Global Courant
A woman who went from a size 18 to a size 6 shared some of the unusual and unexpected effects of losing weight, including experiencing “skinny privilege.”
Meg Stier, an actress and motivational speaker based in New York, is about body acceptance and body neutrality in quite a few of hers TikTok Videos for her 463,000 followers. She avoids diet or exercise advice and instead, when she talks about her weight loss, she talks more about the reactions she’s been getting from people since she lost weight.
“I’ve been somewhere between a size 18 and a size 6 in my life,” she said in one video. When she turned size six, Taurus noticed several changes. “People look me straight in the eye when they talk to me,” she said. ‘Now I can buy clothes in my size in every store. When I speak, people listen more.”
As an actress and speaker, Taurus also said she believes her career took off when she lost weight.
“I didn’t suddenly become more talented, smarter or better at my job,” she said. “I just looked different.”
Taurus said her lifestyle barely changed, but as a size 6, she felt less judgmental about ordering food — whether it was a cheeseburger or a salad — and hit the gym.
‘There is a serious prejudice against fat people, and unless you’ve lived on both ends of the spectrum, it’s hard to fully understand what that means,” she added. “Mean privilege is a thing, and I find myself abusing it.”
Cora Harrington, a writer, summed it up the idea of meager privilege like: being able to live your life without your weight or size making it harder for you.
“It doesn’t mean your life is easy or that no one ever made fun of your looks or that you can find everything you want at your local Target,” she said. continued. “It means that societal discrimination and prejudice are not directed at you because you are thin. It means that your weight/body type is considered ‘normal’.”
Skinny privilege goes deeper than getting or finding more eye contact clothes also in the shop, for example in healthcare can be weight oriented.
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“Weight bias harms everyone across the size spectrum,” wrote Lindo Bacon, nutritionist, researcher, and author the 2010 book Health at Every Size. “As long as it is more difficult to live in a fat body, everyone is afraid of getting fat.”
“There was nothing wrong with me when I was a size 18 and nothing wrong with me when I was a size 6,” Taurus said. in another video. “Meager privilege is one thing. People started to respect me a lot more when I lost weight – which is just disgusting.
Taurus is far from alone in expressing her “disgust” at skinny privilege after losing weight. The hashtag “skinny privilege” has been viewed more than 11 million times on TikTok and many users are sharing their own experiences of losing weight and being treated differently.
“Skinny privilege is real,” Kelsey, a mom of three who lost 85 pounds, said on her TikTok. “Before you come up to me and think, ‘Girl, it’s not real, it’s your energy, it’s your confidence, you’re just more confident now.’ No. Immediately no.”
Another thing that appealed to Taurus was that her weight loss is seemingly the only thing people want to talk to her about. In a recent video, she shared an original poem about all those conversations. In the caption, she wrote, “I didn’t say ‘Thank you,'” in response to people telling her she looks “really skinny.”
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