think is true! and i think this does harm others and perpetuates fatphobia! which makes it harder for fat people, and even anyone who’s not skinny, to exist and be happy and feel good!

like i’m over here existing, feeling fine in my body, and wham. i get hit with some stark reminder that you lost a bunch of weight, which is “good.” people flood the comments with “i’m so proud of you” and “you look SO good”. i just don’t want to think about bodies in terms of good or bad and i have trouble interpreting these interactions as something neutral.

like why isn’t just losing weight enough? why does it seem like people want or expect to be congratulated for their weight loss? why does it seem like the goal is external validation? i don’t think we can be body positive and also want people to say good job for losing weight. because that implies that there is something inherently better about being thin (which i don’t believe). if you are truly body positive, or even body neutral, why would you expect a different response to you losing 50 pounds versus gaining 50 pounds. those things should be the same ?! most of us will lose weight and gain weight at different periods of our life for many different reasons - stress, depression, medication, medical conditions.

if you started going to the gym and it makes you feel great, that’s awesome. i’m so stoked for you. i would love to cheer you on for doing that. i think movement can be incredibly helpful for mental health and physical health. maybe you lose weight doing that, or maybe you don’t. i think it’s kind of irrelevant to the goodness you feel from finding an exercise you love! and i think there’s ways to talk and post about exercise that don’t involve talking or showing weight loss.

i have done a ton of work in healing my self image. of course i still have hard days (luteal phase i’m looking at you). but i generally feel fine with the way my body looks, all of it’s curves, stretch marks, and cellulite. my weight fluctuates quite often these days - last year i was the lowest weight i had been in quite some time - yet i have never found myself wanting to put a picture of me in a thinner body as an “after” compared to me in a larger body. i just don’t see what i gain from that? who gets enjoyment out of seeing that? what message does that send to young people? people in a body that looked like my before?

i have felt the body positive movement slipping in recent years and it makes me super sad. i know that term has become a bit divisive recently, and im not going to paint myself as an expert or leader in that movement, but to me it just means respecting all body sizes, not defining someone’s worth by their body size, not making assumptions about people’s health by their body, etc. (and shout out to fat Black women who have been leading this conversation for a long time).

i remember feeling so confident and loved and empowered from like 2015 - 2022. times when books like shrill, hunger, thick, and heavy came out. this was revolutionary to me as someone who grew up in the peak 2000’s skinny culture - with tyra banks telling someone who was a size 6 that they were fat and tabloids ripping apart any female celebrity with even a millimeter of body fat.

and sure, i’ve never had hopes my mom would grow out of her boomer-ways of being incredibly obsessed with her weight and never feeling thin enough, but i had higher hopes for us younger folks. i thought we were moving forward and leaving the obsession with body image and eating disorders in the past. but now im seeing cool people post before and after photos and im not sure what to make of it.

again - i think you can be body positive and lose weight. i think you can love yourself and want to lose weight, or gain more muscle, or whatever. i think you can make different movement and food choices. but why are these weight loss photos becoming more and more apparent.

i’m not trying to shame or demonize anyone in particular, but if you find yourself wanting to post one, i’d just challenge you to ask yourself - why?

i truly hope my daughter can grow up in a world where her weight isn’t the first thing she sees in the mirror.