LIZZO was the poster girl for body positivity, forging a multi-million pound music career dedicated to embracing yourself no matter your size.
The American singer, who was 23st at her biggest, has released a litany of empowerment anthems that encouraged plus-size women to love their lumps and bumps.
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But now Lizzo, 36, has come under fire from fans for shedding weight, lowering her body mass index by 10.5 and losing 16 per cent of her body fat.
What does her size have to do with music, you might think? If you are a great singer, surely your weight isn’t relevant?
But Lizzo’s obesity is relevant because she never stopped reminding us of it.
Flaunting and glorifying her “back fat and stretch marks” was part of her self-affirmation message.
A generation of young women felt seen, loved and empowered by her unconventional attitude to weight.
I am a recovered anorexic, someone who spent ten years living at the other end of the weight spectrum, convincing myself it was OK to be dangerously underweight when it wasn’t.
I spent my entire twenties hovering around 5st. I know the reality of eating disorders; starving myself and trying to hide my disordered eating from the world.
Plus-size women like Lizzo were as judgmental and unkind as anyone. They called themselves “real women,” casually slamming the skinny look.
While we tiptoed around the word fat, instead calling them larger or plus size, they would describe women like me as skeletons. We were made to feel less than.
Yet Lizzo now appears to want to be slim after all, which is totally at odds with her persona.
She once said: “I love creating shapes with my body, and I love normalising the dimples in my butt or the lumps in my thighs or my back fat or my stretch marks.”
Lizzo was championed by her impressionable army of young fans because she challenged traditional beauty standards: she wasn’t slim, she wasn’t white, she wasn’t quiet. She spoke out against anti-obesity trolls and bullies.
But it now turns out, Lizzo has had a change of heart.
WILD HYPOCRISY
She is hitting the gym, has cut out sugary treats and daily Starbucks coffees, and has taken to social media to share her weight-loss journey and progress pics.
It would be depressing if it wasn’t so wildly hypocritical, because radical weight loss is at odds with everything she has built her estimated £30million fortune on.
She wasn’t only milking her obesity for cash, but it now appears lying to herself and her devotees.
Worst of all, she was sending a dangerous message to young female fans that obesity is OK.
I don’t criticise Lizzo for losing weight or even being overweight. I criticise her because it seems she has been dishonest.
For all that talk of body positivity and self love, it appears she didn’t actually love all of herself after all — or why slim down?
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Sure, anorexia looks different to obesity, but they come from the same place: a dysfunctional relationship with food and with one’s own body and Lizzo spent years peddling the notion that having a skewed relationship with food was OK.
In the era of Ozempic, Mounjaro and other miracle fat jabs, many of these once-curvy role models such as Adele, Rebel Wilson and Sharon Osbourne are suddenly going quiet on us, only to re-emerge several dress sizes smaller.
So was it weight-loss drugs or willpower with Lizzo? Who knows.
She has joked about the Ozempic allegations, but hasn’t entirely denied them.
She wrote on her Instagram: “When you finally get Ozempic allegations after five months of weight training and calorie deficit…”
While some fans have responded positively to Lizzo’s transformation, others have slammed her hypocrisy.
One wrote: “Flaunting her curves was her unique selling point. Not sure she has much that’s different now.
“Plus she was SO loud and vocal about it, it seems like a major sellout and that she was being dishonest all along.”
FIND PEACE
I do applaud Lizzo for finally turning her back on the “Healthy At Any Size” movement, because you don’t need to be a doctor to know morbid obesity — or anorexia — are dangerous.
It took a lot of hard work and struggle to recover from my eating disorder. I’m still very slim but my BMI is back in the healthy range. I eat with gusto and enjoy my food.
I hope Lizzo also finds peace with her body, whatever size she ends up. But I do hope she dials it down now too. Her forceful brand of body positivity was never positive.