Losing weight was one of the hardest things to ever happen to me. 

When I was 17, my body changed; I grew taller, my hair got longer, and I lost 20 pounds. My shirts started slipping off my shoulders, and my jeans sagged below my waist. People started commenting that I looked “different” or even that I looked better. I started to enjoy the compliments and secretly felt a rush when my clothes didn’t fit right. 

After balancing these feelings for a month, I began to feel anxious about gaining the weight back. I would try on my clothes a hundred times to make sure they were still loose. I would over analyze old photos of myself. And then I began obsessing over other people’s bodies on social media. 

I had never done any of these things before. I had been “body positive” myself, and I never thought about the way you could see my stomach through a tight shirt or dress. Suddenly, my life quite literally changed. My body consumed me. All I could think about was how to maintain my “new” body, the one everyone seemed to love so much. 

Even though I had lost weight I still was a curvy girl, and I continued to struggle with the lack of representation of my body type. It had always bothered me that all my favorite characters in shows and movies were often thinner than I was. If the main character was curvy, their storyline was solely about being curvy. I wanted to see more representation, so I began to seek out people who had a similar body to mine. 

I looked for influencers and celebrities who were “body positive.” Influencers who dance around with their tummies out and eat freely in front of the camera because they are helping girls “feel better about themselves.”  Influencers like Spencer Barbosa, a TikTok creator with over 10 million followers, who seem to genuinely believe what they are saying and continue talking about self love and reminding everyone that social media is fake. Yet, this is where things went wrong for me. 

Barbosa has had the same message for years and always tells her fans to “never apologize for being yourself.” However, there is no way to know whether her messaging is genuine for sure. Influencers like Barbosa are making thousands of dollars by spreading this message … as long as it stays popular. 

The body positivity movement started becoming popular in the last 10 years, trying to change the narrative around the bodies we see in the media. I don’t believe the intentions behind the movement were bad; however, it quickly became a way for people to make money. 

In my experience, my longing to see my own body represented in the media caused my vision to cloud. I began putting too much trust in these women, forgetting this was in fact their job.

Thousands of influencers gained millions of followers for being candid about what they eat in a day or talking about past eating disorders. 

But then the times changed. Nobody wanted to be curvy anymore. My favorite curvy queens had taken Ozempic and the Kardashians replaced their BBL with lipo suction. I watched so many of the women I had looked up to completely change their bodies and it left me feeling … weird. I realized I had put too much faith in these influencers and celebrities. “Body positivity” was a fad, and they had been paid to promote it. 

Their efforts to promote body positivity became counterproductive and has left many women feeling worse about themselves than before. It all just added to the world’s obsession with women’s bodies. Even if the messages they were spreading were “good,” people were still capitalizing on women’s insecurities. 

Losing weight truly was one of the hardest things I’ve been through. But now I have learned not to let the constant chatter from the world control me. I cannot put personal confidence in the hands of others. 

This is not to say that every influencer or celebrity who promotes body positivity is disingenuous, but how they feel about my body doesn’t matter. I remembered that the way that I look is not the only important thing in life: if you feel great and just focus on other aspects of your life, the constant insecurities have a way of slowly leaving us.  

As women, we have to try our best to ignore the way we are “supposed” to look, because there is no right way to be healthy or beautiful.