"I Take It Back, I Was Totally Fat"
Remember how Tyra was all “I’m not fat, so kiss my fat ass” blah blah blah? She immediately turned around and lost 30 pounds.
Banks insisted the shots of her in a bikini during a winter break were just taken from a bad angle as she launched a ‘So what’ campaign on her TV show and urged the tabloids to stop poking fun at stars’ weight loss and weight gain…. But the terrible photographs forced Banks to take action – and, after months spent eating right and exercising, she has dropped 30 pounds, according to Life & Style magazine.
Thanks Tyra, for your very convincing pro-fat message. I feel so warm and fuzzy inside!
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Celebrities, Tyra Banks, Weight Loss
And thus we see the great and terrible power wielded by cretins on the internet who sit around and say horrible things about women who are not sticks. Because it’s hard enough to stand up for yourself every day – it’s got to be nearly impossible to have the media and the whole internet calling you mean names.
I tend to agree with Rotund. It’s pretty sad that the almighty power of the media did this. To think, I was beginning to admire miss Tyra’s strength. I guess then I too take it back.
Man, that bums me out. I loved that she was about my height and weighed what my goal weight is, 160. I guess she was lying about being happy with her body. The only positive thing I can say is that she says she lost weight my eating a healthy diet including fruits and veggies and by exercising, but that could be a lie too.
I’m irritated by it too, but I feel the same way: Kiss my fat ass if you don’t like who I am, and damn but I’d like to be 30 pounds lighter. If I can feel both ways at once, I have to give Tyra room to feel that as well.
But it’s still freaking irritating.
I still like Tyra for being pro-fat, no matter what her actual weight is.
I know exactly what you’re saying. I really don’t want to begrudge her the weight loss but it still annoys me, probably unreasonably.
If she was on the fence about her weight to begin with, then I can definitely see giving her the room to feel that way. However, she put up such a loud fuss with the media about body acceptance that you almost want to yell “Liar Liar Pants on Fire!” for her obvious retraction.
Now, I’m not saying that she doesn’t have the right to lose weight or make herself feel good. By all means… we do what we need to. I am however saying that it looks just a bit contradictory that she said she felt great at 160 but then after that little campaign lost 30 lbs.
Good for Tyra. I still think she rocks… I just don’t think she’s as credible with some of her thoughts.
That’s probably more my issue than hers though.
You know, losing weight doesn’t mean she wasn’t happy with her body. I believe she probably was. In this case, it seems more like the rest of the country wasn’t happy with her body. And, given her lifetime in the spotlight and how her career, you know, depends on making people happy, her personal happiness might not even have been a consideration.
Like, I lam totally happy with myself when I make incredibly bitchy comments to people who deserve them. It makes other people a LOT happier when I moderate my tone and refrain from making people cry. My happiness? Not so much a consideration in this case. *grin*
I get so torn over situations such as this one because I don’t know how Tyra losing weight is a direct correlation with her somehow abandoning her previous message. It doesn’t seem to me to be fair, and all too often it’s a fallback position women – more than men – seem to take when a woman loses weight.
Sure, it would be nice if she stayed at a weight more of us could relate with, but what the hell business is it of ours what she does?
Maybe she took great offense to being called all sorts of awful names at 160 (and rightfully so, because she wasn’t fat, for god’s sake), but maybe she also feels better about herself at 130 (and I don’t think she looks emaciated now–frankly, she looked healthy but curvier at 160 and still looks healthy but slimmer now).
Cut her some slack.
I think the most depressing thing here is the fact that a celebrity’s weight is deemed important enough to be a press item.
And these kinds of “news” stories are pretty dubious anyway. I’m sure the only “insider” in a piece like this is just some photo editor who scores a particularly skinny- or fat-looking recent picture of a celeb and extrapolates a story about that celeb’s amazing or tragic weight loss or gain.
I mean, isn’t that exactly what happened the first time around with Tyra’s “fat ass” pictures?
So I feel like getting outraged about this is giving way, way too much credit to the kind of crap that magazines like Life & Style blather out on a weekly basis.
Tyra deserves some sympathy. I wouldn’t attack someone who claimed to be pro-fat and had WLS, for example. I don’t know why it’s any different with Tyra.
You know what’s also funny about this whole thing? Between her talk show and America’s Next Top Model, we get to see an awful lot of photos and videos of Tyra. I know some of the ANTM footage is on a time lag, but I bet at least once a week the average viewer or tabloid reader gets a chance to see how heavy she is or isn’t at the moment. So it’s not like she’s been hiding this whole time. All along we’ve been able to see what she LOOKS like. So why does our attitude toward her change the moment some magazine gives us a number (30 pounds)?
This sucks. It isn’t surprising, but it sucks.
I’m sick of being told that I have to respect the rights of dieters. That’s like asking me to respect the rights of males or white people. They are the overwhelmingly dominant majority. They hardly need my approval to validate whatever they do. So I’m just going to think this sucks. She basically came out and lied to us all. That should bother us. I know why people diet and I don’t hate them, but I don’t have to slink into a corner and clap softly while I die just a little inside. Screw it. This sucks. Greg Grunberg being a spokemodel for “Results Not Typical” sucks. I think Beyonce having to lose weight for a movie sucks. I’m tired of not getting to say that because it might hurt someone’s feelings who has the support of nearly everyone on the planet. So screw it. This just sucks. I wish someone could be fat and proud. Hell, just fat and mostly okay with it would be an achievement. But no. We can never get that. Well sorry if my opinion somehow threatens the rights of dieters, but that just sucks.
“You know, losing weight doesn’t mean she wasn’t happy with her body. I believe she probably was. In this case, it seems more like the rest of the country wasn’t happy with her body. And, given her lifetime in the spotlight and how her career, you know, depends on making people happy, her personal happiness might not even have been a consideration.”
Yeah, that.
“Sure, it would be nice if she stayed at a weight more of us could relate with, but what the hell business is it of ours what she does?”
And this. (Although there’s that whole “representative images” argument — not to mention the whole gobs-of-weight-the-camera-adds thing — but that’s a comment set for a different thread.)
“I think the most depressing thing here is the fact that a celebrity’s weight is deemed important enough to be a press item.”
And, really, this. Weapons of Mass Destruction that were never found but that we taxpayers are still footing the bills for someone to look for to the tune of around a hundred million a day, anyone?
Maybe it had nothing to do with media or weight loss or body image but she evaluated her eating habits and made some changes for her own reasons.
I’m sick of being told that I have to respect the rights of dieters.
I don’t think anyone is saying you have to applaud her choice. There is a HUGE YAWNING VOID in between “Yay, weight loss! OMG!” and “ARGH, I HATE HER NOW BLECH!” and I think most of us are sitting in that middle ground. SOMETHING needs to fill that space and it might as well be people who can see both sides of things. I understand why she might have made her choice. I respect her right to make her choice. I still think it sucks. And I think it sucks even MORE because I understand what might be motivating it. I mean, jeezus, that anyone could be happy with themselves and have to ignore that happiness for any reason is BULLSHIT. It just illustrates how truly fucked up our society is – the way other people want her body to look is more important than her personal happiness.
If Tyra, or anyone else who loses weight, feels better about her/himself when trimmer, why is that a bad thing? Why is that a betrayal? Why does that “suck” for someone else?
Look, I used to be a lot heavier. I was NOT an unhappy person. I was NOT lacking pride. But I’ve lost weight and now I’m a runner and that makes me feel strong and powerful and even better about myself than I ever did before.
When someone loses weight, it’s not always about that person caving in to society standards. Sometimes it really is just about an individual who feels better, physically and mentally, when at a lower weight.
>>>You know, losing weight doesn’t mean she wasn’t happy with her body.
Then why lose the weight? It wasn’t 10 or 15 lbs that she lost it was 30. That’s quite a bit of poundage to lose for someone who is happy with her body.
Maybe she felt uncomfortable about her body and was upset that the paparazzi ptb shot her in an unflattering pose.
Putting myself in Tyra’s shoes; if I were used to having amazing pictures taken of me for most of my life and then one day a really awkward picture is taken of me that paints me in an “ugly” light in a profession that praises beauty, then hell yeah i’d lose the weight and how. There’s a vanity factor to it.
It was admirable of her to launch her body acceptance campaign… but it makes her look a touch of a hypocrite in this instance.
Though really, what we should all be upset about is not that Tyra loses and gains weight like the rest of us. What we should be upset about is that the media puts so much pretentious emphasis on being thin vs. being fat. IMO – this is probably one of the main reasons we have body/mind complexities like anorexia, bulemia and compulsive overeating.
As always, this is just my opinion.
It was probably the network or whoever puts her show on tv that made her lose it. They are always doing that to people. They did it to Kirstie Allie when she was on Cheers and she was always skinny on that show.
24 comments on whether or not we hate Oprah. 21 comments on whether or not we hate Tyra.
But a young woman gets raped? 13 comments.
Oh, well.
I forget: Which Olsen twin is the fat one?
I don’t think that means anything, Fattie Squared, except that there’s actually room for disagreement on these other topics, and people have different points of view. Who the hell is going to disagree about the rape post? If it will make you feel better, we can all go post “Yes, it is awful” one right after another. But really, that’s all there is to it, I’d say.
Then why lose the weight? It wasn’t 10 or 15 lbs that she lost it was 30. That’s quite a bit of poundage to lose for someone who is happy with her body.
I think it’s important to remember that this is an alleged 30 pounds that was reported by “an insider” in a freaking tabloid magazine. It could be true, or half-true, or completely made up. If Tyra herself does a People cover story and a Very Special Episode of her talk show on her amazing weight loss, then we’ll have plenty to discuss.
But right now we’re jumping to conclusions about a personal philosophy that Tyra Banks may or may not hold, based on some amount of weight that she may or may not have lost, for reasons we can only speculate about. We’re letting these 30 pounds have an awful lot of meaning. While I think there’s important stuff at the heart of this discussion, we sure as hell can run a long way with our assumptions.
And again, none of this is based how Tyra Banks actually LOOKS to us. It’s all just from something somebody said somewhere. Why are we letting 30 pounds stand for the difference between body acceptance and body hatred? Did we really just let Life & Style decide that for us?
I don’t think that means anything, Fattie Squared, except that there’s actually room for disagreement on these other topics, and people have different points of view. Who the hell is going to disagree about the rape post?
It’s also worth pointing out that the story about the rape victim has been discussed on Kate Harding’s blog, The Rotund, Elastic Waist, and Body Impolitic, as well as other blogs whose readers and writers are part of this site’s community. This is not to say that “it’s been discussed enough elsewhere,” but rather to point out that it takes more than just a quick comment tally to measure our level of outrage.
I think the main part of this that is disappointing, and the part that I feel OK about criticizing, is that at 5’9″ and 160 lbs. she was NOT FAT. I realize everyone has sort of a hobby these days of looking at Tyra and deciding she has to be more than 160, or deciding that Ricki Lake can’t possibly be a 4 because look how fat she still is and I’m a 4 and she is WAY fatter than me, or decreeing that Kirstie Alley is such a big fat fattie and how can she claim she isn’t. But I think that people’s perceptions of women’s sizes are unreliable at best and completely delusional at worst (I used to be in favor of a day where women wore t-shirts with their true weights inscribed on them, just to watch men’s heads explode when they saw how many women they formally thought looked basically OK were actually 200-lb beached whales who should be shunned and hated). So I basically believe the “advertised” heights and weights of these celebrities.
Given that, the depressing part to me is that we all cheerlead a fellow dieter and tell her how skinny and pretty she is when she gets into the “healthy” BMI range, but secretly many of us think that a person in the “healthy” BMI range is still too fat–however subtle and subliminal the belief–and stories like this prove it. I find it sad and irritating. For some reason it’s this kind of story that really highlights for me the incredibly complex, tangled, totally messed-up strangulation of attitudes that our society still has and probably always will have regarding weight, appearance, feminism, health, morality, etc. etc. and how hard or impossible it will be to ever untangle them. A lot of people who hate fat women for reasons related to all of these factors still honestly think on an overt level that they are just “concerned about their health.” The actual number of Tyra’s weight or Ricki’s size is not really important to me, it’s just that here is something concrete you can point to and go “She was/is a healthy weight—why is this even an issue?” And the answers are just so depressing.
Mo pie sez: “Who the hell is going to disagree about the rape post? If it will make you feel better, we can all go post “Yes, it is awful” one right after another. But really, that’s all there is to it, I’d say.”
Of course this is a pop-culture blog, so I don’t expect any call to action about rape the way there was, say, when Old Navy stopped it’s plus-sized line.
You’re right, Fattie Squared, we should have all been calling the world’s 1-800 customer service number and demanding it stop rape. We totally neglected to email karma and ask it to smack down all the creeps who say horrible things about rape victims. Our bad, because we’re just a bunch of silly shallow gits obsessed with capri pants.
In case you overlooked my previous post in this thread and weren’t just willfully ignoring it for the sake of feeling self-righteous, I pointed out that several regular readers and commenters here have posted some great entries on their own blogs about the London rape case and attitudes towards fat women in regard to rape. Maybe instead of counting comments you should consider the way a story can spread through a community and inspire people to add to the discourse in ways that go way beyond a single thread on a single blog.
I’m sorry the reaction here on BFD wasn’t good enough for you. But I bet you’re so smart you can start your own blog, and use the power of your mind to totally will your readers to respond to all your posts in only the most appropriate ways.
it’s like she had a superiority complex when she was big. She was actually feeling insecure about gaining weight, but accted proud and secure. Then she finally gives into her insecurities and looses the weight. Hippocrit. Couldn’t she just accept her body as it was?
It’s not our job to sit in front of cameras and film a TV show every day, so maybe we can’t possibly understand the kind of pressure a person in Tyra’s career is under to always maintain a certain look.
But gosh, isn’t it totally healthy to love yourself as you are AND still strive for better health? Isn’t that what we’re all after here?
Part of being a healthy person is to take care of the body by eating well and doing exercise daily, and if it results in weight loss and looking like you work out is that such a bad thing?
Isn’t the societal pressure on most of us to eat poorly (as advertised on TV and pressured by our friends to get the extra-large pizza) and not exercise because we have “no time”? It takes a LOT of guts for most people to break out of that comfort/conformant zone, leave their friends and their beers behind, and take good care of themselves.
It should be applauded.
oh, and as far as the number on the scale? who cares! do you feel good? is your state of fitness holding you back from something you’d like to accomplish? do you wake up feeling refreshed and ready to take on the day’s challenges? do you like who you are?
We have no idea whether Tyra’s “state of fitness” was holding her back from anything. Nor that she wasn’t “taking care of herself” before. All of your arguments sound to me like euphemisms for “yeah, she was fat and needed to take off a few.” Which is still depressing to me as 5’9″ and 160 is squarely in the healthy BMI range. I would never argue that it’s a bad thing if you eat right and exercise and you end up losing weight and feeling great. That is an awesome thing. But not everybody needs to lose weight and weight loss should not a priori be applauded. There are a lot of reasons to be suspicious that a former supermodel of normal, healthy size, who has recently been attacked as “fat” in the press, who then goes and loses 30 pounds, is not doing it for the ideal healthy reasons you describe.
All of that is up to her and of course she’s free to lose weight if she wants. But it doesn’t necessarily make her some kind of health hero that we should all look up to. I think it is OK to think critically about people’s motivations for weight loss.
Oh, and who says she was swilling beer and pizza before? You may not have stated that outright but the implication is there. Again it gives the impression that anyone Tyra’s “before” size is fat or has “let herself go” and probably has a bunch of bad dietary habits to address. I know I sound like a broken record but she was NOT FAT IN THE FIRST PLACE. It is not necessarily the case that she was eating unhealthily “before.” For that matter it would not necessarily have been the case that she was on the beer and pizza diet even if she had been fat.
Sorry, in rereading that I sound a little intense (or, not to put too fine a point on it, jerky). This issue makes me cranky but I shouldn’t get all ALL CAPS about it.
hey, no offense taken. Obviously by the length of the comments here (and in other blogs) is is an intense issue for a LOT of people. I guess I was sort of digressing from the main point of the post and flowing into “why is it upsetting for a person to go against our expectations” and inserting some of my own experiences in there. Heck, I am not overweight either, by the standards of the BMI chart and the ideal weight charts, but I still feel uncomfortable at my size and would like to be not smaller than I am, but have less body fat, a better body composition. Perhaps that’s the sort of thing Tyra was feeling too when she decided to get back into her former shape, maybe she was getting more tired, or feeling her favorite pants were too tight (she’s mentioned that on many shows in the past year), but we have no way of knowing for sure what her motivation was. It’s a tabloid spread, and I’m sure that picture was digitally enhanced. We don;t even know that Tyra was seeking out this publicity for her weight loss efforts. I guess my point was, it’s really REALLY hard to go and defy people’s expectations about you and change your lifestyle. People close to you can get very upset about it. But if you can muster the courage to live life in a way that makes you happy, then you should be congratulated.
heck, I doubt it was even 30 pounds she lost, but you know how the tabloids like to exaggerate every little thing. :)
I strongly agree with your premise that it is hard to “go against the grain” and try to lead a healthy lifestyle. I’m on Weight Watchers myself and have lost 60 pounds so far (about the same amount to go). I am so torn between being resentful of the “food pushers” who encourage me to eat cake at work or order appetizers at the bar–and sort of hating myself for being the kind of humorless, unpleasant person who would actually use the word “food pushers” in my brain to describe my friends or coworkers. The people I know eat relatively healthy and it is still a struggle.
But more to the point (perhaps) it still really sounds like you think it is reasonable for someone who was a normal weight before to lose a bunch of weight (or otherwise change their bodies), if that is what they think would make them feel good. And I am not necessarily suggesting that you or Tyra shouldn’t do that, or strive for health in any way you please. I am just suggesting that there are complicated motives there and I doubt Tyra’s decision, or any of our decisions, to lose weight are all about health and discipline and personal achievement. There is a lot of other social conditioning and crap that pushes us into believing that if BMI-healthy is good, thinner is better, and I like to try and expose and examine that stuff for my own purposes. I think a lot of it is that you (OK, I) don’t feel like I am being a good enough little girl unless I am the thinnest, fittest, most controlled person around, which I personally find troubling and self-defeating. Others find trying to be the best to be inspiring and worth striving for. I don’t know. It’s complicated.
I believe that as long as a person does not succumb to disordered eating, or OCD working out, then there is nothing unhealthy about getting leaner, even if that person is already pretty darn good looking. That desire to get leaner can come from different places, such as overcoming health problems, or wanting improved athletic performance, but it is usually an aesthetic motivation for most, but is it wrong to be motivated by aesthetics? That is the question you seem to be asking yourself too.
I am motivated by all three of those things. And what if you kept challenging yourself more in your physical activities, and kept eating well after you attained your goal of 160lbs, and then ended up losing more weight? or gaining weight from muscle building? would that be a reasonable outcome? would it cause you to loosen up your lifestyle just to stick at a number or a size? or would you wonder just how much faster or farther you could run, regardless of what you end up looking like?
Wendy already posted my initial reaction: what — we’re taking the word of a papparazzi and a tabloid magazine as scientific results? But after reading this thread, I realized perhaps the real issue is that many of us have difficulty believing that somebody who is clearly beautiful and in shape could still succumb to all the media hype and definition of what is healthy and what is fat. Banks made her living in an industry that called anybody over 115 pounds “obese” — many years in that, despite having a family that supported and loved her — is going to do something to the mindset. I’m a musician, and I’m fat — and people tell me again and again that it doesn’t matter, but I still walk on stage with a guitar safely covering my abdomen… and I demand bright lights so that people don’t have to use flash (which really points out the fat!).
Banks’ original tirade several months ago actually range truer for me after reading this. If she did indeed drop 30 pounds because of all this attention (and that’s a huge IF, we don’t know for sure), that only points to the fact that that choke in her voice was sincere, that all that crap about how “fat” she was really hurt her deeply, as it hurts many (myself included) of us. That brings me back to my original point: if somebody as physically beautiful and supposedly in control can be hurt by this, maybe we are all in this together, much more than we ever imagined.
virg, obviously if the changes I have made to my lifestyle take me below my WW goal I’ll be thrilled (I’d actually like to lose 20 pounds below it but it would sure be nice not to have to pay the meeting fees anymore). Aesthetics is a huge motivator for me and I do think that’s OK.
I just feel it’s a fine line between striving to better yourself and getting obsessed, for reasons that seem healthy on the surface but may actually not be (like I said, I think it’s normal and totally reasonable to want to look good, it’s just that I think that pressures related to our society’s screwed-up relationship with food, and also some gender stuff, also come into play). Which I think we agree on in general, it may just be a difference of degree between how far you are willing to go vs. how far I am willing to go to achieve aesthetic, health, and fitness goals, which is reasonable.
For example I want to be physically fit (I’ve always wanted to run 5 miles in 45 minutes as a regular workout… at this point I can jog for the 45 minutes but I’m a lot slower than a 9-minute mile so I’m working on speed) but I don’t really have a burning desire to become a marathon runner or anything. At some point I want to settle into a food and exercise routine that will keep me healthy but not too obsessive–something I tend toward personality-wise–and just stay at that level. Others want to keep running farther, faster, harder and lift more and more weight, which is also great. I just like to examine my motivations for the changes I make (not all of them are good, some are weird body-image baggage or whatever) and the Tyra story touched a nerve for whatever reason.
v’ron, I can’t imagine dealing with constant scrutiny of my weight period, much less if I were an ex-MODEL. Yikes! I agree it must have been really hard for Tyra to deal with all that, and come to her own conclusions about how she wanted to handle it.
Oh–in answer to your question, yeah, I would eventually loosen up on my behavior (maybe not at WW goal but eventually). I feel like if one just keeps tightening down, eating less and “healthier,” exercising harder and harder and never being satisfied, then that way lies an eating disorder. For me anyway.
Hey spacedcowgirl, it’s been cool discussing this stuff with you. It’s cool that blogs like this exist where intelligent discussion can be had instead of flame and chaos.
You are so right; it is a fine line between desire and obsession. Fortunately you and I don’t have to deal with the spotlight, thank heaven (v’ron – I can’t imagine what that must be like), or I think it might make me less happy with where I am now.
I’m totally thrilled with how I look now. It’s such a huge improvement over the past that I really can’t complain. Of course I would not be sad if my tummy fat suddenly disappeared, but if I were to keep working out with the same intensity and never got any leaner, I would be completely satisfied. I guess part of that is being over 35 and married, but I really do feel happy with where I am, and it’s how I know there’s no disorder going on.
Also, like you, I can’t keep tightening down, cause I have to have a life. :) This current pace I’ve found is working well for me and fits in well with my lifestyle, but I can’t see loosening up much except on vacations or holidays cause I just slip so fast.
Best to you!
It sounds like you are in a great place (I think I get what you mean now by not “loosening up”–sounds like you want to be vigilant forever at your current high level of lifestyle and fitness and I definitely plan to strive to do the same once I reach goal, so I don’t think we disagree there).
I just checked out your SparkPeople. You look super (I would totally not have pegged you for over 35) and have some great goals and accomplishments there, and looks like an awesome healthy diet as well. Best to you as well, congrats on all you have achieved, and thanks for the food for thought.
What the hell? She couldn’t have put some time between the profat statement and her diet. Quietly slunk off in a year and lost the booty.
I dunno, I read in People last night that she was denying either gaining the 30 lbs to begin with, or losing it now. So make of that what you will.
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Someone already answered this perfectly. I’m about 90% sure that the trash talkers are FAT yourselves and jealous that she looked like you and changed back. Judging from that picture, she didn’t seem to be a healthy weight and decided to change her EATING and EXERCISE habits. There is nothing wrong with a little junk on the trunk, but don’t use some “fat” supermodel celebrity as your excuse to stay fat yourself. Embrace the positive change that she has and get off the couch watching yer oprah and eating bon bons.
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