The Body Positivity Movement is on Life Support

The body positivity movement seems to be running on borrowed time. For probably around the past decade or so, the so-called ethos of accepting your body no matter what has gone from empowering and positive to limiting and negative. As a result, the movement is now seeing a big “Walk Away” moment. Let’s break it down.

A former influencer who once helped promote the message of unconditional body acceptance is now publicly walking away, describing her experience inside the community as increasingly “radical” and admitting that she felt “brainwashed.”

According to her account, what began as a message of self-acceptance gradually became hostile toward conversations about weight loss and health. She says she stayed quiet for a while out of fear of saying the wrong thing but ultimately decided to speak out after watching the space become more extreme and less open to real health concerns.

And even after raising concerns about health risks and personal accountability, she says she faced major backlash and was effectively pushed out of the community she once helped promote.

SOURCE

Former body-positivity influencer Gabriella Lascano spoke to The New York Times in an article published Monday about her journey from “championing” the body-positivity movement to renouncing it for pushing an unhealthy lifestyle.

Lascano described beginning her online career in 2010, adding that while she never planned on becoming an influencer, she began intentionally pushing the message to “love yourself at any size” after receiving support from other plus-sized women.

Over time, however, she found that she was gaining more and more weight and became unable to do activities she enjoyed, such as traveling or riding roller coasters.

“Some days, I would look at photos and not even recognize myself,” Lascano said. “I’m only five feet tall and at my heaviest, I was close to 400 pounds. I started to wonder if loving myself at any size had become an excuse to ignore how big I was getting. I felt like I saw myself being brainwashed, essentially. Meanwhile, the language around body positivity began sounding more extreme online.”

Lascano said that she eventually saw the body-positivity community become hostile toward weight loss and exercise, even for health purposes, which led to her turning on the movement.

“But as the body-positivity community became more radical, I was scared to say the wrong thing, so I stayed silent. Then, my friend died. She was a body-positivity influencer, who founded the world’s first plus-size salon,” Lascano said.

In 2023, she posted a video denouncing body positivity, saying she felt “guilty” for being a part of the movement and adding that it’s “not fatphobic to care about your health.”

DEBRIEFING

Listen closely to what Gabriella is actually saying, because this is where her words are cutting through all of the noise.

She’s not completely rejecting the so-called “self-acceptance” the movement is pushing. She’s just presenting the fact that real health issues matter, and ironically, her logical, measured approach and the extreme backlash she faced just further highlights how toxic “body positivity” has become.

Movements rarely unravel all at once. More often, they show stress fractures first, such as influencers like Lascano choosing to not only walk away but also shine a spotlight on the overall degradation and negativity.

NOW YOU KNOW

The real test of any movement is how it handles its own doubters.

https://www.cypher-news.com/2026/02/the-body-positivity-movement-is-on-life-support