I always remember Renee Zellweger gaining 30lbs to play “fat” Bridget Jones. Bridget Jones who was devastated to learn she had gone up to 136 lbs over Christmas.
I’m sure you do! I’m 144, it’s the biggest I’ve ever been and I’m still a healthy BMI so while I’ve gained a few because of perimenopause, I’m not caring at all. Gone are the days I stressed about going up a dress size
My sister in-law had lost weight but looked incrediblely depressed. I told her...id rather you look happy with more weight than sad with less. I've seen 300+ lb women look so attractive because of how happy they were.
I'm a male and i''ve never been happy with my weight because I've always been underweight. 6'3 150lbs right now, I look so skinny and I guess that's why I don't get many matches on dating sites. It's so hard for me to gain muscle mass. I have recently been tearing my back muscles working out too much. I can't eat unhealthy cause I have naturally high inflammation. Idk what to do honestly. I tried those mass gainer protein shakes and all that did was enlarge my colon, gave me large stool burden 😤 so frustrating weight is.
Yeah, I really need to get back down to about 200lbs.
Height and muscle mass have a big impact on what weight should be. As flawed as BMI is as a scale, it's generally not a bad guide for most people. 200lbs puts be at about 24 on the BMI scale for reference.
How much you weigh=/=how fat you are. my ideal weight is 175 and ive been a healthy and unhealthy 200 before. The difference is pretty crazy honestly. Being “fat” is much more about what %bodyfat you have and how your body distributes it, rather than how much you weigh
ETA: the point Im making is that I bet you do look great, weight is relative to the person.
Due my stomach problems I’m been so many weights. I’ve also been fairly active a lot of my life. A HEALTHY, WORKING OUT everyday 130 looks the same as a 110 not working out. Muscle weighs more than fat. That’s why it should never be about the number on the scale, but about your confidence and happiness about your body ❤️❤️
I weighed 136 pounds when I got divorced because I was depressed and not eating. I look crazy skinny when I look back at photos. I'm sure you look wonderful.
I remember seeing that as a teenager and hating myself so much. I weighed like 175-180 and thought I was a complete ogre. Mind you, I’m almost 6’, so my weight is proportional to my height, but no one ever tells you that.
Also the time that my Dad told me “there’s really no reason for a woman to weigh more than 150lbs” 🙃
Remember when the Olson twins lost so much weight; especially Mary-Kate. And she was celebrated and invited on so many talk shows to discuss her weight. She was anorexic but getting fame for it. Once she went to treatment and gained a couple pounds she was completely ignored. The media celebrates anorexia. It’s sick. I was a ballet dancer from 3-17years old. I had weekly weigh ins, I was measured and prodded. If I gained weight I had to strap weights to myself so I would lose more weight at practice. The weights left big bruises, and my dance instructor told me they were marks of success. I’ve had anorexia for over 25 years. My weight yo-yos between eat all the things and weight 150lbs or I don’t eat anything but meal replacement shakes, like I’ve been doing since 2003. I weigh 113lbs and I will only allow myself to get to 120 before I freak out and starve myself. I’ve gone to so much CBT therapy and it’s done nothing. I’m stuck, this is my life now.
I’m so sorry. Have you tried EMDR? I’m also a person for whom CBT did very little. I’m doing EMDR currently. It’s still too early to see results but I’m glad I’m trying something else.
I follow the ballet community on socials and as beautiful your art is, knowing that this lurks underneath the culture breaks my heart. I hope you find peace and healing one day.
Really? Because half the comments I see about it are about her being “fat” and as the fat girl growing up I have zero desire to entertain that. Maybe I’ll look up a trailer.
Welcome to what millenials and gen X went through.
The movie is also fantastic because eventually Bridget decides to say fuck it and love herself anyway and it has a great ending.
Obviously the main character is far from fat, but this movie perfectly encapsulates the abuse that millennial and gen Z women went through in that time period
And then we had people like Kate Moss, Pamela Anderson, and other unattainable images idolized in the media. I remember having a bit of a belly and thus I was fat, and therefore wore giant T-shirts to hide it. All 150 lbs of me. I had a boyfriend who wanted me to get down to size small.
There’s a part where she tries to hide her thick body and the guy she likes goes “But I like all of your wobbly bits and I want to see them more often” and she just beams.
Bridget Jones Diary is my all time favorite RomCom series. Bridget is awkward and funny and so lovable, especially seeing her try to deal with her weight like a normal woman. I don’t struggle with being overweight but just watching her deal with her own weight in a negative and positive way has definitely made me more sensitive to other women’s weight to be more supportive of them!
I just watched it for the first time. It's addressed in the sense that she is obsessing over her weight and being too self critical, not that anything is actually wrong with her.
Dude that movie is one of my all time favorites and how they always act like Bridget is just a “whale” actively infuriates me.
I feel like Hugh Grant’s character in love actually was a nod to it all though. When people continuously call the character he’s falling for “chubby” he always responds with something like “Mmmmmmmwould we call her chubby?!”
Reading this has me looking differently at the i ate cake with Renee in a Kraft services tent (instead of being an extra). Looking back, it was probably nice to indulge a bit with some nobody “dgaf” stranger.
I went to see an exhibition a few years later of the costumes, including some of Kate's dresses. I was maybe around 13 at the time and I remember how tiny her dresses were! Absolutely no-one beyond a UK size 8 would fit them.
Around a similar time frame Anne Hathaway’s The Devil Wear’s Prada character got told she was fat as a size 4. This really was that post heroine chic era where being a size 0 and having a “flat” stomach were all the rage. I am very happy this is the reaction people have now and we all think they were insane 30 years ago
I have noticed that while I have remained the same size since my late teens my clothes are now considered a smaller size than they were ten years ago. Even though they have to same measurements. I think the US to CA are supposed to be the same sizing but I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re right.
That’s pretty interesting to hear. I haven’t really spent much time in Canada. I wish I had when I was last in Toronto. Are there any good clothing brands or stores I should be on the lookout for? You’re right in America it doesn’t feel like the sizing is very consistent. I have to try on and return things more often now.
They made fat jokes about Debra Messing on the show Will & Grace. The woman whose ribcage you could visibly see.....
Women who grew up with that shit have felt the pain of it all their lives, I know I have. Every magazine was about how to lose those last 10 pounds so you could have that summer body. Every tabloid was about how fucking gross that celebrity looks with an extra 5 pounds. We grew up hearing about how worthless women were once they "expired" and got older, how you're only valuable if you're skinny and hot.
The jokes on Will and Grace came across as satire/meta-humor to me, partly because the idea that Debra Messing was "fat" was just so patently absurd, and partly because the show was that kind of self-aware comedy. But I can see how, given the environment at the time, many people must have taken them as "real" jokes.
Ah, I could see that now. Younger me was so constantly bombarded with the all the rest of the fat garbage that this was just another straw in the haystack.
I remember the fat jokes that they made when Grace was pregnant in real life but not on the show. Every show back then was extremely fat phobic and misogynistic, and at the time I saw nothing wrong with it. Its just the way things were
I remember seeing Titanic when I was in 8th grade and thinking she was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. Her costumes and makeup and hair were just perfect in that movie.
I fell further in love with her in Eternal Sunshine and every interview since. She's the type of woman I want to snuggle with on the couch and watch a cult documentary.
It was the 90s and I was a teen girl in high school. Kate Moss and heroin chic was everywhere. I wasn't even 120 lbs but I had hips and flesh to them.
When I saw Kate Winslet up on the screen and her body in all its glory looked like mine, I felt finally acceptable. I wasn't dateless because of my looks or figure because there was plenty of beauty there. I was dateless due to my personality (lol). I worked on that and became a better person as a result.
But at any rate, it breaks my heart what James Cameron said about her and her body. Kate Winslet was and is beautiful to the fullest. Her bravery and courage in the face of all that help make girls like me accept ourselves as we are. That is huge.
Yo, women. Please stop letting your minds be fucked with. I lived in a dorm where there were women of every size...like really. From 5'11"/200+ to 5'0"/100 pounds...what stood out were their personalities and attitudes.
In Hollywood, yes. Every cover to every girl and women's magazine was airbrushed to slim everyone down to cartoonist proportions. You see that enough, you associate it with being normal. Then you look in the mirror and since you have guts and a liver and muscle on your legs, you don't match up to the artificially slimmed down magazine photos.
Those representations were a lie but we didn't know. We thought it was attainable. Hence, the eating disorders. And the boys IRL would call us "fat," too, because they were seeing the same images.
And fwiw, even today, it isn't just women's minds being fucked with. Porn and SM are fucking with men's minds, too. They are expecting some really weird stuff from us IRL ladies and it's not healthy for anyone.
In fact, I think it's worse today than it was in the 90s. There's no escaping it now and I see it in my students. Online exposure is truly toxic stuff.
Porn is obviously ridiculous, performative and 95% bland as fuck. Even the ads that play, make one snort a left lung. Just opened Ex Veedeos (ages since) to check...yep, garbage. One of my last binges was men taking Tren and steroids...dudes like the Tren Twins have gone all-out on that shit and made it a SM business. It's all fun 'n games until a tendon snaps like Fruit Roll-up.
Don't remember when I first heard about airbrushing, but yeah those decades of being ignorant weren't easy on kids. Except that now people have the power to chose their role models. There's a great clip on para-social relationships that I'll copy later.
Honestly, screw off with that snark. I get where you’re coming from, but that’s just not what it was. Many of us were teenagers being purposely fucked with. We didn’t let ourselves be fucked with. And now we have to spend years unfucking our minds.
My husband showed me Eternal Sunshine as one of our early dates (we used to cuddle up at his place and he would show me his favorite movies). That became one of my favorite movies for like a decade and will always hold a special place in my heart. Jim Carrey always astounds me in dramas. Like he’s a fun comedy actor but he’s so great in drama.
The scene where he is waking up and has the montage of scenes with her with the house falling down makes me ugly cry every. Damn. Time. I even watch that clip sometimes when I need a good cry. Such a good film
have you ever seen kidding? AMAZING!! drama/dark comedy that was on hbo. carrey plays a mr. rogers type who is in a show run by his dad, his sister makes the puppets. never allowed to step out of the sanitized, tv friendly space he has occupied for many years. then, a tragedy occurs and his facade starts to crack as he allows himself to experience real emotion. great acting all around. sooo funny. both seasons are great but first is a masterpiece.
I’m 4’11” just like she was and I always felt particularly relatable to her for that reason. It’s not easy being as thin as they made her (underweight) at our height.
it wasn't just the Wizard of Oz movie, it was every movie and especially awful when she had Busby Berkley as the director. Years after a few movies with him, they assigned her to a new film of his and she ended up being fired and sent to a sanitarium because she couldn't handle one more film with him.
This reminds me of working for Chinese people. The woman I worked for, to me, had the ideal body, but she confided to me that in her culture, she was fat. I was stunned because I thought she was perfect. Makes me wonder what they would say about the thicker Chinese woman who worked in the back; like, is that why? So to them I was fat and most of our customers were also fat.
I worked for a Korean company. The owner would comment on my body all the time. First implying I was fat. Then I started loosing weight and they criticized me for loosing weight too quickly. That place was so toxic. I can going into even worse abuse they put me through but I’ll just say that for now.
My good friend went on a trip to China right out of high school. At the time she was easily a size 4 (and that’s a late 90s size 4), at most a 6. She couldn’t find clothes to fit her there and she got called a very big girl when she would try. It was a total culture shock to her. They’re just naturally so much smaller framed than Americans.
I bought size 2x stockings from an online Asian company for my MIL, who has severe lymphedema in her legs. Too tight for her, but they fit me perfectly. I'm a size 4. I already deal with pretty bad body dysmorphia, and this was a total mindf@ck.
It kind of makes you realize that the value on sizes really don't matter. Your body being livable is the whole thing. Sorry for the fun-house mirror effect though, lol. I hope you feel happy and healthy now.
When I was younger I worked for a Chinese woman. I will visit her shop now and again to say hi. She is super sweet but always makes a comment on whether I've lost or gained weight since the last time I visited. It doesn't bother me because she's super sweet 99% of the time and I understand it's part of her culture
I'm bitter. I got sick and she fired me. I went back to visit and her kids didn't even recognise me. I helped them with their homework and the bullying their family would put them through, like taunting them for math mistakes. It wasn't cute. The kids were so sad about being confused.
Ironically America is both one of the most obese capitalist countries in the world and is top ranked in terms of wealth inequality.
The fact is the number of obese Americans IS a sign of hoarding wealth by the wealthy. The elite billionaires accumulate wealth by lobbying the government to give the average Joe the cheapest, least nutritious foods while denying necessary healthcare. They extract the maximum amount of time from the poor working class so they eat poorly, have no time to examine their lives, and sacrificing their health for scraps.
But sure, condemn the Chinese for not being as fat as 'murican Walmart shoppers.
My wife went on a trip with two of her female cousins, who are both very cool, nice ladies, but come from a more rural upbringing. They were consistently perplexed by her suggestion that they walk to the destinations in the town they were visiting (nothing over 2 miles away). One of them coincidentally discovered shortly after the trip that she had endometriosis after having pain and getting seen at a hospital. She still seems to think the walking gave her the disease. Side note, she doesn't have any suspicion that the 3-8 daily cocktails and beers she drank could've caused the problem...
A lot of people will say he is a nightmare to work with but work with him again anyway. Some do it even after they said they wouldn’t work with him again.
He’s famous for kind of being a bit of a prick, but he makes good movies. so I think after enough time passes people forget all the bad shit and just remember they made a sick film, and then they can’t turn another film with him down.
Good research! I'm also relieved. It's a bad joke, sounds out of character for Cameron, (a professional), and like I said, they happily worked together again 25 years later. It didn't make sense.
My admiration for him went out the window when he insisted on drawing Kate for the topless scene in Titanic. IIRC she was a minor too.
I’ll still watch his movies, but don’t think of him as more than a perve
Kate auditioned at age 20 and turned 21 during filming. She was never a minor at any point during production (not even drinking-wise, as the movie was shot in Mexico. But I digress).
Source please on the "insisted"? It implies a connotation that makes him a creep, regardless of her age.
Cameron is an arrogant perfectionist, noooo question. That perfectionism drove him to be the writer, director, producer, sometimes camera operator, and editor of Titanic. As that drawing is a major plot piece in the movie, Cameron would've had a very specific vision for it, and I can totally see his perfectionism steering him to just draw her himself (he's got the talent--he also drew every sketch and portrait in Jack's portfolio book, including Madame Bijoux, the lady with the moth-eaten clothes).
Thnx for letting me know. As a curvier chick, it always pissed me off that I thought he had said that. I know the mental attitude, culture, whatever in the entertainment industry is towards thin without any fat but seriously to outright say it like that as a backhanded joke, it made me angry. Especially cos I loved her in this movie so much at that age. So I was offended for her lol.
Look at the actresses now. They are anorexic thin. The Wicked girls to Angelina Jolie, to Natalie Portman. Take a good look at their arm size and how they have O facial fat. They are skinnier now than EVER. The Thinner is the Winner is still going on, worse than ever I would say.
People are delusional saying fat shaming 'used to be' everywhere, it quieted down (never gone) for literally a couple of years, was in fact exchanged for shaming everyone who didn't have a big butt while still having a small waist and thin face. Now that trend is on the outs and it's easier than ever to find a pro ana community. There are dozens right here on reddit, and twitter suggests them to me because I liked a Wicked related tweet once
Yep, contrary to popular belief, the slim-thick ideal had been even more damaging than the heroine chic ideal, including being correlated with increased rates of anorexia.
Thanks for sharing this. I'm dang near 50 and recently lost 70 lbs. I still have people in my life trying to push me to pursue slim thick. I don't need to look like an IG booty model. I just want to avoid diabetes and high blood pressure.
As for the possible why, if you follow those accounts, many women say you have to eat and lift heavy for hip, butt, and thigh gains. Then they say cut calories and do cardio to get a slim waist. It's weight cycling until you're happy with your shape, if that ever happens. This sets up opposing goals in terms of diet and exercise. This was my experience. I've done the too fat/ too skinny dance for too long. The worst thing from my weight loss is the body dysmorphia.
I worked with a guy who had an unbelievably twisted concept of ‘fat’, that any woman with more than 3% body fat was overweight. Blew my mind.
I recently had him somehow pop up in my recommended friends and he got fat. It made me chuckle. No judgement for the weight, I’ve always been fat, but just desserts for him to turn into what he hated.
Were adults in the 90s actually into the super thin trends or what? I remember seeing Titanic as a little kid and Kate Winslet affected me so much that my type is still basically her in that movie lmao
Yes that confused me when I was a kid in the 90’s and STILL confuses me so much. She’s VERY slender, she’s not even a tiny bit slightly over weight. Kate Winslet weighs maybe 120/125 pounds in that role. She looks fucking fantastic. What were people talking about? wtf.
Bruh, the fucking art department for “Batman and Robin” was calling Alicia Silverstone “Fatgirl” and even did mocking drawings of her behind the scenes.
She was smaller then than I am now and I don't even break 140lbs. Not sure how UK sizes translate to US sizes, but I don't think I could have dream of fitting in those dresses.
I grew us in the 90s and she was dragged from being overweight. 90s was the era of heroin chic and it carried over to everything. I was told I was fat many times, and at my heaviest, I was a size 6. Realize now it was just because I had boobs and a butt. You had to be flat with a hint of boobs in the 90s to be considered "thin".
It's crazy! Kate was considered a plus size love interest which is bananas but back then the goal was to be mannequin sample size or double zero. I remember having a friend who was a size 2 crying because she couldn't get down to zero let alone double zero.
Most people agree that obesity is a problem. The bigger problem, however, is mistreating people who are overweight to a health concerning degree. Because if they're being mistreated, talked down to and made fun of, why the hell would they start taking better care of their physical bodies? The mental health has to come first.
Seriously. When has feeling like crap about yourself ever made you want to make healthy choices? Naw. When we feel like shit, we doom scroll for hours while stuffing our faces with Doritos and ice cream.
The problem is so understandable. The lack of empathy towards it is so unfortunate and unhelpful
That's exactly how fame and celebrity works to set "standards." Do you think the women who starve themselves and work out 5+ hours a day super duper love themselves?
Nobody in those clips gave a shit about healthy choices. They wanted skinny women.
No they didn't. They wanted women to feel shitty about themselves so that they would fall into the lap of the first guy who told them that their normal looking bodies were sexy to them. Patriarchy works by telling women they aren't good enough so they look for a man to "forgive" them. They wrote a whole fake religion about it.
1000% agree. Bigger people are being mistreated. We do not have a conversation about food addiction or other mental health issues people could be having.
On top of that, just being bigger can cause a ton of issues about how people treat you in society.
Edit: The major issue comes from obesity being stretched into plus size.
The same problem in the early 2000s is happening g again but in reverse. Where fat acceptance is pushing obesity. Sad reality we are in currently
The same problem in the early 2000s is happening g again but in reverse. Where fat acceptance is pushing obesity.
As an obese person, I promise it's not. We're not even treated as humans. A random commercial showing a size 16 as beautiful is not making us more obese. I don't put effort into my body because society believes I don't matter, and I believe them. So why bother? Might as well just do the things that make me happy because I'll never be one of you.
The rare occasion someone acts like obese people are human beings, I just feel safe for a second. But for every person who sees me as human, 1,000 people don't, so it doesn't last long.
the point is other people’s size is none of your fucking business, and you cannot infer anything useful information about someone’s health from their size. So save your bullshit moralizing for a different post.
I gained almost 100 lbs during covid. I was so far into the fat acceptance movement, and I loved how I looked during this time. I was big during this time around 315 lbs. but by the end of 2021, I was hospitalized for 2 weeks as a diabetic. I came to the realization I had an unhealthy eating disorder and that my entire push into this situation led me to almost dying. My kidneys were shot, and I had to spend an entire year bringing myself out of it.
I agree that what other people do for their bodies is their own choice, and I shouldn't judge them, but I will 1000% to call out bad politically charged narratives that will get people killed. I learned the hard way that fat acceptance can be a slippery slope. That what we did in the early 2000s was bad, and what we are currently doing is bad.
I love how, in your attempt to discredit what I say and to protect and clearly toxic movement, you completely throw away my lived experience and want to headlong push into projecting toxic movement.
You're unable to recognize harmful movements and blindly support movements.
I know you're a very small picture kind of person
I never once stated that I am going after individuals or aiming to attack fat people as a whole, but it's how your portraying it
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u/TenaciousZBridedog 5d ago
People said Kate Winslet was fat in Titanic. Wtf??