Adele's Weight Loss Praise Is A Prime Example Of What's Wrong With The Media
Today, May 6, is International No Diet Day. It’s the marked day of the year where we celebrate all things anti-diet. It also happens to have been the day that’s left countless fat people – women in particular – feeling a mixed bag of emotions as media outlets all over the globe have published articles about Adele’s weight loss. Alongside Lizzo, Adele has been a plus size icon in modern music, so to see streams of pictures of her dramatic weight loss plastered across various websites and publications invokes a certain kind of feeling. But this isn’t about Adele, or her weight loss – this is about the media’s response to it and why it’s so fucked up.
Before I go into it, I do firstly want to say that if you came across what felt like the unavoidable coverage today and find yourself feeling some type of way, please, please, please remember that you are beautiful, you are worthy, and you deserve to be celebrated. Right now, as you are, in the body that you’re in.
It all started when Adele posted on her Instagram for her 32nd birthday, thanking frontline and key workers for their service during the COVID-19 pandemic – but obviously, that wasn’t what press honed in on when it came to turning it into a headline. Articles popped up everywhere talking about how beautiful Adele is now, celebrating her visibly slimmer frame, and now the world is abuzz. Not about her music, not about her birthday, but about how much she now weighs. The artist behind the best selling album of the year four times in the space of a decade has been reduced to an “after” picture. It’s all wrong, and it’s damaging – not just to fans, or anyone who may have stumbled across one of these articles, but to Adele, too. It upholds the vile cultural narrative that someone who is slimmer is more valuable, or worthy of attention or praise. I’d like to think that the media fascination since her weight loss won’t go unnoticed for Adele, and she recognises what a problem this is within the industry.
The media fail to be held accountable for so many things – the perpetuation of diet culture and dangerous beauty ideals being just a part of it. Celebrating smaller bodies only – or the bigger bodies that have now become smaller ones – is no different, and reinforces the idea that with thinness comes beauty, or most importantly, worth. Weight does not determine beauty, and press field days like this suggest that the thinner you get, the prettier you get. To put it simply, their behaviour is one of the many reasons why we need body positivity.
Mentions of her upcoming album (which is rumoured to drop in September) were loosely mentioned in some articles, with some publications even implying that her weight loss will have helped make the record better. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but the last time I checked, being a thinner artist doesn’t actually make your music any better. Something tells me that losing a few pounds won’t make this woman’s music improve, when she was already arguably one of the best artists in existence. It’s important to remember that Adele is the same person regardless of her weight. She is no better a human being, nor is she more talented, more beautiful, or worthy of love or respect. The media should be ashamed of augmenting such ideals.
It’s sad that now – considering she’s sold 120million records, won 15 Grammys, 5 AMAs, an Oscar, a Golden Globe, plus 18 Billboard awards – the only Adele-related number the media care about now is the one printed in the back of her dress.
