Why is it so triggering when celebrities lose weight?

With the advent of diet drugs like Ozempic, plus size stars are increasingly losing weight — and gaining haters.

To see a plus-size woman on a red carpet was, for a time, rather revolutionary. I hesitate to use that word for fear it sounds gouache and trite, but I’ll admit it rings true. Sadly.

Any body that wasn’t slim signalled that a long-standing aesthetic order was being, if not dismantled, at least interrupted. Hollywood has been a mecca of the European beauty ideal since its inception, favouring long, narrow, white bodies. So the visibility of women like Melissa McCarthey, Mindy Kaling, and Lizzo suggested that success in the public eye was no longer reserved for the thin.

In the past decade, plus size women have not only been in the spotlight, they’ve dominated it too. Adele is one of the most successful singers of her generation, and actors like McCarthy have gone from jovial sidekick typecasting to sweeping wins at awards ceremonies. This brazen freedom to occupy space has made others feel they can do the same.

Glamour’s Nicola Dall’asen writes about this sense of validation that comes from seeing larger women in this positive context. ‘Comparatively few plus-size women have been allowed past…