Am I the Last Fat Person in America?

What if I were the last fat person, walking through a world where my body is an anomaly, a relic of an era long past? Billboards and magazine covers show only one kind of figure—streamlined, uniform, medically perfected. Store racks are lined with clothes that will never fit me, because the industry has deemed bodies like mine obsolete. People glance at me with a mixture of horror and pity. Everything built with a single standard size in mind, one that I do not fit.

Strangers would probably stare, some with curiosity, others with thinly veiled disgust. “Why won’t you just take the drugs?” they would ask. “Why don’t you choose to be thinner?” My continued existence in this body would be seen as defiant, as unwilling to comply with a world that has decided my shape is unnecessary, undesirable, and inconvenient.

The rise of weight-loss drugs like Ozempic has made this imagined world feel closer than ever. Even the Super Bowl featured Hims/Hers ads for medications promising a thinner, better you (I’m trying to forgive Childish Gambino for lending “This is America” to that mess). An endless parade of solutions for a problem I’m supposed to believe I have. The message has always been clear: Your body is a mistake, and now there’s finally a way to fix it. 

I don’t have to push myself hard to imagine this world. I already know what it is to be the only fat person in the room—to endure conversations where I’m either entirely invisible or painfully on display. The shopping trips where people recommend brands that would never make clothes in my size. The lunch tables where diet talk dominates, swapping stories about avoiding the dreaded fate of looking like me. The fear of not fitting in a tiny airplane seat or a robe at a hotel spa. I am constantly surrounded by the barely unspoken message that my body is a cautionary tale.

It seems like every day there’s another headline announcing someone’s transformation, another dramatic before-and-after. Meghan Trainor, once an outspoken advocate for body positivity, has dramatically slimmed down thanks to weight-loss drugs. TikTok influencer Remi Bader, who built her brand on finding clothes to fit a plus-size body, recently revealed she had weight-loss surgery after initially avoiding talk about how or why she lost the weight. Their reasons are deeply personal, and they don’t owe us an explanation—but the response they’ve received is telling. The applause, the magazine covers, the breathless “glow-up” language. It reinforces the same tired story: Thin is better.  Whether prescribed or pursued, these weight loss drugs are being embraced by a culture that has never made peace with fatness.

It’s especially hard when I see people I once viewed as allies or sources of representation choosing to change, and the world rushing to celebrate them, essentially erasing what their visibility once meant to people like me. It’s not really about them, but the cultural whiplash of seeing formerly fat bodies suddenly validated only after they shrink. 

I vividly remember hearing comedian Janeane Garofalo joke in 1995 about how she’d never lose the weight show business demanded—only to admit later that she did it anyway. (To be clear, Janeane was never fat, she just wasn’t 1990s “heroin chic” which feels horrifyingly familiar these days.) I feel the same sadness when I see artists like Adele and Lizzo lose weight. I don’t know their stories, but I would be lying if I didn’t say part of what drew me to these women was the way they were so unapologetic and confident in their bigger bodies. 

I get it. Living in a fat body in this world is not easy, especially in the public eye. But for me, body acceptance has never been about always loving your body and never changing—but rather the freedom to make choices based on my own values and desires, not society’s expectations. It’s not their bodies or choices I mourn, it’s the way our society treats thinness as a success. 

I wish I could be angry when I think about this. But instead, I’m just sad. Sad for a world where the answer to difference is erasure. Sad that we’ve bought into the lie that we have to look a certain way to be happy, successful, or loved. 

And sad for how much we might lose if we erase certain body types from our world. Where would we be without the artists, thinkers, and creators who refused to conform? The idea of eliminating any kind of body should terrify us—not just because it’s wrong, but because it’s unimaginative.

How do we know what choices we make to change our appearance are truly ours and which have been shaped by a lifetime of magazine covers and diet ads? How do we untangle our desires from a culture that has always feared and vilified fat?

The pressure seems to be everywhere—even people who are considered to be borderline “overweight” by these standards are also seeking weight-loss drugs. The goalpost keeps moving, and the body dysmorphia it fuels is staggering. We have no idea what the long-term effects of these drugs are, yet they are already being lauded as a cure-all. I already feel it. Every doctor’s appointment, I brace for the conversation. I know eventually someone is going to ask if I’ve considered it. 

The truth is, of course I have. I think about it all the time. Because it would be easier. Because maybe I wouldn’t get shouted at while riding a CitiBike in Brooklyn, called a “fat cunt” by some stranger speeding past me. Because maybe—just maybe—people would stop treating my body like a problem to be solved.

I want to live in a world where health isn’t judged by size, where stepping into a doctor’s office doesn’t fill me with dread. A world where I can exist in my body without fear of being heckled on the street. Where I can walk into any store and find clothes made for me, not just for the bodies the world prefers. Where beauty isn’t a narrow standard but a spectrum—diverse, expansive, undeniable at every size. Where the next generation of women doesn’t have to unlearn the same shame I did. 

I lied earlier when I said I was just sad. I’m also really scared. Scared that all the work I’ve done to love who I am in the body that naturally happens without an eating disorder won’t be enough. That I’ll regress, and turn back to harming myself to fit in. Scared that, no matter how much I try to resist, the pressure will be too much. That one day, I’ll wake up and feel that I can’t bear to live in my own body like I did 20 years ago.

I don’t want to live in fear of my own body. I don’t want anyone else to either. We’re standing at a dangerous crossroads, not just medically but culturally. If we keep sliding backward in a world that equates value with size, we’ll lose so much more than pounds. We’ll lose joy and creativity and visibility. 

If I really am the last fat person, I’ll fight to stand tall in this body. Not as a relic, but as proof that there’s another way to exist. I’ll try my damndest to hold my ground because I’ve learned that living authentically—in whatever body you have—is its own kind of freedom.

Being fat is hard. But not being yourself is much harder.