"The present-day body positivity movement is a watered-down version of an older and more radical fat activist movement..."

"... its ideas repackaged for mass consumption by advertisers and marketers. It does not ask us to work on how we regard and treat others, it only asks us to feel better about ourselves. It is purely self-love, with an emphasis on the 'self': the ultimate exercise in navel-gazing. The goal of this form of 'body positivity' is still to have you find yourself lacking, to get you to want, to get you to buy – and whether the capitalist powers that be are using Kendall Jenner’s body or Lizzo’s confidence to sell you your shapewear doesn’t really matter. But there’s one thought I keep coming back to: any activism that does not require you to engage with how you treat your community is not activism at all, and any social progress that is being pushed mostly by market-driven forces has the ability to simply, one day, disappear. That disappearance is more keenly felt now that the 'oh-oh-Ozempic' jingle is coming out of our television sets at an alarming rate, but it began a while ago, perhaps with last year’s breathless headlines that asked us 'could thin be in again?'... "

Writes Rachel Pick in "Ozempic has won, body positivity has lost. And I want no part of it" (The Guardian).

"The Ozempic moment neatly lays bare exactly how much our society still hates fatness and fat people, and the extreme measures people who are already physically healthy are willing to put themselves through to be just that much leaner.... ... I would rather just stay fat than take a drug that completely rewires my most basic impulses. Ozempic is a new drug, and its long-term effects aren’t yet clear, but it is pretty much universally agreed upon that once you stop taking it, the weight will come right back. Side-effects include vomiting, nausea and diarrhea that can get so intense you land in the ER.... The rapid weight loss the drug facilitates causes you to lose muscle mass and can make you look older, as facial skin sags and wrinkles begin to surface.... [W]hen you are already healthy and a below-average size, and you go to such absurd lengths just to winnow yourself down a little, you are actively trying to put as much distance between yourself and fat people as you possibly can.... What does that say to the people like me who, no matter what they did, would still be on the heavier end of the spectrum?"