Gabriella Lascano spent over a decade telling women to love themselves at any size. She built a following on it. She believed in it. And then one day she looked in the mirror at nearly 400 pounds on a five-foot frame and realized she didn’t recognize the person looking back.
“I started to wonder if loving myself at any size had become an excuse to ignore how big I was getting,” she told the New York Times. “I felt like I saw myself being brainwashed, essentially.”
That’s not a conservative pundit. That’s not a doctor on a talk show. That’s a woman who was inside the movement, who helped build it, who carried its banner — and who’s now telling you it nearly killed her.
How It Started
Lascano started posting content in 2010. She wasn’t trying to become an influencer. She was a plus-sized woman who found a community of other plus-sized women online, and the support felt real. “Love yourself at any size” sounded empowering. It sounded kind. It sounded like the opposite of the cruelty that overweight people deal with every day.
And for a while, maybe it was. There’s nothing wrong with telling someone they have value regardless of their weight. There’s nothing wrong with pushing back against the toxic beauty standards that social media amplifies into a funhouse mirror.
But somewhere along the way, the message mutated. “Love yourself” became “never change.” “You’re beautiful as you are” became “anyone who suggests you lose weight is the enemy.” Self-acceptance stopped being about dignity and became a shield against reality — and reality, eventually, doesn’t care about your feelings.
Lascano gained weight. A lot of weight. She couldn’t travel anymore. Couldn’t ride roller coasters. Couldn’t do the things that made her life worth living. The movement that was supposed to free her had trapped her inside a body that was failing — and questioning that, even privately, felt like betrayal.
When the Movement Turned Radical
Body positivity didn’t just encourage self-love. It became hostile to health itself. Lascano watched the community turn against weight loss — not crash diets or dangerous pills, but weight loss in general. Exercise became suspect. Wanting to change your body became “fatphobic.” Doctors who recommended losing weight were dismissed as bigots.
The movement built an echo chamber so airtight that even dying wasn’t enough to break the seal.
“My friend died,” Lascano said. “She was a body-positivity influencer, who founded the world’s first plus-size salon.”
Her friend died. And the community kept going. Kept posting. Kept telling women that health concerns were just society’s prejudice dressed up in medical language. Kept building a culture where acknowledging that obesity kills people was treated as a moral failing worse than obesity itself.
That was the breaking point. In 2023, Lascano posted a video denouncing the movement. She said she felt “guilty” for participating. She said what nobody in that community was allowed to say: “It’s not fatphobic to care about your health.”
The Exile
The response was immediate and predictable. Lascano became a pariah. The community that had embraced her turned on her with the speed and viciousness that only online mobs can achieve. She was attacked, shunned, and expelled from the movement she’d helped create.
That’s what happens in any ideological community when someone breaks ranks. It doesn’t matter if you were a true believer. It doesn’t matter if you spent a decade building the thing. The moment you question the orthodoxy, you’re the enemy. The movement protects itself, not its members.
Lascano has since lost weight. She says she feels more like herself. She still supports a version of body positivity — one that encourages self-love while acknowledging that obesity carries severe health risks. “We can still love ourselves even if we want to lose weight,” she said. “That’s what real body positivity should stand for.”
That’s a reasonable, humane position. It’s also heresy in the community she left behind.
The Bigger Problem
Lascano’s story isn’t just about one influencer’s personal journey. It’s about what happens when a culture decides that feelings matter more than facts — and enforces that decision with social punishment.
The body-positivity movement follows the same pattern as every other ideological capture in modern life. Start with a legitimate grievance. Build a community around it. Radicalize the message until questioning any part of it becomes forbidden. Silence dissenters. Celebrate the orthodoxy. Ignore the casualties.
Overweight people deserve dignity. They deserve kindness. They don’t deserve to be told that the thing killing them is actually fine — that the doctors are wrong, the science is biased, and the only real problem is society’s inability to accept them.
A friend of Lascano’s died. Not from society’s judgment. From the health consequences that the movement told her didn’t matter.
That’s not body positivity. That’s a lie with a hashtag. And Lascano — who helped build it, believed in it, and almost lost herself to it — is now standing on the other side telling anyone who’ll listen that the emperor has no clothes.
Some people will hear her. The movement won’t. It never does. But the woman in the mirror finally looks familiar again, and that might be enough.