The rise of social media has created a space where influencers can connect with audiences on a personal level, sharing their lives, experiences, and perspectives. However, when influencers who have previously championed body positivity and plus-size fashion begin to openly discuss intentional weight loss journeys, it sparks complex conversations about body image, health, and representation. This article examines the phenomenon, drawing upon discussions within the Burnt Toast community, research on weight stigma, and the experiences of young women navigating body image in the age of social media.
The Shifting Landscape of Body Positivity
The body positivity movement has aimed to challenge conventional beauty standards and promote acceptance of diverse body types. Influencers who identify as plus-size or body positive have played a crucial role in this movement, creating content that celebrates larger bodies and advocates for inclusivity in fashion and media.
However, some of these influencers have recently begun to share their experiences with intentional weight loss, leading to mixed reactions from their followers. Some view these journeys as personal choices that should be respected, while others feel betrayed or disillusioned, arguing that it reinforces the idea that weight loss is inherently positive and desirable.
Examining the "Why" Behind the Shift
The reasons behind these influencers' decisions to pursue weight loss are multifaceted and complex. Some may be motivated by genuine health concerns, while others may feel pressured by societal expectations or the desire to conform to conventional beauty standards. It is important to approach these situations with empathy and avoid making assumptions about individuals' motivations.
Weight Discourses and Their Impact
Dominant weight discourses in Western society often link virtue and morality with body weight, leading to weight stigma and discrimination against people in larger bodies. This stigma can have serious physical, mental, and social health consequences, including depression, anxiety, disordered eating, and negative body image.
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Young women, in particular, are vulnerable to the harmful effects of weight stigma, as they are often bombarded with messages in fashion and media that promote thinness as the ideal body type. This can lead to a perpetual cycle of weight work, where young women engage in activities such as hiding their weight, trying to lose weight, and resisting dominant weight discourses.
The Role of Social Media
Social media can be a double-edged sword when it comes to body image. On the one hand, it can provide a sense of community and opportunities to learn about alternative ways of knowing weight. On the other hand, it can also perpetuate harmful weight loss marketing and fat-shaming content.
Young people are particularly vulnerable to the messaging they encounter on social media, as their cognitive development is still limited. They may be prone to perceiving marketing and misinformation as objective and truthful, which can have a negative impact on their body image and self-esteem.
Researching Weight Stigma
Research has shown that higher weight young people face multiple forms of weight stigma in all domains of life, such as social exclusion among peers, bullying from family members, and dismissal of health concerns from medical professionals. Young people are also surrounded by mass media messaging reinforcing fat stereotypes. From a public health perspective, the cumulative health impact of weight-related microaggressions and discrimination across the lifespan is concerning. For more than five decades, literature has documented the serious physical, mental, and social health consequences of weight stigma, such as depression, anxiety, disordered eating, negative body image, and weight cycling.
Encouragingly, more and more public health scholars are questioning the assumption that fatness inherently causes health issues and is a problem to be "fixed," acknowledging that attempting to do so may inflict more harm to people's health than good. Smith's generous conception of work is a useful tool for deconstructing this assumption. Originally conceptualized by the Marxist-feminist group, Wages for Housework, the term "work" includes any paid or unpaid task that requires time, effort, and intent. Such mundane physical, mental, and emotional tasks may not be recognized as "work" by the person doing them (indeed, they may not even be conscious of their knowledge required for doing this work). However, identifying these tasks and showing how they are coordinated to happen can help public health professionals detect and act on levers for change.
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In trying to conform to societal ideals, people in fat bodies do different work than people in thin bodies. One such type of work relates to clothes shopping and getting dressed. A growing body of literature has drawn attention to the limited clothing options for heavier adult women, although literature is lacking on whether clothing options for larger girls are equally limited. Girls' and women's weight work when shopping is socially organized by texts, such as Smith's aforementioned "reed thin" woman. These texts indoctrinate a fear of fatness in women from birth, as girls and women are taught to pursue thinness no matter the cost, monetary or otherwise. In observing the lack of fashionable clothing for bigger bodies, they recognize they must lose weight to fit in.
Another form of girls' and women's work pertains to navigating weight loss marketing, and fat-shaming content more generally, in mass media and social media (hereafter referred to collectively as "media")-an especial concern for young people who are vulnerable to its messaging. Youths' cognitive development is limited; they are prone to perceiving such marketing and misinformation as objective and truthful. Most weight stigma intervention research has concentrated on changing individuals' attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Fewer efforts have addressed how weight stigma manifests from broader social conditions, like institutional policies and practices-essential knowledge for effecting lasting public health change. One way to deepen our understanding of how weight stigma happens is to examine the discourses embedded in the institutions that people encounter in their everyday lives. These institutions, interpreted as complexes of social relations as opposed to brick-and-mortar structures, include fashion and media. Despite their clear potential for overlap, no research to our knowledge has examined these institutions in tandem to examine how they mutually reinforce one another to create stigmatizing conditions for young women to grow up in. We focused on women's experiences because women are disproportionately subject to greater weight-related scrutiny than men in Canada, where this research took place. With its origins in second-wave feminism in North America, IE is well-suited to explicating gendered public health issues. Institutional ethnographers explore how people's everyday activities are coordinated and regulated by institutional policies and practices. They assume what happens locally to be coordinated by ruling relations, which Campbell and Gregor describe as the "socially-organized exercise of power that shapes people's actions and their lives," frequently without our knowledge. This power often manifests in the form of text-mediated discourses connecting people across time and space. The term "social organization" is a cornerstone of IE, referring to the "material and reflexive coordination of people's actions, as observable and reproduced across time and place".
Epistemologically, IE is grounded in anti-positivism, valuing reflexive and experiential knowledge over objectivity and abstract ideology. Ontologically, institutional ethnographers assume that the social world is created through people's ongoing practices, which opens the possibility for people to effect change through their actions. IE's social ontology commits researchers to shift "agency away from concepts … back into the embodied knower".
An IE investigation begins from an embodied standpoint; that is, the social position of those whose interests we aim to serve. Here, standpoint informants were young women who had grown up in bigger bodies. To conduct research from their standpoint, the analysis had to be anchored in the material conditions of their lives (i.e., their work). Work is a fundamental concept within IE. IE researchers look for "traces of ruling relations within the descriptions of everyday work-those occasions when the work done at the standpoint does not seem to be supporting the interests of the people there" (emphasis in original). IE is pragmatic; rather than abstracting into theory, we empirically trace how something is happening. Data employed in this manuscript stem from a broader IE project on the social organization of young people's work of growing up in larger bodies.
Individual Experiences and Perspectives
To gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of young women in larger bodies, researchers conducted individual interviews with 14 young women between the ages of 15 and 21 who self-identified as having grown up bodies labelled as "overweight" or "obese." The interviews explored the trajectory of their experiences across the lifespan, including activities and settings where weight stigma and discrimination might occur, such as when socializing with friends and family, and how informants coped with these experiences.
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The interviews focused on learning about how informants acquired and applied knowledge of their work. For example, when a participant mentioned calorie-tracking, she asked follow-up questions like, "what exactly does calorie-tracking entail? Why do you calorie-track? How do you know how to calorie-track?" Interview questions evolved over time, building upon learnings from previous interviews.
Group Discussions and Collaborative Investigation
All informants interviewed individually were invited to partake in multiple group interviews for deeper investigation and clarification. A subset of five women participated in five group interviews. Conversation topics were emergent but were intended to deepen and refine questions covered in the individual interviews.
In alignment with the collaborative underpinnings of IE, researchers hired two young women as informant-researchers to aid in the investigation of YouTube videos. They had significantly more expertise navigating YouTube and a keener understanding of how other young women use it than the authors. Together, they developed a search strategy and data collection guide. They wanted to examine YouTube in a way that is representative of how young women might actually use it, searching for terms identified by informant-researchers as relevant to the research purpose, such as "body positivity," "weight loss," and "plus-size," and using a snowballing technique to follow up on suggested videos in the "up next" section. Examples of data collected from videos include demographic information about people in the video, body size language used, and viewer comments. Informant-researchers recorded how the video…