DAME: Am I the Last Fat Person in America?
With the increasing availability of GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic and Monjauro, there are fewer fat people than ever. But not everyone believes being thinner is better for them.
Kate Bernyk May 15, 2025
What if I were the last fat person, walking through a world where my body is an anomaly, a relic of an era long past? Billboards and magazine covers show only one kind of figure—streamlined, uniform, medically perfected. Store racks are lined with clothes that will never fit me, because the industry has deemed bodies like mine obsolete. People glance at me with a mixture of horror and pity. Everything built with a single standard size in mind, one that I do not fit.
Strangers would probably stare, some with curiosity, others with thinly veiled disgust. “Why won’t you just take the drugs?” they would ask. “Why don’t you choose to be thinner?” My continued existence in this body would be seen as defiant, as unwilling to comply with a world that has decided my shape is unnecessary, undesirable, and inconvenient.
The rise of weight-loss drugs like Ozempic has made this imagined world feel closer than ever. Even the Super Bowl featured Hims/Hers ads for medications promising a thinner, better you (I’m trying to forgive Childish Gambino for lending “This is America” to that mess). An endless parade of solutions for a problem I’m supposed to believe I have. The message has always been clear: Your body is a mistake, and now there’s finally a way to fix it.
I don’t have to push myself hard to imagine this world. I already know what it is to be the only fat person in the room—to endure conversations where I’m either entirely invisible or painfully on display. The shopping trips where people recommend brands that would never make clothes in my size. The lunch tables where diet talk dominates, swapping stories about avoiding the dreaded fate of looking like me. The fear of not fitting in a tiny airplane seat or a robe at a hotel spa. I am constantly surrounded by the barely unspoken message that my body is a cautionary tale.
It seems like every day there’s another headline announcing someone’s transformation, another dramatic before-and-after. Meghan Trainor, once an outspoken advocate for body positivity, has dramatically slimmed down thanks to weight-loss drugs. TikTok influencer Remi Bader, who built her brand on finding clothes to fit a plus-size body, recently revealed she had weight-loss surgery after initially avoiding talk about how or why she lost the weight. Their reasons are deeply personal, and they don’t owe us an explanation—but the response they’ve received is telling. The applause, the magazine covers, the breathless “glow-up” language. It reinforces the same tired story: Thin is better. Whether prescribed or pursued, these weight loss drugs are being embraced by a culture that has never made peace with fatness.
It’s especially hard when I see people I once viewed as allies or sources of representation choosing to change, and the world rushing to celebrate them, essentially erasing what their visibility once meant to people like me. It’s not really about them, but the cultural whiplash of seeing formerly fat bodies suddenly validated only after they shrink.
I vividly remember hearing comedian Janeane Garofalo joke in 1995 about how she’d never lose the weight show business demanded—only to admit later that she did it anyway. (To be clear, Janeane was never fat, she just wasn’t 1990s “heroin chic” which feels horrifyingly familiar these days.) I feel the same sadness when I see artists like Adele and Lizzo lose weight. I don’t know their stories, but I would be lying if I didn’t say part of what drew me to these women was the way they were so unapologetic and confident in their bigger bodies.
I get it. Living in a fat body in this world is not easy, especially in the public eye. But for me, body acceptance has never been about always loving your body and never changing—but rather the freedom to make choices based on my own values and desires, not society’s expectations. It’s not their bodies or choices I mourn, it’s the way our society treats thinness as a success.
I wish I could be angry when I think about this. But instead, I’m just sad. Sad for a world where the answer to difference is erasure. Sad that we’ve bought into the lie that we have to look a certain way to be happy, successful, or loved.
