Me and Lizzo

Fat liberation in a culture obsessed with trauma, transformation, and thinness.

Would you rather Listen?

Lizzo performing in the gold mirrorball bodysuit during her 2022 tour — a moment of stamina, artistry, and spectacle that the culture still insisted on reading through health panic.

I.

I keep thinking about how quiet the internet has been since Lizzo published her essay last week. Not silent—just quiet. Like everyone is waiting to see how the room wants to feel. The Ozempic Era has already stripped so many fat bodies out of the landscape that even our outrage feels thinner than it used to. Stores rolling back extended sizes. Magazines quietly swapping plus-size models for “wellness” influencers. Studios booking fewer fat actors. A hard cultural reset into thinness-as-default, like the last decade or so never even happened.

It’s into this moment that Lizzo re-emerges.

Not in a blaze of redemption but with a reflective confession about trauma, survival, and what she calls “weight release.” And because she’s Lizzo—because she is a fat Black woman whose body was made into a symbol before she even got to be a musician—her personal story is already being treated like commentary on the state of fatness itself.

So let me be clear:
This isn’t the first time I’ve said what I’m about to say. But I keep having to say it because the world doesn’t want to hear it.

For years I taught a workshop called Beyond Body Positivity. The core argument was simple: body positivity is an ideology without a politic. It can teach you to love yourself, which is beautiful, but it cannot teach you to fight structural injustice. It cannot explain how systems work or protect you when institutions decide your body is inconvenient again. And it cannot produce liberation because liberation requires analysis—material, political, relational. As I used to say in those rooms, ideologies without politics always drift toward the center: whiter, thinner, straighter, more able-bodied.

A slide from Beyond Body Positivity, circa 2021.

And maybe part of why this moment hits me is because Lizzo and I have been forced into the same cultural frame, regardless of how either of us might feel about that. Like Rasputia, Lizzo and I have danced before. She became a mirror the world held up to me; like Rasputia, she was also a comparison I never asked for. I’ve always respected her talent, but I never felt represented by her—not musically, not aesthetically, not personally. The comparison was never about likeness. Collapsing our obvious differences; that was about shorthand. About the way desirous white men, especially but not exclusively, flatten fat Black women into interchangeable silhouettes. So when someone the culture insists is my “sister figure” steps into a narrative I’ve spent my entire life resisting—the “trauma made me fat; healing made me smaller” arc—it lands differently. Not because she owes me anything, but because the culture will use her story as proof that mine should have unfolded the same way.

This isn’t a critique of Lizzo as a person. It’s a critique of the culture that cast her as a movement’s mouthpiece before she ever asked for the role.

Years after the scandal—after the investigations, the media frenzy, the racism and fatphobia braided through every headline—she’s returned with a story about grief, pain, and transformation. I believe her. But understanding your body is not the same as understanding the world.

Her essay frames trauma as fatness, fatness as wound, weight loss as healing, and “release” as spiritual rebirth. That may be true for her. But it is not a universal template. Trauma changes some bodies and leaves others untouched. Plenty of thin people have endured the same traumas Lizzo names. Plenty of fat people have not. Trauma does not explain body size any more than body size explains diabetes or heart disease or anything else the culture tries to hang on fatness.

When someone with her scale and platform ties trauma to fatness, it becomes more than her story. It becomes a cultural fable. A new storyline about what fatness means.

This is where the harm begins.

Because when Lizzo says she carried trauma as weight and “released” it, the world hears:
fat people are fat because they’re holding on to something they should let go.

And when she calls her weight a shield or a grief-body, the world hears:
fatness is inherently pathological.

Not because she intended harm, but because celebrity narratives are never received as personal. They become parables. She is not the first public fat person to link trauma and body size; she’s just the most recent.

And before anyone asks: no, I’m not in denial about my own connection to fatness and trauma. I was fat long before trauma entered my life. Ask anyone who knew me before I was sixteen. Yes, my body has shifted through grief, like many bodies do. But the idea that fatness itself is always a response to suffering is simply another way the world insists my body must be explained.

II.

Here’s the deeper problem: when a fat Black woman with Lizzo’s reach ties her fatness to trauma and her weight loss to healing, the narrative doesn’t stay on her body. The culture recruits it instantly. Institutions recruit it. Medicine recruits it. Anti-fatness recruits it. Suddenly her story isn’t a memoir—it becomes a model. A justification. A cautionary tale.

And in the Ozempic Era, this lands harder than it would have three years ago. Thinness is now framed as responsible citizenship. Weight loss is packaged as self-care, emotional maturity, productivity, modernity. The “new you” rhetoric isn’t just aesthetic; it’s moral.

So when Lizzo shares her arc of “release,” however genuine, the interpretation slides into a familiar groove:

If you’re still fat, you must still be hurting.
If you’re still fat, you must be attached to your wound.
If you’re still fat, you must not be doing your work.
If you’re still fat, you must be choosing to be the problem.
If you’re still fat, you are doing eugenics wrong.

This is how anti-fatness metabolizes stories.

And this is where I come back to Body Trust. Body Trust dismantles the fantasy that bodies tell linear emotional truths. Bodies don’t work like that. Some lose weight under stress; some gain; some do neither. Grief makes some people ravenous, others numb, others oscillate. None of it speaks to morality, character, or healing.

Body Trust teaches that bodies are shaped by an interplay of biology, environment, resources, ancestry, oppression, constraint, and chance.
Not fate. Not virtue. Not some tidy emotional narrative.

Lizzo’s essay, intentionally or not, invites back the fantasy that fatness is the residue of something unresolved. That losing weight means the hard emotional work is finally done. That fatness signals an overfullness—of pain, of history, of self.

That’s the harm of symbolic storytelling.

And when the storyteller is a fat Black woman, the stakes escalate. The world already assumes we are wounded. The world already assumes our bodies are tragedies. The world assumes that if we were emotionally “well,” we would automatically become small. Lizzo’s narrative will be read through that racialized logic—Black women must earn softness, earn desirability, earn safety by shedding whatever made us “too much.”

This is where representation collapses under pressure. It cannot hold the structural weight placed on it. It was never designed to.

Lizzo didn’t tell the wrong story. The culture will weaponize it into the right story for anti-fatness. And in a moment where fat people are quietly being disappeared from casting lists, clothing racks, timelines, and public life, this narrative gives the culture exactly what it wants: a spiritualized justification for erasure.

III.

I don’t want Lizzo punished for telling the truth about her own body. She’s lived through more public violence than most people can imagine, and the world will never fully account for how racism, misogyny, misogynoir, and fatphobia shaped that violence. She carried a cultural burden no one person should have to carry, and while she never publicly engaged the allegations in 2023 beyond issuing denials, that part of the story isn’t the point here. It also doesn’t change what happens next.

Someone will send her essay to a fat friend as encouragement. A doctor will gesture toward it when recommending weight loss. A casting director will fold it into their updated idea of the “Lizzo type.” A wellness influencer will mine it for captions about “releasing.”

I’m not guessing. I’ve lived through the aftershocks of these stories before.

When public fat women frame fatness as trauma, the culture rushes to believe them—not because it trusts them, but because it wants fatness to mean something. It wants fatness to be evidence, a clue, a wound, a deviation from the “true” body underneath.

And that leaves people like me in an impossible position. Not because the culture thinks I’m unhealed—that part is predictable—but because it refuses to believe I might simply be fat. Ordinary. Unexceptional. A body instead of a backstory.

That’s what these narratives erase:
not my healing, but my right to exist without explanation.

Lizzo’s story is powerful because it is hers. It becomes dangerous when it’s universalized, when it becomes a map for bodies that do not share her history, biology, grief, or life.

What I want is the possibility that fatness is not a metaphor and not a diagnostic. Not a symbol or a confession. Not a spiritual blockage or a sign of unfinished emotional work. Fatness as a body, not a universal narrative.

This is where Lizzo and I diverge.
Not because her story is wrong, but because it will be read as evidence about mine.

And the world she is stepping back into—the world we are all in—is one where thinness is being medically engineered and morally mandated. One where disappearing is framed as discipline. One where weight loss is sold as emotional maturity. One where representation is shrinking and the cultural tolerance for fatness is evaporating.

In that world, even a gentle story can become a weapon.

And so I want something different for all of us, including Lizzo. A culture where we don’t need celebrities to validate our bodies. Where representation doesn’t collapse under structural pressure. Where healing has no silhouette. Where fatness doesn’t need an origin myth. Where one woman’s path is not mistaken for a mandate. Where we expand, not erase.

Where fat people get to live—not as metaphors, but as people.

And where our liberation isn’t contingent on whether or not we shrink.

If Lizzo is releasing one kind of weight, this essay is me refusing to pick up another. Not because I don’t care about her story, but because I care about our collective one.

If this piece resonated, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Liberation is built through conversation — through the stories we refuse, the narratives we unlearn, and the truths we finally name out loud.
Leave a comment, share this with someone who needs the analysis, or subscribe to support the work.

Coda

It still floors me that people looked at Lizzo—singing, dancing, rapping, playing the flute through sold-out stadium tours—and called her unhealthy.
The grief is that she started to believe them.

---

Under This Moon

Full Moon in Gemini — December 4, 2025
Candle: Lavender-grey (for clear sight without spiraling; the color of discernment when emotions run hot)
Stone: Obsidian (our hold-over from Scorpio season — protection during revelation, grounding during uncomfortable truths)
Card: The Magician (a reminder that language is creation; what you name becomes possible)

Mercury is direct, but the shadow still hums. Information is moving again — loudly. Expect pivots in your routines, your body’s needs, your travel plans, your money flow. These aren’t setbacks; they’re course corrections. This moon pulls you toward what’s real, not what was convenient.

And while the astrology is tense, I want you to hear this plainly:
pressure doesn’t mean you’re failing — it means something is coming into focus.
Instead of bracing, get specific. Ask better questions. Slow your reactions. Name what’s happening without collapsing into it.

Collectively, this lunation exposes the fault lines we’ve all been straddling — burnout, inequity, the impossible expectations placed on individuals while systems shrug. Gemini reminds us that liberation begins with truth-telling: refusing the narratives that were handed to us, and choosing the ones rooted in community, clarity, and shared care.

This moon wants honesty, not heroics. It wants clarity, not martyrdom. It wants you to stop carrying what was never yours.

Ritual / Reflection

1. Light your candle. Hold your obsidian (or place it on your chest).

2. Speak aloud one truth from 2025 you’re finally ready to admit — even if your voice shakes.

3. Write: What story about myself, my work, or my community am I done repeating? What truth clears my path for 2026?

4. End by saying: I choose clarity. I choose community. I release what isn’t mine.

---

Shards and Fragments

Since Lizzo emerged, a small part of me always wonders what might have unfolded if I’d never put the flute down after high school…

---

From the Margins

The first time someone called me “Lizzo” in public, he (yes, an older white man) grinned like he was offering me a blessing.
I remember the fraction of a second where my body went still — calculating whether to correct him, perform gratitude, or disappear entirely.
I’m sure my grimace looked like a smile.
What struck me wasn’t the insult; it was the entitlement.
The assumption that my shape, my presence, my Blackness could be summed up by a pop-culture shorthand.
That my body was a cultural reference, not a person standing three feet away.
People think comparisons are compliments. And sometimes, they are.
But a compliment that erases you is still an erasure.

---

What’s in Motion

The Center for Body Trust has an Exploring Your Body Story workshop coming up — a space for naming the narratives that were handed to us and choosing the ones we actually want to live in. It’s work I trust, and it’s aligned with everything this essay asks us to question.

If you’re thinking about how you want to enter the new year — what to carry forward and what to leave behind — Hourglass is one way to begin that clarity. Book your Hourglass Session today and meet the new year on your own terms.

I’m also opening space for a few consulting partnerships in early 2026. This is work rooted in strategic and organizational clarity, and in the relational repair and alignment that make real change possible. I help leaders navigate power, feasibility, and direction in a moment when the ground itself is shifting. If your organization is in that kind of terrain, reach out.

---

Further Reflection

What narratives about your body or your becoming do you want to reclaim from the culture — or rewrite entirely?

---

Until Next Time…