Serena Williams, GLP-1s, and the Intersection of Weight Loss, Body Image, Anti-Fatness, and Racism

I woke up yesterday morning to a flurry of DMs with images and videos of Serena Williams talking about her recent weight loss and use of GLP-1s.

Several of the messages expressed frustration and disappointment, which at face value, I understand, but also, it’s so much more nuanced than that.

I had so many thoughts on the matter that I couldn’t hold off from writing them all down, opting instead to make a long winded TikTok about it. So if you prefer to stop reading here and listen to me wax poetic about the intersection of weight loss, body image, and racism, please watch below (and maybe skip to the 2nd half of the article for additional added context which was not discussed in the video). For everyone who prefers to read, skip the video and keep going. And for those who want to spend a lot of time with me, do both!

Before I go any further, I need to make one thing abundantly clear. No where in this article will I be shaming Serena Williams for her decision to use GLP-1s for weight loss, for the choices she has made for her body, nor will I be critiquing what her body looked like before weight loss or after.

And the reason for this is very simple: It’s actually not any of my business.

As I discussed in another article, “We Can’t Win in a Society That is Hyper Fixated on Commenting on Women’s Bodies”, it is never, and I repeat never, okay to comment on someone else's body or appearance. And yes, this includes celebrities and strangers on the internet.

I’m staunchly anti diet culture and anti fatphobia. I’m super clear on that, and my stance will never change. But I also staunchly believe in body autonomy, meaning that I fiercely believe in people’s right to make their own decisions about their own bodies, regardless of what those decisions are, and it’s not my place to pass judgment on the decisions of others. I’m not the morality police. However, I know Serena’s use of GLP-1s has garnered (and will continue to garner) lots of conversation and thought pieces. This is the nature of pop and celebrity culture. It’s always the talk of the town.

That being said, I do want to lend a few of my thoughts.

Speaking of her relationship with her weight, Serena said the following:

“I am a very good use case of how you can do everything — eat healthy, work out to the point of even playing a professional sport and getting to the finals of the Wimbledon and U.S. Opens — and still not be able to lose the weight….

This points back to the very common societally held belief that weight = health, specifically thinness = health. That regardless of the fact that she was performing well and training hard, she still wasn’t doing something right because her body wasn’t thin.

During a 6 minute segment on The Today Show, Serena Williams talks about her use of GLP-1s and her struggles with her weight over the years. But this one particular soundbite really resonated with me.

When we live in a society in which weight is attributed to “health”, you can be the most celebrated and decorated tennis player of all time, training 5 hours a day, and still be told you need to lose weight. Because winning isn’t enough. Being the best isn’t enough. None of that matters if your body isn’t small.

I often talk about the intersection of race and body image, and Serena is a prime example of this.

In an excerpt from The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom, I write:

At the intersection of both racism and sexism, few women have had their accomplishments overshadowed by discussion about their bodies more than Serena Williams has. Arguably the greatest tennis player of all time, Serena has had her career and achievements tainted by incessant rhetoric about her body. From her being called the N-word at tournaments to the constant hypersexuality of her physique, Williams’s body has been under persistent scrutiny when really it’s her skill as a tennis player that should be the talk of the town. And for good reason. Williams has won twenty-three singles Grand Slam titles (thirty-nine major titles overall) and four Olympic gold medals, spent 319 weeks as world number one, and holds a number of World Tennis Association records. She also holds the most combined Grand Slam titles in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles among active players. The woman is a badass. Period.

And yet, people want to harp on her body.

But it’s beyond just harping on her body. The scrutiny is intertwined with overt racism. Here are just a few of the tweets and comments that have been made about Williams over the years:

Today a giant gorilla escaped the zoo and won the women’s title at Wimbledon . . . oh that was Serena Williams? My mistake.

Serena Williams is a gorilla.

Earlier this week I said that all female tennis players were good looking. I was clearly mistaken: The Gorilla aka Serena Williams.

My god Serena Williams is ugly! She’s built like a silver backed gorilla.

I didn’t know apes were allowed in women’s tennis.

Yes, I realize the internet is a cruel place filled with trolls and their twitter fingers, but unfortunately Williams has faced this type of blatant racism at the hands of main-stream media too. In a 2013 article for Rolling Stone, Stephen Rodrick compared Williams to a fellow tennis player stating, “Sharapova is tall, white and blond, and, because of that, makes more money in endorsements than Serena, who is black, beautiful and built like one of those monster trucks that crushes Volkswagens at sports arenas.”

In 2001, Sid Rosenberg, a prominent sportscaster said that Serena and her sister Venus would be better off posing for National Geographic magazine than for Playboy, defending his comments as not racist but “just zoological.”

The way in which people have been fascinated with the size and shape of her body more than the breadth of her tennis skills goes back to the intersection of identity at which Black women reside—sexism and racism. Without her consent, Williams’s body has been put on display and discussed as if it’s an object that doesn’t belong to her.

So when you consider that Serena Willams has been in the public eye for nearly 30 years and that despite her accolades, she has continuously been on the receiving end of hateful comments about the size and shape of her body – likening it to a gorilla – are we really surprised that she chose intentional weight loss through the use of GLP-1s?

This is why I talk so often about the intersection of fatphobia and race.

How people feel about their bodies is not one dimensional. It’s never just about bodies. It’s about race. About colorism. About ableism. About homophobia and transphobia. About the way that Black women’s bodies have always been scrutinized.

For centuries Black women have been hypersexualized and denigrated because of their bodies. Most notable is Saartjie Baartman, referred to as the “Hottentot Venus.”Saartjie Baartman, due to her large buttocks, was paraded around Europe and put on display in freak shows. Her body was literally put on display for objectification. Even following her death, parts of her body were displayed in a Paris museum to support racist theories about people of African ancestry.

And god forbid, a Black woman not be thin. She will be berated when she’s fat and denigrated when she loses weight — look no further than Lizzo for an example of this.

You can’t win because the reality is that people devalue folks in larger bodies.

Our cultural obsession with thinness, our desire to be thin—no matter the cost—and our incessant desire to pursue that as the status quo stems from the fact that diet culture is heavily rooted in racism and white supremacy. As Sabrina Strings, PhD, discusses in her book, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Black people have historically, and intentionally, been linked with fatness dating as far back as the nineteenth century. “One of the things that the colonists believed was that Black people were inherently more sensuous, people that love sex and they love food, and so the idea was that Black people had more venereal diseases and that Black people were inherently obese because they lack self-control,” Strings said in an interview. “And of course, self-control and rationality, after the Enlightenment, were characteristics that were deemed integral to whiteness.”

Over time, this connection between Black people and gluttony has become internalized and upheld, making diet culture’s rejection of larger bodies inherently racist, argues Strings. Connecting fatness to Blackness was a way to not only justify slavery but also deem Black people as inferior to white people. Anti-fat bias and fatphobia are inextricably tied to racism, and even if we don’t know or understand the history, our participation in the system is still participation in white supremacy. As Strings said, “We cannot deny the fact that fat-phobia is rooted in anti-Blackness. That’s simply an historical reality. Today, when people talk about it, they often claim that they don’t intend to be anti-Black . . . they don’t intend all of these negative associations, and yet they exist already, so whenever people start trafficking in fatphobia, they are inherently picking up on these historical forms of oppression.”

Whether we consciously realize it or not, we’ve all been influenced by diet culture and racism, but the fact that fatphobia has its roots in racism means that the impact of diet culture for those living in Black, larger bodies is even greater. No amount of self-love changes that, and no amount of self-love saves people from the consequences of living in a marginalized body.

Eurocentric standards of beauty have made it difficult for all of us to simply exist in our bodies. Now imagine if your body (and your insecurities) are on full display for the world to scrutinize incessantly. While some may say that prior to weight loss, Serena wasn’t in a larger body, that’s subjective, and being repeatedly called a gorilla isn’t coincidental.

And we can’t make a Black woman the scapegoat for a system that was intentionally created to harm people, Black people in particular. Blame the system of white supremacy, not a Black woman. Make your critiques against the system, against capitalism, against diet culture — all the things the fuel this rhetoric.

What all of this makes me think about is just how hard it is to just exist in a body, especially a Black body.

But regardless of race, as long as society deems being fat as a moral failing and thinness as a symbol of “health’, it will continue to be difficult for all of us to simply exist and even more difficult to actually be at peace with our bodies.

The conversation around Serena’s endorsements of GLP-1s is indeed nuanced. Because despite everything that I just said, I do understand why this brings up difficult feelings for people, especially for individuals who have a difficult relationship with their own bodies. I empathize with people feeling disheartened or perhaps frustrated. Managing the changing media landscape — the fact that thinness is trending again — has been difficult. In many ways, it feels like we are fully back in 2000s-era anti-fatness, which makes it even more difficult to remember that all bodies are created differently, and maybe, just maybe, we aren’t all supposed to be thin. Maybe it’s possible for a person work out and train hard and eat well and never achieve a thin body.

Our relationships with our bodies don’t exist in a vacuum and the influx of weight loss marketing and content is working overtime to keep us dissatisfied and distracted. Untangling ourselves from the grips of diet culture, especially in the age of social media, is no easy feat and celebrities embracing GLP-1s for intentional weight loss certainly doesn’t make it easier.

That being said, while I don’t personally endorse the use of GLP-1s for intentional weight loss, I also won’t shame anyone for their choices because ultimately, living in a body is hard and for folks with multiple, intersecting marginalized identities, it’s even more difficult.

Do I think that celebrity endorsements of GLP-1s could be harmful, especially to the fat positive and body liberation communities? Absolutely.

Do I think that this endorsement of GLP-1s could be marketing to people’s insecurities for profit (the very crux of diet culture)? Undeniably.

Do I see a problem with Serena Williams endorsing and advertising a weight loss drug for a company in which her husband is on the board of directors and an investor? Certainly.

Do I think there are potentially dangerous side effects of using GLP-1s for intentional weight loss? Without a doubt. (by the way, there are currently over 2100 major lawsuits pending against GLP-1 brands)

Does that take away from the way that racism and anti-fatness has affected Serena Williams on and off the court? No. Not at all.

Thank you so much for reading The Liberation Collective. I’m eternally grateful to have you here. You can also follow along on Instagram and TikTok. And if you want to partner with me, you can email me at info@chrissyking.com

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