Weight Loss ‘Before-and-After’ Images Are Not Inspiring — They’re Dangerous
By: Kellee Rich
Tags: Health, Society, Equality, Mental Health, Self

As a teenager, I pored over the ‘before-and-after’ images of weight loss in my mother’s magazines. They’d be splashed across the cover of every kind of periodical that was aimed at women, enticing them to part with hard-come-by cash with the promise of revealing The Magic Secret of how they, too, could transform. Some of these magazines were cheap, their flimsy covers soaked in coarse-coloured photographs and attention-grabbing headlines. Some were expensive: glossy, heavy paper-stock displaying pastel mastheads in refined fonts.

But they were all selling the same thing: some variation of the story about how a 300-pound woman had taken up a famous weight-loss plan and had ‘slimmed down’ to 110 pounds.

I would flip straight to the story and stare at those side-by-side photos, fascinated. In one picture, the woman would often look sheepish or embarrassed, the experience of being captured for posterity clearly mortifying. (She would have had no idea at the time it was taken that this would become her ‘before’ photograph. Had she known, she would have arched her body to hide some of its size, or pull at the hem of her top to cover more of what she carried.) If she were smiling, it would be a forced, pained look, as though someone had pressured her to pose and she’d been too polite, too lacking in power, to say no.

The ‘after’ shot was another story. The woman would appear ebullient, victorious, a broad smile lighting up her entire face. Her hairstyle would be more modern, more traditionally ‘feminine’; she would be wearing make-up and fashionable, figure-hugging clothes, possibly a tight dress with a belt cinching her in, emphasising her newly-small waist. Or she would be standing inside a pair of trousers that were now clearly too big, holding out the waistband with both hands and looking into the camera with a slightly raised brow, as if to say directly to us, “Can you believe these used to fit me?!” The articles would then expound on how all the woman had had to do was realise that the secret — The Magic Secret — was that you have to burn more calories than you intake. Ha! That’s all there is to it!

The articles would then expound on how all the woman had had to do was realise that the secret — The Magic Secret — was that you have to burn more calories than you intake. Ha! That’s all there is to it!

She wished she had known it twenty years earlier! She wished she had started calculating every ounce of what she had ingested and expended decades ago! She wished she had stepped on those scales every morning to measure how good or bad she’d been, and had always weighed her food, scooping back into the bag even a single excess gram. She wished she hadn’t been so naughty as to eat that extra slice of cake at the office birthday party. She wished she could have posed for more photographs with her children on holidays, at family get-togethers, at their birthday parties, instead of making herself busy when the camera was brought out. She was absent from the documentation of her own life because she hated the way her body looked.

At that age, I found the photographs inspiring, aspirational even. I have always lived in a larger body, though it has always fluctuated along that axis, sometimes parking at the small end for a while, sometimes the larger end, then back again. In my early teens, I felt my difference the most. I wanted to be effortlessly thin and attractive like the most popular girls at school, though I would have never admitted that to anyone. So I took comfort in these magazines, selling to me as they were the dream that I was an after waiting to happen.

I skimmed the copy in most of those stories, though. The self-hatred tasted too sour, too close to home. I didn’t want to know what this woman thought, or how she felt, and the magazine mostly took care of that inconvenience for me by offering no meaningful details about the woman’s life beyond her looks.

Was she a doctor? The article didn’t say. Had she overcome grief or trauma at a young age and was now a successful entrepreneur? We weren’t told. Had she raised thousands for charity and fundraised enough to open a school for local underprivileged children? There wasn’t enough space for that. And if you wanted to know such details, you were missing the point. There was plenty of room for an in-page advertisement about the famous weight loss plan the woman had followed in order to ‘shed those pounds’, but there wasn’t room to tell us about her daughter’s illness, or her partner’s alcoholism.

I read those articles in the 1990s. Though the facets that made the woman whole were explained in meagre details, back then it would have been considered uncouth to publish only the photographs; there had to be some text to accompany them, otherwise the whole thing would have seemed superficial, indecent, dehumanising.

A Century of the Same Old Message

But of course, weight loss before-and-afters did not start in the 1990s.

Magazines had been available to the general population — or at least, to those who could read, and were able to afford them —from the late 1600s. However, the first illustrated magazine — The Illustrated London News — wasn’t published until 1842. Weight loss tinctures and potions had been advertised for a number of years by then, but illustrations made the message of those advertisements much more generally accessible; even those who were not able to read would pick up on the message represented by an illustration of a large silhouette on the left side of the advert, and a significantly smaller one on the right.

The earliest before-and-after advertisement I found was from the March to August 1925 edition of Picture Play Magazine.

The ad is for ‘La-Mar Reducing Soap’ and features an illustration of three women standing on descending steps on a staircase, each progressively thinner. The headline reads, ‘Wash away fat and years of age with La-Mar Reducing Soap’. The soap claims to reduce the size of targeted areas without affecting other parts of the body, so that the user can get rid of the famously disgusting curses of ‘ungainly ankles’ or ‘unbecoming wrists’.

This type of before-and-after illustrated ad continued to appear in magazines throughout the 1920s. Cigarette brands had already been advertising their products as weight loss aids for years by the time the Kensitas cigarette brand bought ad-space for its own before-and-after illustrated adverts. In them, they extolled the virtues of smoking their cigarettes instead of eating between meals, because, ‘It’s better to be fit than fat’.

Then in the early 1930s, Lucky Strike launched its ‘Tempted to Over-Indulge’ campaign. They used full-colour, beautifully illustrated pieces to sell the idea that it was better to smoke than to ‘over-indulge’. Their ads featured either a man or woman, each straight-sized, participating in tennis, or diving, or horse riding, while behind them poses the larger silhouette of what we are to assume is the same person before they started smoking Lucky Strikes instead of snacking.

Not much has changed in the style of these adverts over the years. Photography started to overtake hand drawn illustrations in the middle of the twentieth century, but the template stayed much the same.

They’re still around today for one reason: they’re effective.

Of course, it’s not only print media that’s to blame for our preoccupation with transformation from fat to thin. Television has played its part, too.

One of the first major transformation reality shows was ABC’s Extreme Makeover (2002–2007). Contestants were separated from their family and friends and put through rigorous physical training, cosmetic surgery and wardrobe makeovers in order to make them meet more closely contemporaneous beauty standards.

Though much of the show focused on the details of the contestant’s cosmetic dental surgery, or rhinoplasty, or lip enhancement, the main pull was the ‘reveal’. Participants would be reintroduced to their families, who waited on the other side of a curtain with cameras already closed-up on their faces in anticipation of the moment their unrecognisable relative would emerge heavily made-up and styled, and now meeting all the requisite ideals of what attractive womanhood looks like.

FOX’s The Swan (2004) took the premise of Extreme Makeover and went even further — it turned the whole ordeal into a competition. Two women were pitted against one another every episode, each competing for the most significant ‘improvement’. At the end of the season, episode winners would then take part in a pageant wherein one of them would be crowned ‘The Swan’. So, not only were their faces and bodies nipped and tucked and pulled and stretched, the notion that this physical pain would release them from societal judgement wasn’t even true: they were still going to be judged, and could therefore still lose.

When the UK version of The Biggest Loser first aired in 2005, I remember wondering: who is this for?

In the same year, NBC’s The Biggest Loser debuted, and became undoubtedly the most famous weight-loss TV show ever. (Though it started in the US, it would go on to be franchised to over thirty-seven other territories around the world.) From its mocking title to the name-calling and ‘tough love’ tactics used by the show’s trainers each week, the whole programme seemed to be an exercise in shame and humiliation.

When the UK version first aired in 2005, I remember wondering: who is this for? Is it for thin people who enjoy watching fat people be condescended to and defamed in a legitimised context, allowing them to indulge in their own prejudice against people in larger bodies from the anonymity of their living rooms? Is it for fat people, so that they can watch avatars of themselves on screen and relive the vilification and opprobrium that they have likely experienced from anyone in the fitness industry when they have tried to enter that space, only to be harassed back out of it? I don’t remember what I concluded; likely it was: both.

The Internet: The Magazine that Never Ends

Fast-forward to 2020 and we have the internet, the magazine that never ends. The one you can never leave on the cluttered table in the dentist’s office, or avoid the ads of, as they flash in the sidebar of any article you might be reading. Given that, according to a study by the app RescueTime in 2019 reported in The Guardian, the average adult spends 3 hours and 15 minutes a day online, the chances of us seeing before-and-after photos is so much higher than in the days where we would make a conscious decision to pick up a magazine and flip through it.

Given that the average adult spends 3 hours and 15 minutes a day online, the chances of us seeing before-and-after photos is so much higher than in the days where we would make a conscious decision to pick up a magazine and flip through it.

And if we want to actively seek them out, we only need to click a couple of times to do so. Social media has moved the formation of these images from the creative department of advertising agencies to the well-lit homes of individuals with smartphones.

On Instagram alone, searching for the ‘fitspo’ (‘fit inspiration’) hashtag — at time of writing — returns the following results, many of which are accompanied by before-and-after images:

Screenshot by author, October 8th 2020

That’s almost 72 million examples of how to change a body. How to make a body smaller, more muscled, leaner, tighter, more conventionally attractive, hotter, sexier, more plainly desirable. How to make a body disappear.

What do we see when we scroll through such hashtag results? There is a protocol to follow to perfectly capture one’s transformation, the language of social media having been soaked into all of our bones by now. The images we see are mostly of young women (though there are many young men, too) in dimly lit bathrooms, standing side-on, holding their phone up at shoulder height to snap a ‘before’ photo of themselves in their underwear. This is then juxtaposed with an image of their same body, only now it’s shrunken, pulled in, posed in the right way. Initiation into the club is complete.

(On the subject of social media, there isn’t enough room in this article to delve into the perpetuation of diet culture in the guise of ‘clean eating’, ‘wellness’, ‘strong not skinny’, and every other fad and coded descriptor for what is essentially the desire to make our bodies — through blood, sweat and tears — look like the version of it we’re conditioned to believe is the only acceptable sort.)

And Back Again: After the After

As if this phenomenon needed a dark side, ‘reverse transformations’ are their own special brand of cruelty. We see paparazzi shots of previously straight-sized celebrities eating brunch with friends or walking down the street living in a larger body than they previously had, accompanied by headlines about how they’ve ‘let themselves go’, or ‘can’t shift the baby weight’.

Not only are these descriptions misogynistic, they speak to the enormous expectations put on women to maintain the same physical appearance throughout their lives, something that is not naturally possible. Hormone fluctuations, childbirth, illness, periods of increased sedentariness or activity will all alter our bodies, and we may not necessarily be in control of any of those factors.

The Dangers of Weight Loss Images

It might be easy to dismiss before-and-after images as a bit of fun, or a snapshot of someone’s perceived success that we can move on from the second after we’ve seen it. But those pictures leave an afterimage.

The proliferation of before-and-after images is dangerous for so many reasons:

They can be dangerous for those living with eating disorders, of any classification, and those who are in recovery from eating disorders

The pressure to look like an ‘after’ photo can lead to exercise addiction

They delegitimise the larger body as an entity in itself — fat people are seen as a transformation waiting to happen, an ‘after’ photo in the making; as though the very vessels that we live and breathe in are an unfinished project waiting to be completed

They dehumanise people in larger bodies, making their ‘fat’ seem like something to be treated as other, not a part of their wholeness

They perpetuate the myth that the body exists for the benefit and judgement of other people

They perpetuate body standard conditioning, the origin of which lays in the male gaze

They gamify a body, making its existence about numbers and goals and achieving targets

They turn exercise into a means to an end, rather than a pleasurable experience to help maintain health

They suggest that the only thing stopping a person from becoming thin is willpower — even though willpower doesn’t exist

They suggest that every body can be changed and made smaller, not taking into account genetics, or a whole host of privileges that would allow that to be possible

They encourage comparison and competition

They perpetuate the myth of ‘thin = healthy’, though we aren’t able to know the actual health of the person in the photograph

They minimise non-physical achievements, and suggest that changes to appearance are the ultimate accomplishment

They direct all our focus to our bodies and away from our mental health

They are not able to account for any harmful mental health effects of that person’s weight loss

They are not able to account for any harmful physical effects of that person’s weight loss

They normalise thinness as the ultimate life goal

They might just plain make us feel bad about our own bodies, which has a knock-on effect to our mental health

They influence others to create their before-and-after shots

There are many more dangers to this phenomenon, and I’m sure you can already think of several that I’ve missed from this list.

There Is Always Another Way

Nothing I’ve written so far is an argument against health. Just as it’s a misconception that being thin automatically equates to good health, it’s another misconception that fat activists want everybody else to be fat, too. As I wrote in a previous article on the topic of diet culture, fat people don’t care whether you’re fat or thin. We just wanted everyone, no matter what their body looks like or what it’s capable of, to be treated with dignity and respect.

Just as it’s a misconception that being thin automatically equates to good health, it’s another misconception that fat activists want everybody else to be fat, too.

Thankfully, there are many people who work every day to expand society’s narrow definition of what health is and what it looks like.

Lindo Bacon, researcher, and author of ‘Health At Every Size’ (also referred to as HAES) advocates for an inclusive approach to health that includes all weights, sizes and bodies.

Louise Green, athlete, and author of ‘Big Fit Girl’ advocates for inclusivity in fitness and sport, for bodies of all sizes and abilities, and works to spread the word that you don’t have to be thin to be athletic.

What Could More Meaningful Transformation Look Like?

There will be those who continue to argue that before-and-after photographs are harmless because they’re effective. That they give people something to aspire to.

Which begs the question: is that really all we’re capable of? As human beings, with so little time on this earth, is the most significant transformation we can imagine losing weight? I don’t think so. I believe you and I are capable of so much more than that. What if we transformed from being a mean-spirited, cynical person to a generous and kind one?

As human beings, with so little time on this earth, is the most significant transformation we can imagine losing weight?

What if we railed against diet culture in all its forms, and — while we’re at it — any kind of social conditioning that works to make us conform to a white, cis, hetero, thin, able-bodied, archetype? What if we fought ableism and demanded access for every body? What if we were actively anti-racist? What if we became vocal allies with our LGBTQIA+ siblings?

What if we recognised our sphere of influence — our friends and families, our social media followers — and used our platforms and our privilege to speak up for people who have less of a voice than we do?

What if we ran for local office based on the principles of equality, anti-discrimination and fair access?

Imagine how much more meaningful, how much more significant and transformative those things would be —not only for ourselves, but for everybody else, too.

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To read my other articles about diet culture and fatphobia, click here, here and here. You can find me elsewhere by going to www.richtext.co.uk/links