You’d need to be living under a rock if you haven’t come across the Wicked press tour by now. It’s been everywhere — I can’t open TikTok or Instagram without seeing another viral moment. Yet alongside the memes of Ariana Grande holding Cynthia Erivo’s lone green fingernail and the endless teary interviews, another conversation is taking place. In TikTok comments, blind items and even tabloid headlines, everyone is talking about the Wicked co-stars’ weight.
My social media feed is filled with blind items, before-and-after photos, and worries that the stars are unhealthy and that “something must’ve happened on set”.
And based on the coverage, I’m not the only one.
It would be disingenuous to call this simply gossip. In my experience, people seem genuinely concerned about Grande and Erivo. It’s why I was hesitant to give this conversation even more airtime: talking about people’s bodies doesn’t help anyone — even if it’s coming from a place of worry.
As someone who has lived experience with an eating disorder, I can confidently tell you that comments about your body, whether they’re saying, “You look great” or “You don’t look well”, never helped. Instead, I became more obsessed with how I looked and what I ate around others, and it felt like my entire identity was based on how much I weighed.
When I was at my lowest, I would receive comments saying a specific part of my body “stuck out too much” or that I looked “frail.” At that time, those comments validated my disordered eating habits, and I fell further into the spiral. Even today, there are parts of my body that I shudder at purely because of my past fixation with them, driven by other people’s comments.
At one point, my identity was solely dependent on what my body looked like. Gaining or losing weight at the time felt like shedding my identity and having to become a completely different person.
It felt like every conversation I had with those closest to me began with “Varsha, you’re not eating enough”, “Varsha never eats”, “Varsha, I’m so glad you’re eating”, “wow, Varsha, never thought I’d see you eat that again”, or “Varsha, you look so much healthier”.
I was so self-conscious about eating; I remember hiding my lunch at school, being terrified of large family dinners, and I began binging at night. Words like “healthy” and “better” became conflated with my internalised fatphobia and fuelled my eating disorder like nothing else.
It has taken me years to recover from this, and I still struggle. At large gatherings with people I haven’t seen in a long time, I hear those comments.
“Wow, last time I saw you, you never ate that.”
“You look so much better and healthier now.”
Rebecca Boswell, PhD, a supervising psychologist at the Princeton Center for Eating Disorders at Penn Medicine Princeton Health, told Women’s Health, “Public commentary on bodies reinforces the idea that physical appearance is the most important aspect of how a person is perceived and evaluated.” This leads to people “devaluing their many other traits and roles”.
I want to be known for more than how much I weigh. I want to be known for my qualities, the work I do, and the things and people I love.
Instead of talking about the remarkable achievements of these women — Grande was named by Rolling Stone as one of the top 50 singers of all time, Erivo is one win away from an EGOT, and together they’ve created a box office record-setting movie — we’re talking about their bodies.
I also want to be clear: regardless of our intention and perception of these women, this is body shaming.
It’s vital to note here that neither Grande or Erivo have addressed the conversation currently happening all around them. However, when conversations around Grande’s apparent weight loss were circulating last year, the singer and actor jumped on TikTok to ask people to kindly put them to rest.
“I think we should be gentler and less comfortable commenting on people’s bodies, no matter what,” she said.
“If you think you’re saying something good or well-intentioned, whatever it is. healthy or unhealthy, big, small…we should really work towards not doing that as much.”
She added: “Even if you are coming from a loving place and a caring place, that person probably is working on it or has a support system that they are working on it with.”
While the media may feed our desire to gossip and theorise about celebrities’ bodies, I know that each comment we make, whether to our friends or under a TikTok, has the power to perpetuate or change our dialogue around people’s bodies more broadly, impacting each of us.
Perhaps it’s time to listen to Ariana, stop commenting, and scroll on.
