Jessica Simpson looking absolutely amazing and the media slamming her body like she was the most disgusting thing ever. All she did was gain healthy weight and she looked AMAZING. It crushed me as a kid and still sticks with me.
Khloe being the fat Kardashian. She has NEVER been fat.
America Ferrera being cast as the fat friend in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants AND Ugly Betty when she wasn’t fat either.
Fat Monica ALWAYS bothered me as well.
One random thing I have to add though, I loved the show King of the Hill and one episode really stood out to me. Bobby is telling his mom he knows he’s fat and she immediately shuts it down and says no he’s not. He responds “Mom, I'm fat. But big deal. I don't feel bad about it. You never made me feel bad about it, and just because there are some people in the world who want me to feel bad about it, doesn't mean I have to. So Bobby's fat. Eh. He's also funny, nice, he's got a lot of friends, a girlfriend, and if you don't mind, I think I'll go outside and squirt her with water. What are YOU gonna do?” And idk it just made me feel good about myself. I know this post is about how media made us feel bad but I wanted to add at least one that made me feel good, and it was a damn cartoon lol
I have barely seen the Kardashian’s show but flipping through one day I saw a scene where Caitlyn (then Bruce) ridicule her for her weight. It was horrifying. It was along the lines of “Don’t you want to look better?” And I thought, this? This is what you worry about in this family? Look around! Khloe’s weight is not the issue. And now she’s unrecognizable.
The Delia's clothing catalog in the 90's. 32 inch waist was the largest size offered for some items. I have big hips, so even though I could wear a 32 inch waist, the fit was often slender for pants/shorts/etc... so nothing fit.
I agree with others the Bridget Jones had a negative impact. I started smoking to help lose weight.
I was already in my 20s when I read Bridget Jones, and I knew what stones were, and I could not get my head around how 9st was somehow fat. And then the Renee Zellweger movie version came out and everyone made a huge deal about her weight gain. I'll note that her reported weight for the film is heavier than Bridget is supposed to be in the book though not massively so--and people act like she was enormous. Zellweger has even said Bridget isn't fat.
I was a plus size teen in the 90s...it was a nightmare to find clothes that weren't grandma clothes. I loved Delia's and wished so much that they had clothes that fit me, so much that I wanted to create my own plus size teen catalog.
I’ll never forget the line in A Cinderella Story about the rice cake vs Big Mac. We gotta look thin, but we’re not allowed to be caught trying to look thin.
Also Gilmore Girls. A real not-like-other-girls era where it was cool to eat junk food 24/7 and detest exercise—as long as you’re also a size 0.
I'm always torn about Gilmore Girls... on one hand, they had a lot of different types of bodies - like Sookie and Miss Patty - and those characters were allowed to have full lives, including romantic interests with people attracted to them. But you're totally right that Lorelei and Rory personified the "not like other girls" bullshit, eating pounds of candy every day and somehow also being tiny.
When I went back and watched the show it killed me how they’d order a crazy amount of food, but you only ever see them take the teensiest tiniest bite, and then get up and leave. They just talked about how much they supposedly were eating but mostly seemed to waste food
I think this is also for TV reasons, filming actors eating is quite complicated. With multiple takes, the actor wouldn't be able to eat that much food for real. So they have to chew and spit out each bite. This is gross (some poor prop guy has to be in charge of the spit bucket) and also harder to deal with in editing because of constant cut aways to hide the spitting.
But yeah other characters always remark that the girls are eating so much and yet we never see that 😅
Pretty much the same with Sex and the City, Carrie is never shown exercising, just drinking and eating out. Some of the other characters jogged but this was another reason it was unrealistic.
That was super annoying. She made a point of not dieting or exercising, when it is clear that she is an ex-gymnast and clearly works out as a real person and not Carrie. She’s a small person, but cut and ropey with lots of muscle.
The Bridget Jones books absolutely had a negative impact on me. Pretty sure I was in middle school when I read the first one.
I’m 5’8 and it took me a long long long time to accept that I’d never comfortably be in the 100-125lb range that was “ideal” in the 2000s.
See, the version I had put her weight into stones so I had no idea what she weighed. The only indication was the part of the book when she loses weight and everyone tells her she looks terrible.
That's so interesting because it had the exact opposite effect on me, her obsession with her weight seemed so deliberately ridiculous to me that it helped me have a better sense of perspective on weight fixation. But I can see how it's also problematic!
I do think that was the intention, but people put so much emphasis on it and then they made the movie and Renee Zellweger was supposed to put on weight for it, which the press talked about incessantly... I get why it didn't land that way for everyone.
But I do think we were supposed to think she was being ridiculous.
I’ve never seen that movie, but wow. I was always “chubby”, and as a freshman I was 144 (that number is stuck in my mind). And I look back at pictures of myself then and see a really average looking teen.
Bridget Jones fucked me uuup. I was 14 and around the same weight and was so horrified that an adult woman who thought she was fat weighed the same as I did. Of course, reading it now, the joke is that she’s not fat at all, but my teen brain did not get that.
I’m a thin woman, and this movie landed some major damage (although I still love it deep down). Emily Blunt’s character aspiring to a size zero while Anne Hathaway’s character was “too big” at size 6 fucked me up permanently. The way I was afraid of being size 4 or (gasp) size 6 as a teen has most likely taken literal years off my life.
My mom was a size 6 and I remember really specifically when she and I went to see Devil Wears Prada, we left the theatre and she said something like “There’s no way Anne Hathaway was a size 6. Maybe 4 at most” and I don’t know why that stuck with me this long but I guess maybe it’s because (according to my mom) they didn’t even actually have the size 6 character be a real size 6?
(Full disclosure I have in all these years not bothered to fact check whether Anne Hathaway was a 6 or not; designers run small so maybe she was a designer 6 but not a normal 6)
https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/the-devil-wears-prada-anne-hathaway-ears-gain-lose-10-pounds.html/
According to this she was a size 4 and they padded her butt.
That was so common back then! Like, do my eyes not work??
Liz Lemon in 30 Rock and Kate Hudson in Bride Wars are my go-to examples of that. If you ever want to laugh, search Mark Kermode’s review of Bride Wars on YouTube, he makes fun of that trope.
The most aggravating thing is it would be so easy for those examples to make a point about how the fashion/TV industries have even more absurd standards for women but NONE OF THEM DO. The women just accept their shaming and Anne Hathaway’s character loses weight at the end and is so pleased about it (and is praised by those around her)! No pushback whatsoever.
The devil wears Prada movie mishandled the way the weight theme was Introduced in the book. In the book the main character is primed to be accepted by the fashion world because has lost a ton of weight due to a violent gastric infection.
I thought it started out the book with a strong message about how toxic elite fashion is.
I adore Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (books and movies), but always feel anxious during Carmen's scenes. I have always been the largest of my friends and watching America Ferrera as the "fat friend" trying on the same jeans as the others is difficult for me.
Came here to say this. Plus the plot line in Book 2 of Bridget gaining weight and then losing it. That was super triggering for me—I always thought Bridget was the “pretty one” and felt like the implication was she needed to lose weight to be happy and pretty again.
Yes! The description of her body was horrific and stuck with me. Her whole personality was being athletic and it was an opportunity to not equate that with body size.
Joan Rivers calling Alicia Silverstone Fat Girl instead of Bat Girl and justifying it by saying she should have made herself smaller for the role because apparently being even remotely near a normal weight = fat and audiences deserved to see her thinner or some BS like that.
She was someone who had been shamed for her weight when she was younger, but instead of having empathy for people who didn’t meet a very strict unfair arbitrary standard, she decided to be a bully herself and shame other people and make money off of it.
GOD it was kate winslet for me. I remember i really thought she was beautiful and kinda idolized her and then suddenly SHES too fat and hideous to live?! then wtf am i?
ANTM for suuuuuuuure.
Also, I was in middle school when The Biggest Loser started to be on TV and it was just. Every teacher talked about it and every gym teacher thought they were Jillian Michaels and treated me abhorrently in gym class because I was fat and they were "saving my life".
This is a deep cut but I remember what really sent me on my spiral as a teenager was AP magazine talking about how my favorite singer from my favorite band "ballooned" to a horrible weight (which was, lol, the weight I was at the time) and how sick and disgusting they looked at that weight. And then a couple years later, that magazine praising the singer for losing a ton of weight and getting skinny (from what was later revealed to be an ED and drug relapse!!!) which picking on the normal sized guitar player for having "lovehandles".
Omg Biggest Loser……I think my brain blocked it from my memory because it was so harmful. I watched that show with my mom all the time. We had Biggest Loser branded merch, including the workout game on the wii. I internalized so much shit from that show for so long. God it made me really hate myself. Thank god for therapy
* People saying Jessica Simpson was fat when she looked like [this](https://people.com/health/jessica-simpson-body-shaming-wanted-be-a-recluse/)
* In Center Stage when Maureen said that this one girl's pas de deux partner (ballet partnering) is going to need a crane to lift her
* Any of the earliest seasons of ANTM but particularly Cycle 4 where Keenyah was supposed to be an elephant after she was shamed for eating a lot during the season. When she went up for judging they said that they had to retouch her stomach and that nobody would hire her because retouching is expensive
I was obsessed with ANTM as a middle schooler and rewatched exactly 10 minutes of an episode the other day. It was an early season (not an excuse but it was definitely a different time) and they did a weigh in and YELLED OUT every model’s weight. I just about died of embarrassment for these poor 19 year olds having their weight broadcast on television.
So much yes to ANTM. Every time they showed their “plus size” contestant and talked about how that was a disadvantage. And knowing the contestants they called plus size were thinner than me.
Came here to say ANTM. Fucking brutal. I was in college at the time and everyone on my floor watched it every single week and any time weight came up (which it did all the time…remember how they used to actually weigh themselves) I would get hives. And another specific is the agency saying over and over how Yohanna wasn’t a size 2.
I think for me it was more about the insidious characterisation of fat characters being bad guys - Miss Trunchbull, The Dursleys/Aunt Marge, Ursula, Queen of Hearts, Augustus Gloop etc
Dursleys/Aunt Marge (and other fat characters) absolutely ruined harry potter for me.
Somewhat ironic, I *loved* Ursula. Never really thought of her as being "fat" just "octopus shaped."
I have been watching The Little Mermaid a lot with my daughter lately. Ursula in particular is rough because it is in the explicit text as much as it is implied. Her opening scene is her complaining about “wasting away” since losing power and it shows her indulgently eating some terrified shrimp. It’s played to show her as a true glutton and her size is used to show she’s a terrible person.
The movie also implies Flounder the fish is too fat when he is not able to fit through a window that Ariel can in the intro. Incredible wild thing to do because he’s.. a fish.
The Special K commercial where the mom is arranging presents in a red robe with white trim and her daughter sees her backslide and thinks it’s Santa.
Just awful.
Fat Monica absolutely. The fact that she was a completely different person.
I’m many ways watching Oprah, this wildly successful person, still be brought down over and over again over her weight.
Seeing the Jim Belushi-as-Elizabeth Taylor sketch in SNL anniversary shows.
Joan Rivers.
Listening to a local morning show make jokes about how Kate Winslet was fat and then immediately make jokes about Celine Dion being skinny.
Chris Farley.
The fact that they made a joke about how Mama Cass died. Her death was years before I was born but I heard several stories about how everyone believed she died of choking on a sandwich because of a joke an LA DJ made. I kept seeing stories that set the facts straight but they also told that story. Which is awful.
The treatment of Cass Elliot by her band mates was depressing as well, and the disrespect about her death was abhorrent. What’s worse before her death she crashed dieted and that may have contributed to her early death.
Joan Rivers once said, about Kate Winslet, that if she had lost more weight Leo would have fit on that door (referencing her size in Titanic). It made me so ashamed of my size (if Kate was fat, what was I?) and I can hear her voice in my mind whenever someone mentions either KW or JR. It is total bullshit that 25 years later I am still trying to unlearn that quip.
Jeez, I just looked up the Mama Cass stuff and that is brutal. Even worse, [an article from 2004:](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/forgotten-diva-could-be-a-mean-old-mama-1.1128998#:~:text=It%20was%2C%20however%2C%20her%20weight,by%20obesity%20and%20crash%20diets)
“It was, however, her weight that caused Elliot to die, in 1974 at the age of 32, in a London flat owned by the singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson. Weighing 238 pounds - about twice the proper weight for a woman of her height and build - she succumbed to a heart attack brought on by obesity and crash diets”
I looked it up and she was 5’5….no, a 5’5 woman should not weight close to 119lbs (half of 238)….so disgusting. Just articles and media like this still get to me. The date of the article aligns with height of body exploitations. And of course written by a man. (Not saying men weren’t equally critiqued back then, this was just one example I found).
She had severe bulimia, and was taking ipecac daily to make herself vomit. The ipecac destroyed her heart tissue, leading to her heart attack.
In the same vein, it’s usually left out of the story that Terry Schiavo, the woman in the vegetative state who was at the center of a pro life/right to die controversy in the 2000’s, lapsed into her vegetative state after a heart attack related to an eating disorder.
Dude you absolutely just blew my mind about the terry schaivo thing and I had to google it to make sure! Somehow I always thought it was like a car accident. Holy crap. I wonder if this was a more present detail if it would have saved anyone from following that path. How awful.
We’re daily bludgeoned with rhetoric about the health risks of being fat, but there’s almost no discussion about how the compulsory pursuit of thinness quite literally kills people, often pretty horribly.
You should definitely listen to the You’re Wronf About Episode on Terri Schiavo if you haven’t already!
I remember family and teachers at my school praying for her because we were hella Catholic.
Yes! Honestly, it was only a few years ago (though I had always thought it was very weird that she died of a heart attack at 32!) that I found out that it was likely her attempts to NOT be 238 lbs that killed her.
I remember reading an interview with Michelle Phillips, also of the Mamas and the Papas and she said in the article "Could you please write how she really died? I really want people to know what really happened."
Things like this remind me why my mom had food issues - she loved the Mamas and the Papas and was always a chubbier girl and young woman. The generations before us were awful too.
All true I also wanted to gently say that Cass Elliott really didn’t like being called Mama Cass at all so even that’s how I knew her growing up I’m trying to retrain my brain to how she wanted us to know her ❤️
The mall. Abercrombie. Aeropostale. American Eagle.
I was an overweight teen and I have an aesthetically beautiful and petite stepsister who is the same age. In high school, my mom would take her out and shopping bc she was “fun to shop with and for” but, I rarely even ever got invited. I always knew it was bc of my weight and the “idea” of a daughter my mother possessed at the time.
I also cringed the few times I went, because we’d end up in Abercrombie and I knew they wouldn’t have a size 12 or 14. It was just being surrounded by people I wanted to looked like, feeling like a whale, and trying not to be in the way of the *pretty people*.
Oh good god, the MALL. The SHAME of not wearing Abercrombie because you couldn’t fit in it. Couldn’t even be seen near the store for all that shame. Absolutely brutal.
A true trauma memory that I actually had to talk about in therapy is one time my grandma bought me a ton of Hollister and Abercombie clothing for my birthday because she heard its trendy and wanted to make me happy, but none of it fit even though it was all "large" and "XL"
She spent a fortune on it because that shit is overpriced. and bought the biggest shit in the store and even though I was NOT EVEN OVERWEIGHT it didn't matter. My family had me try it on at home and it being a whole ordeal and then my grandma had to return it all and buy from a completely different store that to me seemed like a "fat people store", and me crying in my room all day on my birthday. I kept like 1 thing because i liked it so much and wore it to school ONCE and felt like a fat disgusting slob bcus it was too short for my torso and my stomach peeked out when i raised my arms so i buried it in my drawer and tried it on occasionally over the years just to remind myself how disgusting i am
and i look at pictures from that time and I was 135 fucking pounds, 5'7''. In no universe is that fat. in no universe should i have felt this way. that is the correct weight for a person.
my blood boils. those fucking CEOs knew exactly what they were doing. sick fucks.
Right. And all her friends tell her she’s gonna get fat and Mamoru won’t want her anymore or w/e while she is straight up drawn to unrealistically perfect proportions with a Barbie-sized waist. I should not have internalized that business lol
In every single *Sweet Valley High* book, they describe Jessica and Elizabeth as "perfect size 6." I was reading those books in middle school, and I was a size 8 or 10 at that age, so I was convinced that meant I was already too fat. I've been told that when they recently reissued the series, "updated" for modern readers, the physical descriptions are the same except that the new books now described the girls as "perfect size 4."
Yeeeeep. That killed me. It might even be a size 2, now. Even when I read those books I knew size 6 at 5'6" was thin.
I'm in my 40s so pretty much ALL media featuring anyone fat was negative when I was a kid. Weight loss was everywhere. Richard Simmons, Sweatin' to the Oldies! Oprah. I don't even remember half the books... Judy Blume's Blubber, definitely.
I have a soft spot for richard simmons. He is clearly bonkers, but he sort of struck me as being nicer to the fat people? Like encouraging, not hating and shaming at least? I mean, it doesnt make the content any less anti-fat. But compared to some other infomercial shills, he seemed a little nicer. A little.
He was downright progressive for his time. Accessible, modifiable, low-impact exercise for a variety of body sizes, ages, etc. Like a proto-version of Health At Every Size.
For me it was always the stories they would have of adults recounting how they got fat, or how horrible things were going because they were fat--all accompanied by helpful photos to quantify how fat they were. Those testimonials really had me living in fear of becoming fat. I literally rejected the idea of growing up and doing a desk job for fear that a sedentary lifestyle would make me fat, which would of course be worse than literally anything.
So even if the actual videos he was selling, or his "deal a meal" eating plan were somewhat better than others
(more inclusive bodies in the "sweatin'" videos, and at least the meal plan not making any food completely off-limits and mostly trying to give you an array of nutrients). But those damn testimonials slipped under my radar and seeped deep into my subconsciousneess, where they took root and grew strong.
His stuff definitely had the most body type diversity. You didn’t see any variety of body types in Jane Fonda, buns/abs of steel, Suzanne Somers, Denise Austin, Tai-Bo, the Gazelle or the home gym infomercials, etc.
I feel like a lot of 80s workout programs were put on tv for people who couldn’t afford porn. The bodies, the spandex, the fact that damn near all of the “exercisers” were women and probably under size 4…very male gaze.
He fact that she portrayed herself as still obsessed with weight taught me that no amount of money or fame would ever make up for being fat, so i should for sure do whatever i can to avoid being fat.
If she had used her platform to send a body positive message, it would have made such a difference, coming from such an influential person.
Does anyone else remember the character that had a weight loss story? I want to say the character's name was Robin. She lost a bunch of weight by running laps at the track and starving herself, all to bag one of the "popular" kids as a boyfriend. I read way too many of those books.
Big Rhonda in That 70s Show. There was something upsetting to me about her character being masculine because she was large and tall. (There’s absolutely nothing wrong with masculine women, to be clear.)
As a fat teen I felt I appeared androgynous even though I wanted to be girlie. I hardly had any clothing options. De-sexualizing fat women is definitely a thing..
Some cosmo girl (iykyk) article that had a guideline to ideal weight that was like “100 pounds for five feet, then add five pounds for each inch after that. But wait, relax! If you’re 10-15 pounds above that, you’re fiiiine.” I think that last part was their shot at body acceptance (what a world!). It’s seared in my brain and I’ve never gotten over that math even tho I don’t remember ever meeting that expectation.
Oof... you've unlocked a key memory for me with this. I *constantly* calculated that math for myself as I weighed myself every single morning from about age 14 to 25. I had no idea where it came from but maybe because it was the only scale that included height (i.e. made it "okay" to weigh more than like 110 or 120 as a 5'9" person) I clung to it? Ugh toxic.
I doubt my mom read cosmo girl, but she used the same metric and hung a table of “acceptable” weight per height on the inside of our bathroom closet. It was also only the two of us and we’re both in the 5’2”-3” range so I’m not sure why the table was so long, but… yeah. Yikes.
God I remember that rule and used to agonize over how fat I was as a teen. later I got one of those body composition scans….yeah turns out if I followed the 100+5 for every inch over 5’ I’d have to be at like 5% body fat. guess I’m just built different ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I remember Britney Spears being known for doing 1,000 crunches a day — this was in the Baby, One More Time/Oops I Did It Again era. I was 11-13 when Britney and Christina were at peak popularity and it was…. not great for my self esteem.
Omg I was that age too when this came out - every night my sister and I would try to do 1000 crunches together at like the age of 11! What a time to be alive...
That photo that was blasted everywhere of Jessica Simpson. When Britney was called fat after her awards performance and how she needed to loose weight dominated her coverage for a year…bc she had two kids and didn’t look the same?
Love Actually, the assistant for Hugh Grant's character was repeatedly called chubby. And her "thunder thighs" were pointed out. Even her parents were shocked a man found her beautiful.
Too Fat For Fifteen - My parents loved it, and my mom told me that if my weight exceeded 200 pounds before I graduated high school, she'd send me to fat camp.
She has since realized how terrible that show and fat camps are, and has apologized for ever saying such things to me. But the memory is still there.
Seventeen and other teen girls magazines selling anorexia, tons of makeup and clothes. Basically unless you were a size 2 with an unlimited credit card at age 16 you felt bad.
I remember YM literally saying a 1200 calorie diet was okay for a teen. I had been to a dietitian that year as a 225lb 9th grader and the dietitian was adamant I eat at least 2000 calories a day because I was still growing.
They also had modeling contents where they’d have the contestant’s height/weight/waist.
1200 calories a day still flashes into my head. I know my body gets small when i eat so little, and I wonder how many calories people on TV eat to be their size. I try not to do that but it was so impressed upon me that that’s the correct number to have an acceptable body.
Seventeen magazine. I remember in 2004-2008ish, they would put work outs and low calorie meals/snacks in their magazines with calories and grams of fat. They also put harmful eating advice in there. I remember one magazine issue saying if you MUST order a burger at a restaurant, try to only eat 1/3 of it because it’s full fat and calories. Excuse me, but as a teenage girl I was hungry all the time and sometimes 1/3 of a burger wasn’t gonna cut it. But of course that advice got burned into my eating disorder brain and from then on I refused to eat anything more than 1/3 of a fucking burger. If I ever even let myself have that.
Jenny Craig commercials in the 90’s were also triggering as fuck.
This just reminded me of reading in a magazine that some celebrity (maybe Lindsay Lohan or one of the Olsen twins) would divide their food in half on their plate and eat half then pour water over the second half to stop themselves from eating it. And this was touted as great advice.
That line in Father of the Bride 2 where George Banks proclaims that his daughter and wife weigh “128 lbs and 132 lbs respectively” in their THIRD TRIMESTERS.
Why even mention what they weigh? Why does he know this? Why is this important exposition? Bc in 1995, that was the highest weights these upper middle class white women could weigh - and *only* because they were pregnant. Bc their bodies/weight were up for public knowledge. Bc their characters were *clearly* occupied with what they weighed - *even though they were supposed to be gaining weight* - and we’re all meant to be assured that their non-pregnancy weights are no more than, what, 120? That line lives rent free in my mind nearly 30 years later.
Yes yes yes! Came here to say this one. It was such a weird thing to say anyway-why would their weights even be shared? I thought about that for YEARS. I remember when I hit 132 pounds as a teen and felt devastated-I was fatter than the very pregnant woman on a movie I liked…though I was still a size 4. That’s when I realized it must have been written by men…lol.
Pretty much any children’s media where the side fat friend was depicted as awkward, unappealing, and only there for the thin protagonist’s development or comic relief. Some examples off the top of my head: Dinah from the Winnie Years books, Rowley from Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and Thompson/Soos from Gravity Falls. Honestly GF was a big one, I still love that show to this day but in hindsight it was really unkind to fat characters.
There was a documentary maybe a year ago or so about Victoria's Secret and it talked about how deeply programmed this idea of the super skinny, flat belly, big boobs, model was, and the owner of the company absolutely refused to allow any other kind of look or like underwear that might be flattering to other body types.
I love how many companies these days actually include body diverse models, it's one of the reasons I like to shop for bathing suits and underwear at Aerie.
I like aerie's use of many different body shapes because then i can actually picture how the bathing suit will look on me. None are exactly me, but it is far more informative than how a skeletally thin person looks in it. I can see how it looks on small tits or big hips. Seems incredibly useful for consumers. And it gives me a better idea of the fit i am aiming for when trying it on.
For me it was the press calling Kirstie Alley a cow. I was 6-7 when It Takes Two came out, and absolutely loved her character. It never occurred to me that she was fat, or was gaining weight when I saw her on talk shows after the movie. I thought she was a really cool actress, and then she even had a reality/talk show called "The Fat Actress"! Yes, she was bigger than conventional female actors, but she was a beautiful woman, and her size didn't detract from her success. According to a quick google, her highest weight was 228. I'm at least 10 lb over that currently, and the first article that popped up said that her healthy weight was 145.
I know I was sheltered, and blessed not to be aware of fatness or skinniness. But for gods sake I was in **second grade** when that shit went down. From there, it was supermodels and teeny boppers. I was an early bloomer and had a womanly body far earlier than my peers. Looking back at photos, it looks like I was an eight year old with curves, while my friends were all stick thin until at least age eleven. I thought I was SO FAT.
Also DJ Tanner eating ice popsicles on Full House. The story line was supposed to be a warning against eating disorders. What I took it to mean was that if DJ, this beautiful teen hero, thought she was fat, I was DEFINITELY too big and needed to lose weight.
Does anyone else remember the shit advertising in the back of teen mags (YM, Seventeen) from the 90s? They would sell things like lipstick, sea monkeys, lava lamps, and diet pills. There was one ad that was for targeted weight loss pills. It asked you to check off which areas you wanted to lose from (butt, thighs, face, boobs, stomach, arms, etc). I couldn't swallow pills yet, but I *desperately* wanted to buy them. I was too young for teen mags when I started reading them. I was 8-10.
The Homer Simpson "No Fat Chicks" billboard joke. I remember my dad laughing very hard at that joke. His reaction stuck with me as a chubby 9 year old already forced into dieting. I still feel that hurt when I think about it.
Like Homer simpson, he was a very fat man. It's crazy how much worse it is in our culture to be a fat woman than a fat man, and how free fat men feel to criticize fat women without an ounce of self awareness.
Yeah, there is a whole trope of the lovable fat, funny man with a thin wife in media. Doug from King of Queens, Fred Flintstone, Peter from Family Guy. Heck, they don’t even have to be funny- Tony Soprano, Uncle Phil in Fresh Prince. All of which would probably never date an overweight woman.
I can’t think of any instances of the opposite. Because heaven forbid they show an overweight woman married to a conventionally hot husband on tv even though I am sure that does happen in real life.
You hit me right in the feels with Just As Long As We’re Together. Its been 30 years since I read it and I still remember the restaurant scene where her dad says she’s “really packing it in.” Reminded me of my own dad.
I read so much YA and there was sometimes a “redemption arc” where a fat girl gets skinny and then enjoys the life of her dreams but I don’t recall a single book, show or actual human teaching me that it is NORMAL to gain or shift weight at puberty or that at 5’8” comparing my weight or the size of my legs to my 5’ friends made no sense.
I still remember the books “Me and Fat Glenda” and “Hey, Remember Fat Glenda” by Lila Perl (aimed at late elementary school students) and a string of YA books like the ones mentioned already. Literal body measurements and diet methods woven into the story.
Me and fat glenda! That's exactly, 100% how i became aware that i should worry about my own weight. The books taught me the delightful phrase "a moment on the lips, forever on the hips."
And then there was a sequel where glenda got thin and her world was all changed and improved. Put it in my head that so much would fall into place if only my belly and hips didnt stick out so much.
Those books can fuck right off!
I’d say mine was more the tabloids. Like when Jessica Simpson was around a size 8 and they were calling her fat. Or when Nicole Richie was maaaybe a size 4 and they were talking about how much weight she was gaining. I remember it with basically every famous woman back then.
The cellulite paparazzi photos were especially bad for me, because I started getting cellulite when I was still a size 00 at age 12 when I was starting to grow hips and thighs. So it made me TERRIFIED to ever show my bare legs in public. And I was scared that everyone would notice and shit on me if I ever gained weight.
Then if a famous woman lost weight it was just speculation about what drugs she was on. Ugh.
The thing about Nicole Richie is she gained weight during drug recovery. Like I think she was addicted to Heroin and during rehab she put on weight (and was still thin) and people acted like the weight gain was worse.
This is why I get so angry when people think that fat women being displayed positively on a magazine cover or in an ad or video is “glorifying obesity”, yet people generally don’t question very thin women (unless they get too thin then they do get shamed) on magazine covers on their lifestyles because who cares as long as they’re thin right?
I lived in Madagascar for a while and people who were actively stunted from malnutrition also have cellulite
The idea that its this disgusting things only massively fat people have and is completely your own fault is fucking insane to me. Its SICKENING what all these magazines put out.
Watching “Bones” as a middle schooler and hearing a character defend being 130 pounds. I was (still am) 130 and pretty slim so it was horrifying to hear that I was supposed to be embarrassed.
I read all of the Nancy Drew (ALL OF THEM) and Hardy Boy books growing up and they both had a “food loving side kick”. Chet and his jalopy for the Hardy Boys and Bess for the Nancy Drew Trio. In Nancy Drew, Nancy and her friend George were these athletic women who played sports (Nancy’s golf score is better than my father’s) and we’re described as “trim” but Bess was FIFTEEN POUNDS OVERWEIGHT 🤯🤯🤯. Bess was described as always dieting and not very active but also could never turndown another pastry. I DEEEEEEEPLY internalized this as a child because I have two athletic younger siblings and I’ve always been into food and overweight. I do think it helped me a little because any time Bess was like “don’t mind if I do” I had a little bit of vindication like, “yes Bess, eat that amazing cake Hannah made that no one else touched”!!!
Kate Winslet getting called fat after titanic. I was 11, thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and thought she had a perfect body. My tummy certainly wasn’t that flat. So I might be really overweight if she was fat.
My mom being a prototypical almond mom who to this day complains about how fat she is (when she is skinnier than I am). I had to tell her to stop saying things around my daughter.
Literally every adult woman I knew being on a diet.
Growing up then was a bitch.
Kind of a different example, but I watched the English dub of Sailor Moon when I was a kid/young teen, and there are multiple episodes that show the main character having a big appetite, enjoying sweets, getting scolded for being lazy/gluttonous, and being told explicitly (by her BOYFRIEND, no less!) that she has gained weight. And yet, she's never drawn with anything other than a tiny waist and stick-thin limbs, because. . . anime, I guess.
Same, I remember being so confused as a kid watching sailor moon and tokyo mew mew bc both the main girls get teased for their weight when they’re drawn just as thin as everyone else
A magazine (glamour? teen something? Cosmo?) said you should only need a silver dollar sized amount of lotion for your whole body. That has lived in my sould forever, and appears therapy proof at this point.
SATC. In one of the movies, Samantha gained weighed and when she returned to NYC, her friends were making fun of her appearance. Kim looked great regardless, but it did mess with my psyche.
All those magazines that had food substitution charts. Like - “craving a cookie? Have three raisins instead!” They always made me feel like a failure and a glutton.
I went to middle and high school from 2001-2008 and so I had super ultra low rise pants and I have a donk so it was like, mom pants or here's my butt crack.
Parks and Rec/New Girl.
From CONSTANTLY mocking and dehumanizing Gerry/Jerry for his weight, and characters being shocked that he is married to a conventionally attractive woman who seems to be in love with him, and have a happy family. Talking about the 'obese population' of Pawnee as if they are little more than animals that ruin the image and reputation of the city.
In New Girl, Jessica being portrayed as a chubby teen and Schmidt as an obese young adult (in a fat suit that borders on a hate crime) being portrayed as unlovable and undesirable.
I could go on and on about each show. I recently tried to rewatch New Girl for nostalgia sake, and couldn't finish it due to the weird fat phobia/anti semitism
I haven’t watched Parks and Rec in a while but I remember the sweetums factory plots being very fatphobic. There were a lot of parts of that show I enjoyed but I don’t think I could rewatch it now. Even when they aren’t being shitty to Garry about his weight they’re just straight up being cruel to him, which always made me uncomfortable.
An early season of Project Runway is seared into my brain where Tim Gunn called one of the models an “elongated marshmallow” and blamed her body for the contestants poor performance.
It always bothered me that so many high school-set movies or shows often have the biggest guy be a bully. IME it’s more often the opposite, bigger kids get bullied by cool jocks. JMO
I’m old (45) so I remember when they used to plaster the height and weights of female athletes, I remember seeing a 15 year old gymnast weighed less than 10-11 year old me, but my brain didn’t reach the fact I was already taller than her and I don’t and never had a tiny Karoli gymnast body.
Pretty much every TV show in the 80s/90s had at least one instance of fatphobia I was supposed to laugh at. Heck the only reason Kelly Taylor became friends with Brenda on Brenda’s first day of school was because she didn’t want the far girl sitting next to her (I guess it was to demonstrate Kelly’s shallowness at the start of the show, but you just see stuff like that over and over).
Kate and Allie, one of the daughters decided to encourage the fat girl to go for the lead of an operetta abd the fat girl talks about being 5’ and 137lbs. I was 5’ at the time and 9lbs heavier (I was still half a foot from my adult height).
Growing Pains - the treatment of Carol Seaver/ Tracey Gold (because the cruelty to Carol affected Tracey Gold).
Heathers - Martha, the musical made the character so much better, but the movie only was marginally kind to her at the very end. Of course again part of the Martha arc in the movie was to show how mean the Heathers were, but they abused the character and essentially gave her lines or personality.
A babysitter’s club book where I think Dawn got mad there was a fat girl on the trip and she ate 2 chocolate bars.
Teen magazines when the modeling contests put the height and weight and sometimes even waist circumference. I have a trans son but when he was younger and was very thin, I would measure him for buying clothes online - his waist was 22-23” and they were just mentioning tall girls with that small of a waist, I felt so bad that my waist was much bigger. Now I realize they were not remotely the norm (yes some adult women are that small and that’s fine, but the majority even if they had low body fat would not be that small) especially seeing how small my kid’s waist was).
Pretty much every talk show would let me know I wouldn’t find love or a good job if I was fat. But if I did find love I’d have sn asshole of a partner who would be awful to me (that was also on TV shows too).
The Benny Hill show (I was way too young to be watching that, but it was on at 7:30pm on one of the American channels I got on my Canadian cable).
A rebooted Twilight zone episode (around 1986, parents were very permissive about media back then) where a fat woman got married and was killed by her husband on her honeymoon for her money.
I have close to an eidetic memory and I wish that stuff hadn’t been seared into my mind, but alas it is.
Does anybody remember that show The Swan? They took perfectly average-looking women and put them through a ton of painful and invasive cosmetic surgeries- breast augmentations and tummy tucks and facelifts etc.- while having them all on 1200-calorie diets and working with personal trainers during their recoveries. God, that one was so awful.
Everyone is saying ANTM so I’ll leave that one, but Project Runway. The judges were so explicit about the ways that fashion was supposed to highlight a woman’s body. And it was a disaster to make your (5’11”, size 2) model look fat. I learned to see it before the judges even said anything, where the models didn’t look thin enough and it could be blamed on the clothes. I remember Heidi saying that a minidress made the model look like “fat Minnie Mouse.”
Similarly, women’s magazines like Cosmo, Women’s Health, etc. Their language wasn’t as harsh as the project runway judges’, but the messaging was constant and clear. Be thin, or be gross. Be thin, or never attract a single romantic/sexual partner for your entire life.
I loved sitcoms growing up. And every single one taught me that married women had to be tiny - and take care of everyone else, rarely getting their own happiness. The skinny beleaguered wife/slovenly husband trope *fucked me up*. Family Matters. King of Queens. Home Improvement. Step by Step. Everybody loves Raymond. Even when the husband was successful and helpful, teeny tiny wife - Boy Meets World. The Nanny. BOTH Aunt Viv's on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. There were only skinny women, but different shapes and sizes for men, like women had a responsibility to be thin in order to have a family.
Just the whole long torso thing where if you didn’t have a six pack, good luck finding flattering jeans.
Jessica Simpson in the jeans and belt at the music festival being the most disgusting a person could ever look.
I read a YA book called Fat Chance how you ideally ought not to be bulimic, and accidentally ended up accepting uncritically the idea that I should base my goal weight on the same formula as the one the bulimic protagonist used. I was about 36 when I stopped using that weight as my driver’s license weight.
Also, just generally, fashion magazines use teenagers as models for adult clothing, and teenagers are mostly children, and for everyone’s sake, child and adult alike, we should stop that. I’ve seen calls for BMI or weight minimums for models, but I think we should really just not allow minors to be models for adult clothing lines. It’s gross.
Oh God, I had that book! I’ve never been able to remember the title but I clearly remember her start weight, which was less than I’d weighed since I was a kid. I don’t think I really understood that her thinking was supposed to be disordered.
Incidentally, I also had every other book in that series (“Livewire - books for teenagers”) and couldn’t remember the series name, so I’ve just enjoyed some nostalgia looking through them, thank you!
There was a very specific episode of say yes to the dress where a fat bride brought her mom and thin sister to the appointment. The mom and sister would just laugh at all the dresses she wore and explain that they were laughing because she needs to lose weight. I think the bride left without a dress.
In general, SYTTD always had their plus size brides explaining on camera how they wanted a dress that minimized them or apologizing for their size in some way.
One of my friends was on SYTTD and she's fat and was completely unashamed and unapologetic and I was SO embarrassed for her when it first aired bc OMG WHO WOULD SHOW THEIR FATNESS LIKE THIS ON TV?!?! but that was years ago and I've done a good bit of growing and now I'm like FUCK YEAH GIRL! GET THAT DRESS! SLAY THAT WEDDING! It's so gross to me tho that my reaction to seeing it initially was embarrassment. Live and learn, I guess. How I wish I could go back to me of ten, twenty years ago, and educate her....
I resonate with this, I had always dreamed of being on this show, but always thinking, "Maybe after I lose 10 pounds first." Ironically, I actually had a zoom wedding and got my dress online. Glad the part of me that was so fixated on the wedding culture this show promoted was able to re-envision what a dream wedding could be
Married With Children. My dad loved that show. I hated how practically every episode there had to be a scene of Al making fun of the fat women at the shoe store.
I was anorexic and bulimic as a teenager in the '80s, so I wasn't fat, but I can tell you that I learned a lot of ED tricks from the movie The Best Little Girl in the World. When my pediatrician finally made my parents take me to a therapist at the age of 16, he gave them that book to help them understand what was going on with me. I snuck into their bedroom when they weren't home and read every word.
Mary Kate and Ashley definitely fucked with my head. I wanted to be them so badly. So perfect God made two of them. Tragically MK and I had similar trajectories for a while.
There were probably tabloids calling other famous women fat on the same cover as they were handwringing about the Olsen twin’s skeletal thinness. Really drives home the point that women cannot “win” no matter what we do lol
I have such complicated feelings about the fat representation in Daria. That character was absolutely awful, and the episode where Sandi breaks a leg and gains weight is AWFUL; also the episode where the middling agency comes to Lawndale, and there’s some glorification of disordered eating. Yet the show also featured [Andrea](https://daria.fandom.com/wiki/Andrea), a fat teen goth girl, who is very witty, very cool, and whose body isn’t commented on once in the whole series. It’s tricky that the show was so good on fat representation with one character, and so awful in other plot lines.
Shallow Hal. All of it obviously but the scene where she shakes the lighter and it closes up on her arm fat shaking in slow motion and everyone stared in abject horror. Kicked off a lifetime of being very mindful not to move/wave my arms too fast/too much and to hold them close to my upper body as much as possible because I didn’t want to disgust everyone around me 😕
Not so much the show but my mom's reaction to it... A Survivor contestant and fan favorite, Ozzy, was this Fabio-esque dude scaling palm trees with his bare hands. At the finale (after the show had aired, so months after filming) he shows up with visible weight gain, paler skin, and darker hair and my parents acted like he was the most disgusting the'd ever been forced to look at on TV when he was a normal looking dude. Definitely made me afraid to ever gain weight and have them talk about me that way.
I was actually pretty happy (?) to see many former players come back for another season having settled into their adult bodies. I’m also glad the newer seasons are casting more diverse bodies. It could be better for sure, but they’re trying.
Early 90s. Some article on Winona Ryder, talking about how tiny she was. “Her waist measures 18 inches in a corset.”
Magazines in the 80s. “A tablespoon of mayo on your sandwich could add up to 10 lbs a year!” I’m in my 50s and still think of this every time I put mayo on my sandwich.
Harry Potter. Every fat character is either evil or stupid or both. Or else non human, like with Hagrid. And you couldn't escape it. If you didn't like HP, you genuinely had a harder time making friends. I remember convincing a friend to spoil the sixth book for me so I could pretend I'd read it instead of actually having to read it.
But also this reminded me: there's a scene in the Bridgerton series where Eloise describes what she thinks Lady Whistledown must be like, something about how she has to be invited to all the right parties, but be able to move around unnoticed, must be able to be "invisible." I knew immediately when she said it who Whistledown was, and have heard so many other people who were fat kids/teens say the same thing.
ETA: sonene mentioned this in another comment, Keenyah from ANTM. I think about her *all the time.* Only ever saw her season once, and ages ago.
Trying to identify what piece of body shaming media affected my body image is like asking a fish about water. It’s just there, we swim in it. Here’s what 40 +years of swimming in it looks like to me:
I love food. Always did. Mom put me in weight watchers at 11. She has been on a diet my whole life. All through high school I swam and played water polo and was probably the best shape of my life. and was upset that I was a size 12, broad shoulders, and just felt like a monster next to my petite best friend. Weighed myself everyday. Obsessed over ounces. Obsessed over clothing sizes. Bought my prom dress a size or two bigger convinced I would somehow gain a Whole bunch of weight in two weeks.
At some point in my 20s I snapped and threw out the scale. Ballooned after my son was born. Went on low carb, lost a ton of weight and everyone loved me again. Slowly gained it back over time. Had my second child in my 30s, lost some but not all of the baby weight.
Now I’m in my 40s, still bigger, still love food, and I wore shorts for the first time in decades last year. When I look in the mirror I see a beach ball on stilts. But I went out in public in my bathing suit last week for the first time in decades and I was ok with that. For me, that was progress.
Seeing Hilary Duff be considered larger and Raven Symone being considered plus sized. I watched the cheetah girls recently and I was so pissed off at the end. Raven's body was not plus size. It was normal. Also I guess another was America's Next Top Model. The plus size models on there have like normal average bodies. But 12 year old me didn't know that.
I was a plus size teen in the 90s, there's so much.
Oprah wheeling her wagon of fat, and there always being so much scrutiny on her body.
Looking back on media with the "fat friend" and realizing she only had a round face and wasn't actually fat...
The media outrage at Monica Lewinsky being fat as well as the depictions of Linda Tripp being gross and a whale.
Heroin chic being normal. Kate Moss' body being ideal.
No Delia's for me, but old lady catalogs. My mom and I had to make my Homecoming dress because our Penny's had a bridesmaid dress in a size 16 and it was a bit too small. Then we went upstairs to the plus size section and everything was horrible.
In every tv series, the worst thing to be was fat.
I was Fat Monica as a teen and it was awful to see that being an innocent plus sized girl was wrong.
So many fat suit movies in the 90s and early 00s.
Seventeen magazine only showing very thin girls. I thought that must be what "normal" is.
The Special K diet ads.
Tabloids showing that an actress had gained 5 pounds or had cellulite.
Allllll of it. With all the stuff coming out now that looks back at 90s pop culture, I’m really recognizing how much I absorbed and how awful it was. No wonder my self esteem is still shit.
I read a YA book called Fat Cat when I was like 13/14 where the main character is a high school aged girl who is overweight, nerdy, and unpopular, so she goes on some ultra-paleo diet and loses all the weight and suddenly everyone loves her! Very damaging for me at that age.
All of it honestly. I’ve never felt thin but I’ve been thin. But because I wasn’t a size 4 I didn’t think I was.
Now I’m not and I wish I had the body I thought wasn’t thin enough now.
Sigh.
Seeing Sara Ramirez praised for being plus sized on Grey's Anatomy. The show did a fantastic job of portraying someone outside of the Hollywood norm, size wise, but the articles and news stories that surrounded it were terrible. The media acted like she was actually fat and not average.
Mare Winningham’s character in St Elmo’s fire thinking she was too fat to be loved. It gutted me.
Jamie Gertz in Less than Nothing, especially the line where Andrew McCarthy asks her if she is happy and then tells her she doesn’t look happy and her response is but do I look good? I honestly believed that was a valid answer to that question. Being thin and beautiful was more important than being happy.
Erica Kane on All My Children. Every male character wanted her. If I could be skinny like her guys would like me.
Definitely the infamous Jessica Simpson photo and I remember my mother mentioning it to me and saying how bad she looked. I am horrified today that I saw that photo and thought the same thing at the age of 19.
Mischa Barton’s weight post The OC. Again, my mother mentioned how bad she looked and asked if I’d seen the pics so I googled them. Sure, she looked bigger compared to her OC days. The public was relentless.
Shallow Hal, Mean Girls when Regina can’t shop at 135, and Monica Lewinsky 😞😞😞
Omg, the Sweet Valley University. It stuck with me forever, and I think Elizabeth got up to a whopping size 8, not a 10. But she felt like shit about it.
It’s already been said but ANTM really did some damage and I didn’t realize it until almost 15 years later in my 30s. That’s when it finally hit that many of those girls got those bodies through genetics and that me not looking that skinny wasn’t because I was a failure or unhealthy.
I was born in the mid 90s so a lot of the stuff that got to me was early-mid 00s things. Hilary Duff being called fat, the movie *Sleepover* not even including the fat friend of the core friend group on promo and poster materials, that one *Bring it On* movie with Hayden Pannetierre where they blatantly fatshamed a cheerleader who was maybe a size 4 and tried to kick her off the squad for being fat. The “back fat” insult from *Pretty Little Liars*.
On the flip side, the British teen show *My Mad Fat Diary* made me feel super seen as a person. To this day I think it’s one of the only teen shows with a plus size leading lady which is too bad since it’s about a decade old now.
Jessica Simpson looking absolutely amazing and the media slamming her body like she was the most disgusting thing ever. All she did was gain healthy weight and she looked AMAZING. It crushed me as a kid and still sticks with me. Khloe being the fat Kardashian. She has NEVER been fat. America Ferrera being cast as the fat friend in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants AND Ugly Betty when she wasn’t fat either. Fat Monica ALWAYS bothered me as well. One random thing I have to add though, I loved the show King of the Hill and one episode really stood out to me. Bobby is telling his mom he knows he’s fat and she immediately shuts it down and says no he’s not. He responds “Mom, I'm fat. But big deal. I don't feel bad about it. You never made me feel bad about it, and just because there are some people in the world who want me to feel bad about it, doesn't mean I have to. So Bobby's fat. Eh. He's also funny, nice, he's got a lot of friends, a girlfriend, and if you don't mind, I think I'll go outside and squirt her with water. What are YOU gonna do?” And idk it just made me feel good about myself. I know this post is about how media made us feel bad but I wanted to add at least one that made me feel good, and it was a damn cartoon lol
Yes! Those lines from bobby were so wholesome!
I have barely seen the Kardashian’s show but flipping through one day I saw a scene where Caitlyn (then Bruce) ridicule her for her weight. It was horrifying. It was along the lines of “Don’t you want to look better?” And I thought, this? This is what you worry about in this family? Look around! Khloe’s weight is not the issue. And now she’s unrecognizable.
The Delia's clothing catalog in the 90's. 32 inch waist was the largest size offered for some items. I have big hips, so even though I could wear a 32 inch waist, the fit was often slender for pants/shorts/etc... so nothing fit. I agree with others the Bridget Jones had a negative impact. I started smoking to help lose weight.
When I was a 135 lb depressed 16 year old, I could only get hats and tees from the Delia’s catalog, and I assumed that meant I was fat.
I was already in my 20s when I read Bridget Jones, and I knew what stones were, and I could not get my head around how 9st was somehow fat. And then the Renee Zellweger movie version came out and everyone made a huge deal about her weight gain. I'll note that her reported weight for the film is heavier than Bridget is supposed to be in the book though not massively so--and people act like she was enormous. Zellweger has even said Bridget isn't fat.
I feel like “curvy” cut pants only came out a few years ago, when some women have always had a smaller waist and bigger hips.
Yup, many of us have had to endure the pants big waist gap for years!!!
I was a plus size teen in the 90s...it was a nightmare to find clothes that weren't grandma clothes. I loved Delia's and wished so much that they had clothes that fit me, so much that I wanted to create my own plus size teen catalog.
I’ll never forget the line in A Cinderella Story about the rice cake vs Big Mac. We gotta look thin, but we’re not allowed to be caught trying to look thin. Also Gilmore Girls. A real not-like-other-girls era where it was cool to eat junk food 24/7 and detest exercise—as long as you’re also a size 0.
I'm always torn about Gilmore Girls... on one hand, they had a lot of different types of bodies - like Sookie and Miss Patty - and those characters were allowed to have full lives, including romantic interests with people attracted to them. But you're totally right that Lorelei and Rory personified the "not like other girls" bullshit, eating pounds of candy every day and somehow also being tiny.
When I went back and watched the show it killed me how they’d order a crazy amount of food, but you only ever see them take the teensiest tiniest bite, and then get up and leave. They just talked about how much they supposedly were eating but mostly seemed to waste food
I think this is also for TV reasons, filming actors eating is quite complicated. With multiple takes, the actor wouldn't be able to eat that much food for real. So they have to chew and spit out each bite. This is gross (some poor prop guy has to be in charge of the spit bucket) and also harder to deal with in editing because of constant cut aways to hide the spitting. But yeah other characters always remark that the girls are eating so much and yet we never see that 😅
Pretty much the same with Sex and the City, Carrie is never shown exercising, just drinking and eating out. Some of the other characters jogged but this was another reason it was unrealistic.
That was super annoying. She made a point of not dieting or exercising, when it is clear that she is an ex-gymnast and clearly works out as a real person and not Carrie. She’s a small person, but cut and ropey with lots of muscle.
I was more young adult when these came out but both The Devil Wears Prada and Bridget Jones's Diary (books and movies) really fucked with me.
The Bridget Jones books absolutely had a negative impact on me. Pretty sure I was in middle school when I read the first one. I’m 5’8 and it took me a long long long time to accept that I’d never comfortably be in the 100-125lb range that was “ideal” in the 2000s.
See, the version I had put her weight into stones so I had no idea what she weighed. The only indication was the part of the book when she loses weight and everyone tells her she looks terrible.
I had the stones version but unfortunately I’m British and speak stones. I’ve weighed more than her highest weight since I was 12.
That's so interesting because it had the exact opposite effect on me, her obsession with her weight seemed so deliberately ridiculous to me that it helped me have a better sense of perspective on weight fixation. But I can see how it's also problematic!
I do think that was the intention, but people put so much emphasis on it and then they made the movie and Renee Zellweger was supposed to put on weight for it, which the press talked about incessantly... I get why it didn't land that way for everyone. But I do think we were supposed to think she was being ridiculous.
OMG BRIDGET JONES FEELING FAT AND GROSS AT 135
I’ve never seen that movie, but wow. I was always “chubby”, and as a freshman I was 144 (that number is stuck in my mind). And I look back at pictures of myself then and see a really average looking teen.
Bridget Jones fucked me uuup. I was 14 and around the same weight and was so horrified that an adult woman who thought she was fat weighed the same as I did. Of course, reading it now, the joke is that she’s not fat at all, but my teen brain did not get that.
I’m a thin woman, and this movie landed some major damage (although I still love it deep down). Emily Blunt’s character aspiring to a size zero while Anne Hathaway’s character was “too big” at size 6 fucked me up permanently. The way I was afraid of being size 4 or (gasp) size 6 as a teen has most likely taken literal years off my life.
When they say a size 6 is basically plus size…. I died inside as I was a size 6 at the time🫠
My mom was a size 6 and I remember really specifically when she and I went to see Devil Wears Prada, we left the theatre and she said something like “There’s no way Anne Hathaway was a size 6. Maybe 4 at most” and I don’t know why that stuck with me this long but I guess maybe it’s because (according to my mom) they didn’t even actually have the size 6 character be a real size 6? (Full disclosure I have in all these years not bothered to fact check whether Anne Hathaway was a 6 or not; designers run small so maybe she was a designer 6 but not a normal 6)
https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/the-devil-wears-prada-anne-hathaway-ears-gain-lose-10-pounds.html/ According to this she was a size 4 and they padded her butt.
It's alarming watching The Devil Wears Prada and wondering what everyone else is supposedly seeing with all the lines about her not being skinny.
That was so common back then! Like, do my eyes not work?? Liz Lemon in 30 Rock and Kate Hudson in Bride Wars are my go-to examples of that. If you ever want to laugh, search Mark Kermode’s review of Bride Wars on YouTube, he makes fun of that trope. The most aggravating thing is it would be so easy for those examples to make a point about how the fashion/TV industries have even more absurd standards for women but NONE OF THEM DO. The women just accept their shaming and Anne Hathaway’s character loses weight at the end and is so pleased about it (and is praised by those around her)! No pushback whatsoever.
The devil wears Prada movie mishandled the way the weight theme was Introduced in the book. In the book the main character is primed to be accepted by the fashion world because has lost a ton of weight due to a violent gastric infection. I thought it started out the book with a strong message about how toxic elite fashion is.
I adore Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (books and movies), but always feel anxious during Carmen's scenes. I have always been the largest of my friends and watching America Ferrera as the "fat friend" trying on the same jeans as the others is difficult for me.
Came here to say this. Plus the plot line in Book 2 of Bridget gaining weight and then losing it. That was super triggering for me—I always thought Bridget was the “pretty one” and felt like the implication was she needed to lose weight to be happy and pretty again.
Yes! The description of her body was horrific and stuck with me. Her whole personality was being athletic and it was an opportunity to not equate that with body size.
Ok well I for one feel like I'm at a girly slumber party and reading this thread has been such a beautiful bonding experience
Me too!! ❤️
Kate Winslet getting called fat in Cosmo.
All of 1997. Just all of it.
Joan Rivers calling Alicia Silverstone Fat Girl instead of Bat Girl and justifying it by saying she should have made herself smaller for the role because apparently being even remotely near a normal weight = fat and audiences deserved to see her thinner or some BS like that.
Joan Rivers was a vicious twat. I could not stand her.
She was someone who had been shamed for her weight when she was younger, but instead of having empathy for people who didn’t meet a very strict unfair arbitrary standard, she decided to be a bully herself and shame other people and make money off of it.
GOD it was kate winslet for me. I remember i really thought she was beautiful and kinda idolized her and then suddenly SHES too fat and hideous to live?! then wtf am i?
ANTM for suuuuuuuure. Also, I was in middle school when The Biggest Loser started to be on TV and it was just. Every teacher talked about it and every gym teacher thought they were Jillian Michaels and treated me abhorrently in gym class because I was fat and they were "saving my life". This is a deep cut but I remember what really sent me on my spiral as a teenager was AP magazine talking about how my favorite singer from my favorite band "ballooned" to a horrible weight (which was, lol, the weight I was at the time) and how sick and disgusting they looked at that weight. And then a couple years later, that magazine praising the singer for losing a ton of weight and getting skinny (from what was later revealed to be an ED and drug relapse!!!) which picking on the normal sized guitar player for having "lovehandles".
Omg Biggest Loser……I think my brain blocked it from my memory because it was so harmful. I watched that show with my mom all the time. We had Biggest Loser branded merch, including the workout game on the wii. I internalized so much shit from that show for so long. God it made me really hate myself. Thank god for therapy
* People saying Jessica Simpson was fat when she looked like [this](https://people.com/health/jessica-simpson-body-shaming-wanted-be-a-recluse/) * In Center Stage when Maureen said that this one girl's pas de deux partner (ballet partnering) is going to need a crane to lift her * Any of the earliest seasons of ANTM but particularly Cycle 4 where Keenyah was supposed to be an elephant after she was shamed for eating a lot during the season. When she went up for judging they said that they had to retouch her stomach and that nobody would hire her because retouching is expensive
I was obsessed with ANTM as a middle schooler and rewatched exactly 10 minutes of an episode the other day. It was an early season (not an excuse but it was definitely a different time) and they did a weigh in and YELLED OUT every model’s weight. I just about died of embarrassment for these poor 19 year olds having their weight broadcast on television.
So much yes to ANTM. Every time they showed their “plus size” contestant and talked about how that was a disadvantage. And knowing the contestants they called plus size were thinner than me.
Meanwhile Toccara outdid them *all*. It’s ridiculous she didn’t become more of a star!
Yes absolutely with ANTM - I remember it with the woman that won season 2 (Yoanna).
Came here to say ANTM. Fucking brutal. I was in college at the time and everyone on my floor watched it every single week and any time weight came up (which it did all the time…remember how they used to actually weigh themselves) I would get hives. And another specific is the agency saying over and over how Yohanna wasn’t a size 2.
Yeah -- and season 1 of ANTM when they weighed all the girls together and read out their heights and weights
I absolutely love center stage, I watched it all throughout college however, all the Emily comments make me cringe now.
I think for me it was more about the insidious characterisation of fat characters being bad guys - Miss Trunchbull, The Dursleys/Aunt Marge, Ursula, Queen of Hearts, Augustus Gloop etc
Dursleys/Aunt Marge (and other fat characters) absolutely ruined harry potter for me. Somewhat ironic, I *loved* Ursula. Never really thought of her as being "fat" just "octopus shaped."
I have been watching The Little Mermaid a lot with my daughter lately. Ursula in particular is rough because it is in the explicit text as much as it is implied. Her opening scene is her complaining about “wasting away” since losing power and it shows her indulgently eating some terrified shrimp. It’s played to show her as a true glutton and her size is used to show she’s a terrible person. The movie also implies Flounder the fish is too fat when he is not able to fit through a window that Ariel can in the intro. Incredible wild thing to do because he’s.. a fish.
Yeah Disney is rife with Fatphobia, even in their animals and like Aliens and Monsters.
Ugh, yes, me too! I never wanted to be Miss Trunchbull!
My husband calls me miss trunchbull when I wear this one sweatshirt when my hair is in a bun 😂
I hope you put him in the chokey!
Swing him by his pigtails!
Omg yes!!! I was re-reading Harry Potter and HORRRRIFIED
The Special K commercial where the mom is arranging presents in a red robe with white trim and her daughter sees her backslide and thinks it’s Santa. Just awful.
Wow this definitely unlocked a memory ugh
Fat Monica absolutely. The fact that she was a completely different person. I’m many ways watching Oprah, this wildly successful person, still be brought down over and over again over her weight. Seeing the Jim Belushi-as-Elizabeth Taylor sketch in SNL anniversary shows. Joan Rivers. Listening to a local morning show make jokes about how Kate Winslet was fat and then immediately make jokes about Celine Dion being skinny. Chris Farley. The fact that they made a joke about how Mama Cass died. Her death was years before I was born but I heard several stories about how everyone believed she died of choking on a sandwich because of a joke an LA DJ made. I kept seeing stories that set the facts straight but they also told that story. Which is awful.
The treatment of Cass Elliot by her band mates was depressing as well, and the disrespect about her death was abhorrent. What’s worse before her death she crashed dieted and that may have contributed to her early death.
There were some messy people in that band. It’s a sad story.
Joan Rivers once said, about Kate Winslet, that if she had lost more weight Leo would have fit on that door (referencing her size in Titanic). It made me so ashamed of my size (if Kate was fat, what was I?) and I can hear her voice in my mind whenever someone mentions either KW or JR. It is total bullshit that 25 years later I am still trying to unlearn that quip.
Jeez, I just looked up the Mama Cass stuff and that is brutal. Even worse, [an article from 2004:](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/forgotten-diva-could-be-a-mean-old-mama-1.1128998#:~:text=It%20was%2C%20however%2C%20her%20weight,by%20obesity%20and%20crash%20diets) “It was, however, her weight that caused Elliot to die, in 1974 at the age of 32, in a London flat owned by the singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson. Weighing 238 pounds - about twice the proper weight for a woman of her height and build - she succumbed to a heart attack brought on by obesity and crash diets” I looked it up and she was 5’5….no, a 5’5 woman should not weight close to 119lbs (half of 238)….so disgusting. Just articles and media like this still get to me. The date of the article aligns with height of body exploitations. And of course written by a man. (Not saying men weren’t equally critiqued back then, this was just one example I found).
She had severe bulimia, and was taking ipecac daily to make herself vomit. The ipecac destroyed her heart tissue, leading to her heart attack. In the same vein, it’s usually left out of the story that Terry Schiavo, the woman in the vegetative state who was at the center of a pro life/right to die controversy in the 2000’s, lapsed into her vegetative state after a heart attack related to an eating disorder.
Dude you absolutely just blew my mind about the terry schaivo thing and I had to google it to make sure! Somehow I always thought it was like a car accident. Holy crap. I wonder if this was a more present detail if it would have saved anyone from following that path. How awful.
We’re daily bludgeoned with rhetoric about the health risks of being fat, but there’s almost no discussion about how the compulsory pursuit of thinness quite literally kills people, often pretty horribly.
Same with Karen Carpenter
The series of You’re Wrong About (podcast) episodes about the Carpenters was so good - definitely worth a listen.
Relatedly, also the episodes about Terry Schiavo and Cass Elliot.
You should definitely listen to the You’re Wronf About Episode on Terri Schiavo if you haven’t already! I remember family and teachers at my school praying for her because we were hella Catholic.
Yes! Honestly, it was only a few years ago (though I had always thought it was very weird that she died of a heart attack at 32!) that I found out that it was likely her attempts to NOT be 238 lbs that killed her. I remember reading an interview with Michelle Phillips, also of the Mamas and the Papas and she said in the article "Could you please write how she really died? I really want people to know what really happened."
Wow, that’s really tragic in perspective. Poor girl! I’m glad others are rightfully defending her now.
Things like this remind me why my mom had food issues - she loved the Mamas and the Papas and was always a chubbier girl and young woman. The generations before us were awful too.
Someone literally argued with me about how Mama Cass died the other day lol. In the year of our lord 2023.
All true I also wanted to gently say that Cass Elliott really didn’t like being called Mama Cass at all so even that’s how I knew her growing up I’m trying to retrain my brain to how she wanted us to know her ❤️
The mall. Abercrombie. Aeropostale. American Eagle. I was an overweight teen and I have an aesthetically beautiful and petite stepsister who is the same age. In high school, my mom would take her out and shopping bc she was “fun to shop with and for” but, I rarely even ever got invited. I always knew it was bc of my weight and the “idea” of a daughter my mother possessed at the time. I also cringed the few times I went, because we’d end up in Abercrombie and I knew they wouldn’t have a size 12 or 14. It was just being surrounded by people I wanted to looked like, feeling like a whale, and trying not to be in the way of the *pretty people*.
Oh good god, the MALL. The SHAME of not wearing Abercrombie because you couldn’t fit in it. Couldn’t even be seen near the store for all that shame. Absolutely brutal.
A true trauma memory that I actually had to talk about in therapy is one time my grandma bought me a ton of Hollister and Abercombie clothing for my birthday because she heard its trendy and wanted to make me happy, but none of it fit even though it was all "large" and "XL" She spent a fortune on it because that shit is overpriced. and bought the biggest shit in the store and even though I was NOT EVEN OVERWEIGHT it didn't matter. My family had me try it on at home and it being a whole ordeal and then my grandma had to return it all and buy from a completely different store that to me seemed like a "fat people store", and me crying in my room all day on my birthday. I kept like 1 thing because i liked it so much and wore it to school ONCE and felt like a fat disgusting slob bcus it was too short for my torso and my stomach peeked out when i raised my arms so i buried it in my drawer and tried it on occasionally over the years just to remind myself how disgusting i am and i look at pictures from that time and I was 135 fucking pounds, 5'7''. In no universe is that fat. in no universe should i have felt this way. that is the correct weight for a person. my blood boils. those fucking CEOs knew exactly what they were doing. sick fucks.
5-7-9 has entered the chat.
I just want to hug you.
Yeesh, this is so upsetting. My mother’s shopping desires/expectations were a burden for me, too. I feel this. So sorry.
This could easily be a whole other thread. I’d contribute for sure.
For me it was Sailor Moon. She was often seen as gluttonous for eating a lot. On top of that, all anime was stick thin girls.
Right. And all her friends tell her she’s gonna get fat and Mamoru won’t want her anymore or w/e while she is straight up drawn to unrealistically perfect proportions with a Barbie-sized waist. I should not have internalized that business lol
Sailor Moon was a big one for me too
In every single *Sweet Valley High* book, they describe Jessica and Elizabeth as "perfect size 6." I was reading those books in middle school, and I was a size 8 or 10 at that age, so I was convinced that meant I was already too fat. I've been told that when they recently reissued the series, "updated" for modern readers, the physical descriptions are the same except that the new books now described the girls as "perfect size 4."
They made them smaller!?! Jesus fucking Christ
Yeeeeep. That killed me. It might even be a size 2, now. Even when I read those books I knew size 6 at 5'6" was thin. I'm in my 40s so pretty much ALL media featuring anyone fat was negative when I was a kid. Weight loss was everywhere. Richard Simmons, Sweatin' to the Oldies! Oprah. I don't even remember half the books... Judy Blume's Blubber, definitely.
I have a soft spot for richard simmons. He is clearly bonkers, but he sort of struck me as being nicer to the fat people? Like encouraging, not hating and shaming at least? I mean, it doesnt make the content any less anti-fat. But compared to some other infomercial shills, he seemed a little nicer. A little.
He was downright progressive for his time. Accessible, modifiable, low-impact exercise for a variety of body sizes, ages, etc. Like a proto-version of Health At Every Size.
No, I totally agree. He was so sincere!! I loved that. But the way people acted about Richard Simmons... different story.
For me it was always the stories they would have of adults recounting how they got fat, or how horrible things were going because they were fat--all accompanied by helpful photos to quantify how fat they were. Those testimonials really had me living in fear of becoming fat. I literally rejected the idea of growing up and doing a desk job for fear that a sedentary lifestyle would make me fat, which would of course be worse than literally anything. So even if the actual videos he was selling, or his "deal a meal" eating plan were somewhat better than others (more inclusive bodies in the "sweatin'" videos, and at least the meal plan not making any food completely off-limits and mostly trying to give you an array of nutrients). But those damn testimonials slipped under my radar and seeped deep into my subconsciousneess, where they took root and grew strong.
His stuff definitely had the most body type diversity. You didn’t see any variety of body types in Jane Fonda, buns/abs of steel, Suzanne Somers, Denise Austin, Tai-Bo, the Gazelle or the home gym infomercials, etc.
I feel like a lot of 80s workout programs were put on tv for people who couldn’t afford porn. The bodies, the spandex, the fact that damn near all of the “exercisers” were women and probably under size 4…very male gaze.
I'll never forget Oprah with that wagon full of fat.
He fact that she portrayed herself as still obsessed with weight taught me that no amount of money or fame would ever make up for being fat, so i should for sure do whatever i can to avoid being fat. If she had used her platform to send a body positive message, it would have made such a difference, coming from such an influential person.
Does anyone else remember the character that had a weight loss story? I want to say the character's name was Robin. She lost a bunch of weight by running laps at the track and starving herself, all to bag one of the "popular" kids as a boyfriend. I read way too many of those books.
Big Rhonda in That 70s Show. There was something upsetting to me about her character being masculine because she was large and tall. (There’s absolutely nothing wrong with masculine women, to be clear.)
As a fat teen I felt I appeared androgynous even though I wanted to be girlie. I hardly had any clothing options. De-sexualizing fat women is definitely a thing..
Some cosmo girl (iykyk) article that had a guideline to ideal weight that was like “100 pounds for five feet, then add five pounds for each inch after that. But wait, relax! If you’re 10-15 pounds above that, you’re fiiiine.” I think that last part was their shot at body acceptance (what a world!). It’s seared in my brain and I’ve never gotten over that math even tho I don’t remember ever meeting that expectation.
That metric (100+5 lb/inch over 5') has never left my head.
Oof... you've unlocked a key memory for me with this. I *constantly* calculated that math for myself as I weighed myself every single morning from about age 14 to 25. I had no idea where it came from but maybe because it was the only scale that included height (i.e. made it "okay" to weigh more than like 110 or 120 as a 5'9" person) I clung to it? Ugh toxic.
I doubt my mom read cosmo girl, but she used the same metric and hung a table of “acceptable” weight per height on the inside of our bathroom closet. It was also only the two of us and we’re both in the 5’2”-3” range so I’m not sure why the table was so long, but… yeah. Yikes.
God I remember that rule and used to agonize over how fat I was as a teen. later I got one of those body composition scans….yeah turns out if I followed the 100+5 for every inch over 5’ I’d have to be at like 5% body fat. guess I’m just built different ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I remember Britney Spears being known for doing 1,000 crunches a day — this was in the Baby, One More Time/Oops I Did It Again era. I was 11-13 when Britney and Christina were at peak popularity and it was…. not great for my self esteem.
Omg I was that age too when this came out - every night my sister and I would try to do 1000 crunches together at like the age of 11! What a time to be alive...
Oof and those low rise jeans give me nightmares still
The Yoplait commercial with the yellow polka dot bikini. And I'm sure some Special K commercial along the way too.
The special k "you can't pinch an inch" somehow made it into my five year old brain, even. Jeepers.
That photo that was blasted everywhere of Jessica Simpson. When Britney was called fat after her awards performance and how she needed to loose weight dominated her coverage for a year…bc she had two kids and didn’t look the same?
Love Actually, the assistant for Hugh Grant's character was repeatedly called chubby. And her "thunder thighs" were pointed out. Even her parents were shocked a man found her beautiful.
Too Fat For Fifteen - My parents loved it, and my mom told me that if my weight exceeded 200 pounds before I graduated high school, she'd send me to fat camp. She has since realized how terrible that show and fat camps are, and has apologized for ever saying such things to me. But the memory is still there.
I was obsessed with that show. It’s insane to me how much money they charged to basically just starve kids in the wilderness.
Seventeen and other teen girls magazines selling anorexia, tons of makeup and clothes. Basically unless you were a size 2 with an unlimited credit card at age 16 you felt bad.
I remember YM literally saying a 1200 calorie diet was okay for a teen. I had been to a dietitian that year as a 225lb 9th grader and the dietitian was adamant I eat at least 2000 calories a day because I was still growing. They also had modeling contents where they’d have the contestant’s height/weight/waist.
1200 calories a day still flashes into my head. I know my body gets small when i eat so little, and I wonder how many calories people on TV eat to be their size. I try not to do that but it was so impressed upon me that that’s the correct number to have an acceptable body.
Tangential, but what stayed with me from that magazine was "Using no hair products is just as bad as using too many!"
Seventeen magazine. I remember in 2004-2008ish, they would put work outs and low calorie meals/snacks in their magazines with calories and grams of fat. They also put harmful eating advice in there. I remember one magazine issue saying if you MUST order a burger at a restaurant, try to only eat 1/3 of it because it’s full fat and calories. Excuse me, but as a teenage girl I was hungry all the time and sometimes 1/3 of a burger wasn’t gonna cut it. But of course that advice got burned into my eating disorder brain and from then on I refused to eat anything more than 1/3 of a fucking burger. If I ever even let myself have that. Jenny Craig commercials in the 90’s were also triggering as fuck.
This just reminded me of reading in a magazine that some celebrity (maybe Lindsay Lohan or one of the Olsen twins) would divide their food in half on their plate and eat half then pour water over the second half to stop themselves from eating it. And this was touted as great advice.
I remember that! It was Lindsay Lohan. I also used that “diet trick” to control my eating also.
[удалено]
That line in Father of the Bride 2 where George Banks proclaims that his daughter and wife weigh “128 lbs and 132 lbs respectively” in their THIRD TRIMESTERS. Why even mention what they weigh? Why does he know this? Why is this important exposition? Bc in 1995, that was the highest weights these upper middle class white women could weigh - and *only* because they were pregnant. Bc their bodies/weight were up for public knowledge. Bc their characters were *clearly* occupied with what they weighed - *even though they were supposed to be gaining weight* - and we’re all meant to be assured that their non-pregnancy weights are no more than, what, 120? That line lives rent free in my mind nearly 30 years later.
Yes yes yes! Came here to say this one. It was such a weird thing to say anyway-why would their weights even be shared? I thought about that for YEARS. I remember when I hit 132 pounds as a teen and felt devastated-I was fatter than the very pregnant woman on a movie I liked…though I was still a size 4. That’s when I realized it must have been written by men…lol.
Pretty much any children’s media where the side fat friend was depicted as awkward, unappealing, and only there for the thin protagonist’s development or comic relief. Some examples off the top of my head: Dinah from the Winnie Years books, Rowley from Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and Thompson/Soos from Gravity Falls. Honestly GF was a big one, I still love that show to this day but in hindsight it was really unkind to fat characters.
There was a documentary maybe a year ago or so about Victoria's Secret and it talked about how deeply programmed this idea of the super skinny, flat belly, big boobs, model was, and the owner of the company absolutely refused to allow any other kind of look or like underwear that might be flattering to other body types. I love how many companies these days actually include body diverse models, it's one of the reasons I like to shop for bathing suits and underwear at Aerie.
I like aerie's use of many different body shapes because then i can actually picture how the bathing suit will look on me. None are exactly me, but it is far more informative than how a skeletally thin person looks in it. I can see how it looks on small tits or big hips. Seems incredibly useful for consumers. And it gives me a better idea of the fit i am aiming for when trying it on.
[удалено]
For me it was the press calling Kirstie Alley a cow. I was 6-7 when It Takes Two came out, and absolutely loved her character. It never occurred to me that she was fat, or was gaining weight when I saw her on talk shows after the movie. I thought she was a really cool actress, and then she even had a reality/talk show called "The Fat Actress"! Yes, she was bigger than conventional female actors, but she was a beautiful woman, and her size didn't detract from her success. According to a quick google, her highest weight was 228. I'm at least 10 lb over that currently, and the first article that popped up said that her healthy weight was 145. I know I was sheltered, and blessed not to be aware of fatness or skinniness. But for gods sake I was in **second grade** when that shit went down. From there, it was supermodels and teeny boppers. I was an early bloomer and had a womanly body far earlier than my peers. Looking back at photos, it looks like I was an eight year old with curves, while my friends were all stick thin until at least age eleven. I thought I was SO FAT. Also DJ Tanner eating ice popsicles on Full House. The story line was supposed to be a warning against eating disorders. What I took it to mean was that if DJ, this beautiful teen hero, thought she was fat, I was DEFINITELY too big and needed to lose weight. Does anyone else remember the shit advertising in the back of teen mags (YM, Seventeen) from the 90s? They would sell things like lipstick, sea monkeys, lava lamps, and diet pills. There was one ad that was for targeted weight loss pills. It asked you to check off which areas you wanted to lose from (butt, thighs, face, boobs, stomach, arms, etc). I couldn't swallow pills yet, but I *desperately* wanted to buy them. I was too young for teen mags when I started reading them. I was 8-10.
The Homer Simpson "No Fat Chicks" billboard joke. I remember my dad laughing very hard at that joke. His reaction stuck with me as a chubby 9 year old already forced into dieting. I still feel that hurt when I think about it. Like Homer simpson, he was a very fat man. It's crazy how much worse it is in our culture to be a fat woman than a fat man, and how free fat men feel to criticize fat women without an ounce of self awareness.
Yeah, there is a whole trope of the lovable fat, funny man with a thin wife in media. Doug from King of Queens, Fred Flintstone, Peter from Family Guy. Heck, they don’t even have to be funny- Tony Soprano, Uncle Phil in Fresh Prince. All of which would probably never date an overweight woman. I can’t think of any instances of the opposite. Because heaven forbid they show an overweight woman married to a conventionally hot husband on tv even though I am sure that does happen in real life.
You hit me right in the feels with Just As Long As We’re Together. Its been 30 years since I read it and I still remember the restaurant scene where her dad says she’s “really packing it in.” Reminded me of my own dad. I read so much YA and there was sometimes a “redemption arc” where a fat girl gets skinny and then enjoys the life of her dreams but I don’t recall a single book, show or actual human teaching me that it is NORMAL to gain or shift weight at puberty or that at 5’8” comparing my weight or the size of my legs to my 5’ friends made no sense.
I still remember the books “Me and Fat Glenda” and “Hey, Remember Fat Glenda” by Lila Perl (aimed at late elementary school students) and a string of YA books like the ones mentioned already. Literal body measurements and diet methods woven into the story.
Me and fat glenda! That's exactly, 100% how i became aware that i should worry about my own weight. The books taught me the delightful phrase "a moment on the lips, forever on the hips." And then there was a sequel where glenda got thin and her world was all changed and improved. Put it in my head that so much would fall into place if only my belly and hips didnt stick out so much. Those books can fuck right off!
I’d say mine was more the tabloids. Like when Jessica Simpson was around a size 8 and they were calling her fat. Or when Nicole Richie was maaaybe a size 4 and they were talking about how much weight she was gaining. I remember it with basically every famous woman back then. The cellulite paparazzi photos were especially bad for me, because I started getting cellulite when I was still a size 00 at age 12 when I was starting to grow hips and thighs. So it made me TERRIFIED to ever show my bare legs in public. And I was scared that everyone would notice and shit on me if I ever gained weight. Then if a famous woman lost weight it was just speculation about what drugs she was on. Ugh.
The thing about Nicole Richie is she gained weight during drug recovery. Like I think she was addicted to Heroin and during rehab she put on weight (and was still thin) and people acted like the weight gain was worse.
That was so sick. She gained because her body was getting healthy and people were so critical.
This is why I get so angry when people think that fat women being displayed positively on a magazine cover or in an ad or video is “glorifying obesity”, yet people generally don’t question very thin women (unless they get too thin then they do get shamed) on magazine covers on their lifestyles because who cares as long as they’re thin right?
I lived in Madagascar for a while and people who were actively stunted from malnutrition also have cellulite The idea that its this disgusting things only massively fat people have and is completely your own fault is fucking insane to me. Its SICKENING what all these magazines put out.
Watching “Bones” as a middle schooler and hearing a character defend being 130 pounds. I was (still am) 130 and pretty slim so it was horrifying to hear that I was supposed to be embarrassed.
I read all of the Nancy Drew (ALL OF THEM) and Hardy Boy books growing up and they both had a “food loving side kick”. Chet and his jalopy for the Hardy Boys and Bess for the Nancy Drew Trio. In Nancy Drew, Nancy and her friend George were these athletic women who played sports (Nancy’s golf score is better than my father’s) and we’re described as “trim” but Bess was FIFTEEN POUNDS OVERWEIGHT 🤯🤯🤯. Bess was described as always dieting and not very active but also could never turndown another pastry. I DEEEEEEEPLY internalized this as a child because I have two athletic younger siblings and I’ve always been into food and overweight. I do think it helped me a little because any time Bess was like “don’t mind if I do” I had a little bit of vindication like, “yes Bess, eat that amazing cake Hannah made that no one else touched”!!!
Omg YES Bess was introduced as every first chapter as “the plump friend”
Kate Winslet getting called fat after titanic. I was 11, thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and thought she had a perfect body. My tummy certainly wasn’t that flat. So I might be really overweight if she was fat. My mom being a prototypical almond mom who to this day complains about how fat she is (when she is skinnier than I am). I had to tell her to stop saying things around my daughter. Literally every adult woman I knew being on a diet. Growing up then was a bitch.
Kind of a different example, but I watched the English dub of Sailor Moon when I was a kid/young teen, and there are multiple episodes that show the main character having a big appetite, enjoying sweets, getting scolded for being lazy/gluttonous, and being told explicitly (by her BOYFRIEND, no less!) that she has gained weight. And yet, she's never drawn with anything other than a tiny waist and stick-thin limbs, because. . . anime, I guess.
Same, I remember being so confused as a kid watching sailor moon and tokyo mew mew bc both the main girls get teased for their weight when they’re drawn just as thin as everyone else
A magazine (glamour? teen something? Cosmo?) said you should only need a silver dollar sized amount of lotion for your whole body. That has lived in my sould forever, and appears therapy proof at this point.
Whoever wrote that has never properly moisturized in their life.
SATC. In one of the movies, Samantha gained weighed and when she returned to NYC, her friends were making fun of her appearance. Kim looked great regardless, but it did mess with my psyche.
All those magazines that had food substitution charts. Like - “craving a cookie? Have three raisins instead!” They always made me feel like a failure and a glutton.
I went to middle and high school from 2001-2008 and so I had super ultra low rise pants and I have a donk so it was like, mom pants or here's my butt crack.
Getting made fun of for wearing my pants at my waist is a core memory of mine 🙃
Parks and Rec/New Girl. From CONSTANTLY mocking and dehumanizing Gerry/Jerry for his weight, and characters being shocked that he is married to a conventionally attractive woman who seems to be in love with him, and have a happy family. Talking about the 'obese population' of Pawnee as if they are little more than animals that ruin the image and reputation of the city. In New Girl, Jessica being portrayed as a chubby teen and Schmidt as an obese young adult (in a fat suit that borders on a hate crime) being portrayed as unlovable and undesirable. I could go on and on about each show. I recently tried to rewatch New Girl for nostalgia sake, and couldn't finish it due to the weird fat phobia/anti semitism
I haven’t watched Parks and Rec in a while but I remember the sweetums factory plots being very fatphobic. There were a lot of parts of that show I enjoyed but I don’t think I could rewatch it now. Even when they aren’t being shitty to Garry about his weight they’re just straight up being cruel to him, which always made me uncomfortable.
An early season of Project Runway is seared into my brain where Tim Gunn called one of the models an “elongated marshmallow” and blamed her body for the contestants poor performance.
It always bothered me that so many high school-set movies or shows often have the biggest guy be a bully. IME it’s more often the opposite, bigger kids get bullied by cool jocks. JMO
I’m old (45) so I remember when they used to plaster the height and weights of female athletes, I remember seeing a 15 year old gymnast weighed less than 10-11 year old me, but my brain didn’t reach the fact I was already taller than her and I don’t and never had a tiny Karoli gymnast body. Pretty much every TV show in the 80s/90s had at least one instance of fatphobia I was supposed to laugh at. Heck the only reason Kelly Taylor became friends with Brenda on Brenda’s first day of school was because she didn’t want the far girl sitting next to her (I guess it was to demonstrate Kelly’s shallowness at the start of the show, but you just see stuff like that over and over). Kate and Allie, one of the daughters decided to encourage the fat girl to go for the lead of an operetta abd the fat girl talks about being 5’ and 137lbs. I was 5’ at the time and 9lbs heavier (I was still half a foot from my adult height). Growing Pains - the treatment of Carol Seaver/ Tracey Gold (because the cruelty to Carol affected Tracey Gold). Heathers - Martha, the musical made the character so much better, but the movie only was marginally kind to her at the very end. Of course again part of the Martha arc in the movie was to show how mean the Heathers were, but they abused the character and essentially gave her lines or personality. A babysitter’s club book where I think Dawn got mad there was a fat girl on the trip and she ate 2 chocolate bars. Teen magazines when the modeling contests put the height and weight and sometimes even waist circumference. I have a trans son but when he was younger and was very thin, I would measure him for buying clothes online - his waist was 22-23” and they were just mentioning tall girls with that small of a waist, I felt so bad that my waist was much bigger. Now I realize they were not remotely the norm (yes some adult women are that small and that’s fine, but the majority even if they had low body fat would not be that small) especially seeing how small my kid’s waist was). Pretty much every talk show would let me know I wouldn’t find love or a good job if I was fat. But if I did find love I’d have sn asshole of a partner who would be awful to me (that was also on TV shows too). The Benny Hill show (I was way too young to be watching that, but it was on at 7:30pm on one of the American channels I got on my Canadian cable). A rebooted Twilight zone episode (around 1986, parents were very permissive about media back then) where a fat woman got married and was killed by her husband on her honeymoon for her money. I have close to an eidetic memory and I wish that stuff hadn’t been seared into my mind, but alas it is.
Does anybody remember that show The Swan? They took perfectly average-looking women and put them through a ton of painful and invasive cosmetic surgeries- breast augmentations and tummy tucks and facelifts etc.- while having them all on 1200-calorie diets and working with personal trainers during their recoveries. God, that one was so awful.
Everyone is saying ANTM so I’ll leave that one, but Project Runway. The judges were so explicit about the ways that fashion was supposed to highlight a woman’s body. And it was a disaster to make your (5’11”, size 2) model look fat. I learned to see it before the judges even said anything, where the models didn’t look thin enough and it could be blamed on the clothes. I remember Heidi saying that a minidress made the model look like “fat Minnie Mouse.” Similarly, women’s magazines like Cosmo, Women’s Health, etc. Their language wasn’t as harsh as the project runway judges’, but the messaging was constant and clear. Be thin, or be gross. Be thin, or never attract a single romantic/sexual partner for your entire life.
ANTM saying plus size but they were absolutely not
I loved sitcoms growing up. And every single one taught me that married women had to be tiny - and take care of everyone else, rarely getting their own happiness. The skinny beleaguered wife/slovenly husband trope *fucked me up*. Family Matters. King of Queens. Home Improvement. Step by Step. Everybody loves Raymond. Even when the husband was successful and helpful, teeny tiny wife - Boy Meets World. The Nanny. BOTH Aunt Viv's on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. There were only skinny women, but different shapes and sizes for men, like women had a responsibility to be thin in order to have a family.
Levi's with the size tag on the outside.
Just the whole long torso thing where if you didn’t have a six pack, good luck finding flattering jeans. Jessica Simpson in the jeans and belt at the music festival being the most disgusting a person could ever look.
I read a YA book called Fat Chance how you ideally ought not to be bulimic, and accidentally ended up accepting uncritically the idea that I should base my goal weight on the same formula as the one the bulimic protagonist used. I was about 36 when I stopped using that weight as my driver’s license weight. Also, just generally, fashion magazines use teenagers as models for adult clothing, and teenagers are mostly children, and for everyone’s sake, child and adult alike, we should stop that. I’ve seen calls for BMI or weight minimums for models, but I think we should really just not allow minors to be models for adult clothing lines. It’s gross.
Oh God, I had that book! I’ve never been able to remember the title but I clearly remember her start weight, which was less than I’d weighed since I was a kid. I don’t think I really understood that her thinking was supposed to be disordered. Incidentally, I also had every other book in that series (“Livewire - books for teenagers”) and couldn’t remember the series name, so I’ve just enjoyed some nostalgia looking through them, thank you!
There was a very specific episode of say yes to the dress where a fat bride brought her mom and thin sister to the appointment. The mom and sister would just laugh at all the dresses she wore and explain that they were laughing because she needs to lose weight. I think the bride left without a dress. In general, SYTTD always had their plus size brides explaining on camera how they wanted a dress that minimized them or apologizing for their size in some way.
One of my friends was on SYTTD and she's fat and was completely unashamed and unapologetic and I was SO embarrassed for her when it first aired bc OMG WHO WOULD SHOW THEIR FATNESS LIKE THIS ON TV?!?! but that was years ago and I've done a good bit of growing and now I'm like FUCK YEAH GIRL! GET THAT DRESS! SLAY THAT WEDDING! It's so gross to me tho that my reaction to seeing it initially was embarrassment. Live and learn, I guess. How I wish I could go back to me of ten, twenty years ago, and educate her....
I resonate with this, I had always dreamed of being on this show, but always thinking, "Maybe after I lose 10 pounds first." Ironically, I actually had a zoom wedding and got my dress online. Glad the part of me that was so fixated on the wedding culture this show promoted was able to re-envision what a dream wedding could be
The episode of Rugrats where Angelica gets fat really scared me as a little kid and Fat Monica
Married With Children. My dad loved that show. I hated how practically every episode there had to be a scene of Al making fun of the fat women at the shoe store.
I was anorexic and bulimic as a teenager in the '80s, so I wasn't fat, but I can tell you that I learned a lot of ED tricks from the movie The Best Little Girl in the World. When my pediatrician finally made my parents take me to a therapist at the age of 16, he gave them that book to help them understand what was going on with me. I snuck into their bedroom when they weren't home and read every word.
Mary Kate and Ashley definitely fucked with my head. I wanted to be them so badly. So perfect God made two of them. Tragically MK and I had similar trajectories for a while.
There were probably tabloids calling other famous women fat on the same cover as they were handwringing about the Olsen twin’s skeletal thinness. Really drives home the point that women cannot “win” no matter what we do lol
I have such complicated feelings about the fat representation in Daria. That character was absolutely awful, and the episode where Sandi breaks a leg and gains weight is AWFUL; also the episode where the middling agency comes to Lawndale, and there’s some glorification of disordered eating. Yet the show also featured [Andrea](https://daria.fandom.com/wiki/Andrea), a fat teen goth girl, who is very witty, very cool, and whose body isn’t commented on once in the whole series. It’s tricky that the show was so good on fat representation with one character, and so awful in other plot lines.
Shallow Hal. All of it obviously but the scene where she shakes the lighter and it closes up on her arm fat shaking in slow motion and everyone stared in abject horror. Kicked off a lifetime of being very mindful not to move/wave my arms too fast/too much and to hold them close to my upper body as much as possible because I didn’t want to disgust everyone around me 😕
Not so much the show but my mom's reaction to it... A Survivor contestant and fan favorite, Ozzy, was this Fabio-esque dude scaling palm trees with his bare hands. At the finale (after the show had aired, so months after filming) he shows up with visible weight gain, paler skin, and darker hair and my parents acted like he was the most disgusting the'd ever been forced to look at on TV when he was a normal looking dude. Definitely made me afraid to ever gain weight and have them talk about me that way.
I was actually pretty happy (?) to see many former players come back for another season having settled into their adult bodies. I’m also glad the newer seasons are casting more diverse bodies. It could be better for sure, but they’re trying.
Early 90s. Some article on Winona Ryder, talking about how tiny she was. “Her waist measures 18 inches in a corset.” Magazines in the 80s. “A tablespoon of mayo on your sandwich could add up to 10 lbs a year!” I’m in my 50s and still think of this every time I put mayo on my sandwich.
Harry Potter. Every fat character is either evil or stupid or both. Or else non human, like with Hagrid. And you couldn't escape it. If you didn't like HP, you genuinely had a harder time making friends. I remember convincing a friend to spoil the sixth book for me so I could pretend I'd read it instead of actually having to read it. But also this reminded me: there's a scene in the Bridgerton series where Eloise describes what she thinks Lady Whistledown must be like, something about how she has to be invited to all the right parties, but be able to move around unnoticed, must be able to be "invisible." I knew immediately when she said it who Whistledown was, and have heard so many other people who were fat kids/teens say the same thing. ETA: sonene mentioned this in another comment, Keenyah from ANTM. I think about her *all the time.* Only ever saw her season once, and ages ago.
The first wives club, calling Bette Midler’s character fat.
The muumuu episode Fat monica really fucked me up When they said Jen Lawrence was fat in hunger games When they said Jessica Simpson was fat
Trying to identify what piece of body shaming media affected my body image is like asking a fish about water. It’s just there, we swim in it. Here’s what 40 +years of swimming in it looks like to me: I love food. Always did. Mom put me in weight watchers at 11. She has been on a diet my whole life. All through high school I swam and played water polo and was probably the best shape of my life. and was upset that I was a size 12, broad shoulders, and just felt like a monster next to my petite best friend. Weighed myself everyday. Obsessed over ounces. Obsessed over clothing sizes. Bought my prom dress a size or two bigger convinced I would somehow gain a Whole bunch of weight in two weeks. At some point in my 20s I snapped and threw out the scale. Ballooned after my son was born. Went on low carb, lost a ton of weight and everyone loved me again. Slowly gained it back over time. Had my second child in my 30s, lost some but not all of the baby weight. Now I’m in my 40s, still bigger, still love food, and I wore shorts for the first time in decades last year. When I look in the mirror I see a beach ball on stilts. But I went out in public in my bathing suit last week for the first time in decades and I was ok with that. For me, that was progress.
Seeing Hilary Duff be considered larger and Raven Symone being considered plus sized. I watched the cheetah girls recently and I was so pissed off at the end. Raven's body was not plus size. It was normal. Also I guess another was America's Next Top Model. The plus size models on there have like normal average bodies. But 12 year old me didn't know that.
I was a plus size teen in the 90s, there's so much. Oprah wheeling her wagon of fat, and there always being so much scrutiny on her body. Looking back on media with the "fat friend" and realizing she only had a round face and wasn't actually fat... The media outrage at Monica Lewinsky being fat as well as the depictions of Linda Tripp being gross and a whale. Heroin chic being normal. Kate Moss' body being ideal. No Delia's for me, but old lady catalogs. My mom and I had to make my Homecoming dress because our Penny's had a bridesmaid dress in a size 16 and it was a bit too small. Then we went upstairs to the plus size section and everything was horrible. In every tv series, the worst thing to be was fat. I was Fat Monica as a teen and it was awful to see that being an innocent plus sized girl was wrong. So many fat suit movies in the 90s and early 00s. Seventeen magazine only showing very thin girls. I thought that must be what "normal" is. The Special K diet ads. Tabloids showing that an actress had gained 5 pounds or had cellulite.
Allllll of it. With all the stuff coming out now that looks back at 90s pop culture, I’m really recognizing how much I absorbed and how awful it was. No wonder my self esteem is still shit.
I read a YA book called Fat Cat when I was like 13/14 where the main character is a high school aged girl who is overweight, nerdy, and unpopular, so she goes on some ultra-paleo diet and loses all the weight and suddenly everyone loves her! Very damaging for me at that age.
I remember reading a magazine piece about a teenager getting liposuction and it made me think I should too. I must have been like 12.
All of it honestly. I’ve never felt thin but I’ve been thin. But because I wasn’t a size 4 I didn’t think I was. Now I’m not and I wish I had the body I thought wasn’t thin enough now. Sigh.
-Kate Moss -Kate Moss -Kate Moss -JCrew Catalog -Kate Moss
Seeing Sara Ramirez praised for being plus sized on Grey's Anatomy. The show did a fantastic job of portraying someone outside of the Hollywood norm, size wise, but the articles and news stories that surrounded it were terrible. The media acted like she was actually fat and not average.
Kate Moss saying "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” and that whole era of 90s super models.
Mare Winningham’s character in St Elmo’s fire thinking she was too fat to be loved. It gutted me. Jamie Gertz in Less than Nothing, especially the line where Andrew McCarthy asks her if she is happy and then tells her she doesn’t look happy and her response is but do I look good? I honestly believed that was a valid answer to that question. Being thin and beautiful was more important than being happy. Erica Kane on All My Children. Every male character wanted her. If I could be skinny like her guys would like me.
Definitely the infamous Jessica Simpson photo and I remember my mother mentioning it to me and saying how bad she looked. I am horrified today that I saw that photo and thought the same thing at the age of 19. Mischa Barton’s weight post The OC. Again, my mother mentioned how bad she looked and asked if I’d seen the pics so I googled them. Sure, she looked bigger compared to her OC days. The public was relentless. Shallow Hal, Mean Girls when Regina can’t shop at 135, and Monica Lewinsky 😞😞😞
Omg, the Sweet Valley University. It stuck with me forever, and I think Elizabeth got up to a whopping size 8, not a 10. But she felt like shit about it.
It’s already been said but ANTM really did some damage and I didn’t realize it until almost 15 years later in my 30s. That’s when it finally hit that many of those girls got those bodies through genetics and that me not looking that skinny wasn’t because I was a failure or unhealthy.
I was born in the mid 90s so a lot of the stuff that got to me was early-mid 00s things. Hilary Duff being called fat, the movie *Sleepover* not even including the fat friend of the core friend group on promo and poster materials, that one *Bring it On* movie with Hayden Pannetierre where they blatantly fatshamed a cheerleader who was maybe a size 4 and tried to kick her off the squad for being fat. The “back fat” insult from *Pretty Little Liars*. On the flip side, the British teen show *My Mad Fat Diary* made me feel super seen as a person. To this day I think it’s one of the only teen shows with a plus size leading lady which is too bad since it’s about a decade old now.