Keep Your Opinions Off Celebrities’ Bodies (Unless It’s Time to Intervene)

Last awards season, the gossip around town, salacious and disturbing in equal measure, was that hotel suites all over Hollywood were populated by tailors taking in gowns coming straight off the runway. Those sizes vary from size four all the way down to zero, but even the zeros weren’t small enough. Wasp waist? Wasps are huge! Give me a gnat waist. A flea waist. An amoeba waist.

In 2026, handwringing over certain physical standards feels passe. We know that those bodies — lush boobs and booty, itty bitty everything else — are rarely found in nature. And it feels like the battle may be lost on this one. As reality TV helped normalize plastic surgery, more people than ever are having it. With liposuction being the number one ask, breast augmentation third and Brazilian butt lifts pulling up the rear. So to speak.

Lately, the talk behind closed doors is about extreme thinness. Who looks good? Who looks scary? Who’s flaunting their skeletal frame and who hides a bit behind a couture wall of feathers? Often it seems we’re judgmental and envious. As a person who nearly died from anorexia as a young woman, I find the images upsetting on a number of levels. My reptile brain gets the message — Check your thigh gap! Do the chicken arm test! — while my higher brain and activist side reacts with alarm.

Much of my work has addressed harmful beauty standards and I consider myself well-versed in media literacy concerning body image. So in recent years I was heartened when it seemed we were headed in the right direction, even if it was just baby steps. But with the advent of GLP-1 drugs, many fat people (I use that language, as it’s generally the preferred term among fat activists) we admired as models of self-acceptance suddenly made red carpet appearances looking like every other thin actor, singer, comedian, etc. How is this affecting all those people who felt seen and accepted by growing inclusivity? And what about young people coming of age in this new era? When people choose to take the drugs when not medically necessary, because they can afford it, they chose ultra thinness. Body size becomes even more of a class issue and the message seems clear: Thin is in.

Ten years ago I was shooting my film, To The Bone, about a young woman struggling to overcome anorexia. The movie is based not just on my own battle, but the struggles of people with all types of disordered eating. When looking for financing, we were told time and time again that it was “too small a subject” for a feature. We managed to make it. Netflix bought it. And to date it’s had tens of millions of views worldwide. Not such a small subject at all. According to the National Eating Disorders Association, the number of people with disordered eating has more than doubled globally in past two decades. And that’s just reported cases. Ask any roomful of people how much of their lives have been taken up thinking about their body’s deficiencies, and I promise you, over half will say it’s an alarming amount.

While making the movie, we took great pains to portray anorexia in a way that didn’t glorify it. We showed the character’s body only a few times, and only for the gut punch that brings home just how deadly her dysmorphia has become. Because, statistically, normalizing such images can do great harm to people’s relationship to food and weight. A 2020 study of a demographically diverse group of undergraduates found that “exposure to weight loss content was associated with lower body appreciation, greater fears of negative appearance evaluation, and more frequent binge eating.”

And Whitney Totter, chief executive officer at Project Heal, a non-profit organization that offers help to people with disordered eating, comments: “As the cultural ideal continues to shift toward extreme thinness, we’re seeing the consequences reflected in people seeking support. For someone vulnerable to an eating disorder, [pressure] from social media, celebrity images, or the growing visibility of GLP-1 medications can reinforce restriction and the belief that their body is somehow not small enough. We have to recognize that these images aren’t simply a matter of aesthetics. They can have very real consequences for mental health and eating disorder risk.”

Generally, my credo is this: Keep your opinions off other people’s bodies. Very thin or not at all, it’s none of our business. Unfortunately, the recent controversies around images of Ariana Grande and other actresses have made this argument less binary. After Grande released her music video for “Petal,” social media exploded with comments from people concerned about her health. While I know from personal experience that this is a deeply private matter and Grande has the right to bodily autonomy, it is also a case of a public figure broadcasting what are, for many, dangerous and upsetting images. It’s not a matter of policing her body but rather criticizing the decision to emphasize a look that will actively do harm to people’s mental health.

Grande is not alone in this. We see it more and more. But hers is a case so undeniable it’s reignited an important conversation. What’s our responsibility as entertainers? If we’re afraid for our own vulnerable children, siblings or friends to see and admire certain celebrities — maybe that’s our answer. Maybe we have to think twice about the content we put into the world. Maybe we have to intervene.

Activist Shannon Watts and author of Fight Like A Mom and the bestseller Fired Up, is a mother of an adult child who has struggled with an eating disorder for decades. Since she’s a lot smarter than I am, I’ll close with this: “There is an enormous difference between policing a woman’s body and caring enough about someone to help save her life.”

The Project Heal: If you are struggling with an eating disorder and need immediate support, text HEALING to 741741 to be connected to a crisis counselor.

Marti Noxon is a veteran Emmy-nominated writer, creator, producer, director and showrunner with a long list of credits that includes Sharp Objects, Dietland, Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce, UnREAL, Code Black, Mad Men, Private Practice, Glee, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.