OBESE BODY POSITIVITY INFLUENCERS KEEP DYING YOUNG

 Washington Examiner

 

Tragic: Obese ‘body positivity’ influencers keep dying young

By Brad Polumbo

December 28, 2023 01:21 PM

 

It might sound extreme to call the “body positivity” movement, which promotes obesity as beautiful and healthy , a left -wing death cult. But a series of recent tragedies suggest that, if anything, this might be an understatement.

 

As the YouTuber Blaire White recently pointed out in a mega-viral video, prominent “body positivity” influencers who promoted and defended obesity for years keep suddenly, tragically dying at a young age.

 

The Daily Mail recently reported on this story, telling the tale of four different overweight influencers who’ve lost their lives.

 

One is a woman named Brittany Sauer, an obese influencer who recently died at the tender age of 28. Her direct cause of death is unknown, but she struggled with severe health problems related to her obesity, including Type 2 diabetes. Tragically, Sauer realized before her death that promoting obesity as healthy and beautiful was a mistake, yet this realization came too late. In one of her last TikTok videos before her death, Sauer warned others not to make the same mistakes.

 

“I ruined my life through food, binge-eating, and lack of self-care,” she said in that November 2022 video. “I just want this to be a warning for other people. … I’m hoping it’s not too late for me this time.”

 

It was.

 

Another TikTok influencer named Taylor LeJeune died in January from a “presumed heart attack,” according to the Daily Mail. He didn’t explicitly or ideologically promote obesity, but his popular videos were of him engaging in insane and extremely unhealthy eating behaviors.

 

“Fat studies” professor Cat Pause, who explicitly questioned whether obesity was even unhealthy, similarly died from unknown causes in March 2022 at just 42.

 

Another woman, Jamie Lopez, starred in a reality TV show promoting her “Super Sized Salon” dedicated to making overweight women feel beautiful, the Daily Mail reports . She did lose some weight before her death but nonetheless died from “heart complications” at age 37 in December 2022.

 

The level of tragedy here is hard to put into words. Each one of these people has loved ones and friends who will desperately mourn their loss and miss their presence in the years to come. And each one clearly had talents and charisma to offer the world, or they’d never have become so popular online. No one should glibly cite their deaths to “own” the other side or lose sight of the heartbreaking reality we’re dealing with here. In fact, it’s exactly for people like these four and their families that we need to do better and challenge the “body positivity” movement’s viral success.

 

Yes, we can’t say definitively in every one of these cases that obesity is what caused their death. But it’s fair to assume it at least played a part in some of the situations. The odds of this pattern being purely coincidental are pretty slim. And we can say with absolute certainty that the message these people conveyed, both explicitly and implicitly, was a deadly one.

 

Extreme obesity shaves 14 years off a person’s average life expectancy, according to the National Institutes of Health. And obesity is now the second-leading cause of preventable death in the United States, behind only cigarette smoking. It’s estimated that obesity-related health problems claim 280,000 lives every year in the U.S., making obesity more deadly than even the opio id epidemic.

 

So, anyone promoting obesity as healthy, and that’s what the entire “Health at Any Size” movement exists to do, is directly spreading health misinformation about something that has killed millions of people over the last several decades.

 

To be clear, bullying, mocking, insulting, or shaming overweight people for their bodies is never acceptable, and it's actually deeply counterproductive, tending to push them further toward the self-destructive behaviors causing their obesity in the first place. But we can be kind while standing firm on the factual realities of obesity and encouraging people to change their ways without being disrespectful or cruel.

 

What we can’t do is simply stand by and, out of fear of offending someone, continue to allow people to spread false, largely unchallenged messages promoting a way of life that’s killing our fellow Americans in breathtaking numbers. It’s time to recognize the “body positivity” movement for the destructive death cult it truly is — and stop encouraging people who are eating their way to an early grave.