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“Ozempic body” is the new “heroin chic” in the world of celebrity — and the fact that it’s trickling down to the masses should concern everyone.
When I scroll through post after post featuring celebs shrinking away — most aggressively, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo through the “Wicked: For Good” press tour — my stomach turns.
Yes, these are beautiful, talented, powerful women. And yes, feeding into the mass scrutiny of celebrities’ bodies feels icky. (Grande even clapped back that it’s “dangerous” to critique women’s bodies.) But I don’t see it as body shaming or hypocrisy to express legitimate concern about the issue.
Whether or not they’re mainlining GLP-1s, Hollywood has shrunk before our eyes — with stars like Erivo and Grande appearing thinner than ever in recent red-carpet images, La Toya Jackson showing off her painfully slim figure on social media, and celebs including Amy Schumer and Meghan Trainor displaying their significant weight loss, revealing jutting collarbones and hollowed cheeks.
And it feels time to say the quiet part out loud: The thinness is alarming, and it could have catastrophic consequences for how younger generations view their bodies — and look after their health.
The great celeb “slim down” makes me feel angry and betrayed — particularly Grande, whom I looked up to as a role model during her time on Nickelodeon’s hit 2010s show “Victorious,” when I was a young teen also interested in acting and singing.
It’s scary to think about, but I do think being constantly exposed to these images as a teenager could have fanned the sparks of my young self-loathing — which included skipping the occasional meal in the name of thinness — into a full-on, disordered eating flame.
Today’s teens feel similarly.
When Noelle, a 17-year-old senior from Pennsylvania, sees pictures of dramatically slimmed-down celebs on her own Instagram and TikTok feeds, she told The Post: “It’s made me think, ‘Am I pretty enough? Is my body what everyone wants? Do I fit the norm?’
“Even in my friend group, they’ll be, like, ‘I don’t look like this person, I don’t look like that person’ because of all the (new) celebrity stuff.”
Lana, an 18-year-old college freshman at Millersville University who preferred to use a pseudonym, doesn’t feel that commenting on the radical celeb trend toward weight loss necessarily equates to body-shaming.
“I don’t know (celebrities’) personal lives or personal stories, but I think being concerned about them is not body shaming,” Lana told The Post. “Being concerned about someone’s health is just wanting the best for them, not trying to bring them down.”
The indisputable rise of ultra-skinny also worries dieticians and eating-disorder specialists.
Deb Malkoff-Cohen, a registered dietician and diabetes care specialist with over 20 years of experience, prescribes GLP-1s to her patients who need them. She told The Post that the medication should only be used as a “tool when your diet and exercise is not working.”
She also emphasized how the medication’s propensity to make consumers feel full without eating enough can be dangerous to those with a history of disordered eating.
“I always screen people for eating disorders on my first call with them, and if I know they have that, I really caution against a GLP-1, because it makes you not hungry,” Malkoff-Cohen told The Post. “It reinforces not eating.”
Christina Grasso, co-founder of The Chain — a New York-based nonprofit that provides peer support for those in the fashion and entertainment industries coping with eating disorders — has also observed the real-time consequences of the cultural shift towards thinness in the community she’s helped create.
“I’ve heard from a lot of my (mostly) female audience and peers in the industry that it’s as though the culture has given them silent permission to engage in disordered eating,” Grasso told The Post.
“It’s very reminiscent of how extreme thinness was romanticized during the early aughts, which triggered and/or exacerbated eating disorders for myself and countless others,” she continued.
Plastic surgeons are also noticing the tangential trend toward an increased cultural desire for thinness — concerningly, in younger people.
“Younger patients are coming in asking for more body modification procedures, like rib remodeling and facial slimming/contouring procedures like buccal fat pad reduction,” Dr. Walter Joseph, a renowned plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, told The Post.
When it comes to the rise of celebrity thinness culture, Joseph shared that while he, like Grande, feels it’s “dangerous” for the public to comment on a celeb’s weight due to them not being privy to what is going on medically with the patient, that doesn’t lessen the harm of young people seeing these bodies as the standard to strive for.
“These people are in the public eye, and they’re visible to young and easily-influenced minds,” said Joseph. “This often creates an unattainable beauty standard, starting at a very young age.”
As a person who, against all rational thought, has long struggled with body image, the celebrity sea of withered waists and carved-out collarbones reminds me that we’re not as far along in the age of body positivity as we thought — and still have a long way to go.
Perhaps British actress and activist Jameela Jamil said it best:
“I’m incredibly worried about my peers. Every event I go to, when I hug people, it feels like they’re gonna snap in my hands.
“This stuff is really, really serious, and it’s being so hypernormalized. It’s setting an example for young girls who then think they are not normal if flesh grows on their bodies.”
