As Im sure everyone is very aware at this point, Adele has lost someweight. In the past shes often been cited as a plus-size icon, aninspiration to heavier women everywhere. And of course, shes also been heavilycriticised for her appearance. A little too fat, was Karl Lagerfelds commentafter her appearance on the cover of Vogue in 2012; only one of thousands ofjudgements shes had to deal with throughout her career.
And now, naturally, people feel the need to address her new appearance.With almost 250 thousand comments on her recent Instagram post at the time ofwriting, ranging from Talk about a glow up! to YOU LOOK SO UNHEALTHY!,people clearly have a lot of opinions on her transformation. But why doescelebrity weight loss, or indeed any kind of weight loss, engender such astrong reaction? Why do we feel the need to speculate on a persons life, theirhealth, the motivations for their actions, when they change the way they look?
Honestly, I thinkthe explosive response to Adeles post says a lot more about society than itdoes about the singer herself. We shouldnt be talking about Adele rightnow; we cant know the exact reasons for her weight loss and, whats more,those reasons are absolutely none of our business unless she chooses to sharethem. Which she hasnt. What we should be talking about, however, is theobsession our society seems to have with tying a persons self-worth to theirsize.
This can happen in a lot of different ways: people can be shamed forbeing too big, too small, for changing, and a whole host of other things. Theycan also be praised for the way their body looks, something which is often justas damaging. When we make a big deal out of a persons weight, we send them amessage that this is something which defines them, and the way other people seethem. At the end of the day, the people who cant stop talking about Adelesweight loss are the kind of people who actuallydolet theiropinion of someone be determined by superficialities like appearance and bodytype. And if social media right now is any evidence, most of us seem to be thatkind of people.
Anyone who has lost or gained a lot of weight over a short period willtell you that it spurred on no shortage of speculation and gossiping. Peoplewant your advice, they want to give you advice, they want to praise orsympathise with or disapprove of you. Nine times out of ten, those commentsarent helpful, unless its already been made clear by the person in questionthat theyre comfortable talking about their weight.
As a society, we have a tendency to assume that a persons weight mustdirectly correlate to their identity in some way. When someones weight changes, we go crazy because ofsome idea that we now need to change the way we look at them; theyre adifferent person, after all. Well, heres my opinion. Theyre not. And unlessthey personally decide that their weight makes up a big part of their identity,it really has nothing to do with who they are. We should all stop wonderingabout what Adeles weight loss means for who she is and start thinking aboutwhat our reactions to it mean for who we are.
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Self-worth and Size: what weve learnt from celebrity weight loss - Cherwell Online
