‘Nobody hates fat people more than former fat people’: Lizzo ditches body positivity by defacing her own photo

Lizzo made her career with songs full of killer hooks and a refreshingly sincere message of body positivity and loving yourself. Her lyrics were peppered with uplifting no-nonsense celebrations of her femininity and sexuality, and her interviews contained killer quotes like:

“FAT DOES NOT=UGLY. Love Yourself. Eat like you love yourself. Drink water like you love yourself. Dance & move your body like you love yourself. Next time someone calls you fat, you’ve got fat in your body just like them. And having fat is beautiful.”

More recently, Lizzo has lost a lot of weight, sharing that she’s lost 16% of her body fat over two years of slimming. Despite ongoing accusations that she’s using Ozempic to achieve this, she maintains her weight loss is the product of exercise and diet (though if it is Ozempic, who cares?).

Lizzo still maintains a body-positive message, albeit one that’s slightly lessened in impact given that she’s gone to such lengths to slim down, combined with allegations in a lawsuit from her former dancers alleging she criticized them for putting on weight.

All of which means this video of Lizzo spraypainting “Bye b***h” over the face shot of her on her 2022 album Special has many fans concluding she’s now “fat-shaming” her old self:

Nobody hates fat people more than former fat people https://t.co/jBHkMFHODA

— Ruby (@ilyyyRuby) June 11, 2025

We need to be graceful

Or, as this put it: “Nobody hates fat people more than former fat people”. Comments inevitably come at this from a wide range of viewpoints: there are legions of bluetick nobodies doing fat jokes, but also more thoughtful observations like:

“We need to be graceful to these kinds of people they’ve experienced bullying their entire lives as fat people it makes sense that it’s mostly how they’d act towards their prior selves too, but they do need some education on how harmful this behaviour is”

And that:

“I’m guessing it’s because people who have to work for results tend to feel more ionately about them. If you then see others not putting that effort in it probably makes you disdainful.”

Other Lizzo fans cast doubt on whether it’s even fair to read this as her fat-shaming her past self. Perhaps dismissing the Special era is just a way to pave the way for her fifth studio album Love in Real Life. As of writing we can’t really tell though, at the very least, Lizzo herself seems happy with where her music and her body is. And maybe that’s the point of all this.