I Gained 25 Pounds. Why Are People Acting Like I’ve Committed a Crime?

Confession: I feel like a fraud writing this story. The main reason being that during the last two years, I’ve gained 25 pounds—the most significant amount I have experienced in my adult life—but I’m likely still perceived by most to be a thin person. It’s a social privilege I’m aware of and want to be transparent about. In truth, some unhealed part of me is probably even relieved by it.

And yet.

When I look in the mirror these days, there is new fleshiness in a stomach that no longer cinches to a textbook hourglass, thighs that smush together where there was once a hollow. I am disconnected from this body and can’t help but feel a sharp sense of embarrassment and loss by its expansion since my early 20s; the way certain clothes I once found joy in wearing no longer fit. Against all rational self-talk and years of therapy for adjacent self-image issues—you went through an unhealthy relationship; you moved to a new city; you’ve been stressed at work; you know all bodies are beautiful; you would never talk to a friend this way—something deep inside still feels like I’ve committed this egregious, immoral act. Which pisses me off, even through my white-hot shame.

You don’t have to look far to understand why I and countless other women who have experienced weight gain—no matter how large or small the actual difference on the scale—have been impacted by it, especially now; just pull out your phone and scroll through social media. In 2025 it is nearly impossible to open any major app without coming across news of some celebrity, influencer, or advertisement touting the dramatic results of weight loss-inducing GLP-1s, with Ozempic being the brand name typically used as a catch-all in the overarching cultural conversation.

It’s little help that the body-positivity movement that roared to a peak in the 2010s has been reduced to the meekest of whimpers, replaced by the recently banned #SkinnyTok and a general consensus that “thin” is back in. This time, though, our media diet of lose-five-pounds-fast hacks and “Look, I Lost the Weight!” content is incessant—and insidious.

Before social media, if you didn’t feel like consuming weight-loss content, you simply placed that magazine back in its holder by the grocery store checkout line.

Now near-constant phone usage makes this idea of mental and emotional escape almost comical. Sprinkle in our increased audacity to publicly comment on friends’, family members’, and even strangers’ bodies—just at the salon, I gaped as a woman all but demanded that her stylist provide intimate details as to how he lost visible weight—and it makes sense why so many of us are left questioning where our communal worth truly comes from.

Even Meghan Trainor recently switched the lyrics in her 2015 self-love anthem “All About That Bass” from “It’s pretty clear, I ain’t no size 2” to “It’s pretty clear, I got some new boobs” to reflect the changes in her body after a self-reported overhaul of diet and exercise—along with going on Mounjaro, a weight-loss med similar to Ozempic that uses a different active ingredient. And while it’s hardly newsworthy to note that thinness has long been equated with desirability and attractiveness, this growing prevalence of the upper echelon’s drug of choice sends out a startling message: Lose weight, because it’s never been easier. If you take this injection or swallow this pill, you can look like us.

Let me be clear: I don’t want to shame people who take Ozempic or any other GLP-1, for that matter—for health reasons or not. These drugs can clearly be a helpful tool for those who have trouble losing weight due to a range of chronic conditions, from type 2 diabetes to obesity. My beef is with the crushing onus that the drugs’ constant online and IRL advertising presence (seriously, I can’t even escape it on the train) puts on women of infinite shapes, sizes, and life circumstances to shrink into one hyperspecific mold that just keeps getting smaller and smaller. Not to mention the moral superiority gap it’s widened in conversations between the thin and the not thin enough.