Is it ever okay to discuss a celebrity’s body weight? | Canada Voices

Among the online chatter about Wicked – a feature-film adaptation of the beloved Broadway musical – there’s one topic in particular the internet has feasted on, voraciously: how thin the two lead actors appear to be.

It’s common knowledge that Hollywood has certain standards for what women should look like, and that was probably likely for the two leads of the year’s biggest movie, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo.

In an interview this week, Grande said she tries to stay away from the “noise” (comments about her looks). But for the rest of us chronically-online fans, the speculation of whether the stars have eating disorders has been right in our faces. The controversy has led to two camps: one saying that it is in poor taste to speculate on someone’s health, while the other implores us to focus on the larger societal issues at play here, which, in this case, is diet culture.

Earlier this year, Grande published a TikTok claiming she’s “the healthiest [she’s] ever been.” For many, this connection between “health” and her exaggerated thinness looked all too familiar. As this year’s international runways showed more extremely thin models than previous years, and fashion brands have been scaling back or cutting their plus-size offerings, it raises the question of whether we are back to an old-fashioned taste for skinny. Or, perhaps, the pressure to be thin has never gone away.

For example, the stick-thin Kate Moss body type idealized in the early 2000s evolved in the later 2000s into a thinness accentuated by curvier body parts, best typified by the Kardashians (who, themselves, have been rumoured to be removing their breast and butt implants over the past year or two). It seems, then, that what we are seeing now is a return to a previous version of the thin ideal, with the only difference being that instead of using appetite suppressants such as fen phen that were popular back then, we’re seeing a rise in drugs such as Ozempic or Mounjaro.

In reference to these new drugs, Jennifer Mills, a professor and director of clinical training at York University’s Faculty of Health who researches body image and eating disorders, says that now more than ever, diet culture is being repackaged with ‘healthism’ narratives from the health and wellness industry because drugs that can cause weight loss including Ozempic are prescribed by some doctors. “This may trick folks into thinking that these aren’t diet culture messages or a diet culture product, but in reality, it is.” In other words, all of this encourages the idea that smaller bodies are “healthier,” says Mills.

Famous folks are not immune to the same pressures. And for the public, there is a level of concern, warns Mills: “I don’t want to see an actress on the screen who looks emaciated. It makes me uncomfortable because I worry for her and I worry for the effect it has on young people wanting to look like her.”

But when the public speculates on celebrity bodies, where do we draw the line?

Consider late Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman who, it turned out, wasn’t living with an eating disorder or abusing drugs as people speculated, but cancer, which was only made public after his death. Not only did it prove all that conjecture was in poor thought, but that people don’t always share everything they’re dealing with, whether they’re famous or not. Because, yes, it’s none of our business. And no matter what sort of parasocial relationship you might have with someone, you don’t know them.

“There are so many reasons why someone’s body is the way that it is,” says Kheana Barbeau, a part-time professor at the University of Ottawa and Banting Postdoctoral researcher who studies body image, stigma and self-compassion. “Making assumptions on behalf of other people’s bodies can be extremely harmful and create more stigma around issues like eating disorders.” For the record, too, she adds: “Eating disorders come in all body sizes and shapes – it does not discriminate.”

So, how can we talk about this around the dinner table in a healthy way?

For starters, it’s important to recognize just how harmful weight stigma and diet culture can be. Research has shown that those who score high on celebrity-worship scales, specifically teens, are more likely to have body image concerns and disordered eating. Barbeau explains, “We are all key players in how alive diet culture is. We need to resist norms that surround commenting and spotlighting other people’s bodies.”

It’s also important to develop media literacy, which means making smart assessments about the media we are taking in and understanding how it can impact us. Studies have shown that developing a level of media literacy leads to higher self-esteem and body satisfaction. This can look like learning to question, for example, a celebrity’s social media and asking who it’s made for, what its purpose is meant to be, what conditions or pressures the person making it might have been under, how it might have been altered (through filters or Photoshop), etc. For example, Grande has been under intense public scrutiny since the age of 17, and that’s not something the average person can understand or relate to.

As Mills says, “I don’t believe that the celebrities or models themselves have an agenda to push thinness on others. Maybe the question is, what social responsibility do the movie, music or fashion industries have to promote healthiness through the models they use or the celebrities they create?”