Elizabeth Berrett
Weight is a hugely personal thing, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t still widely discussed. And when weight loss shows up in public—on a red carpet, in a magazine shoot, or in a comment section—people too often treat it like a riddle they’re entitled to solve, aloud, with zero consequences.
This is particularly true of celebrities – because they’re in the public eye, there’s often an assumption they’re ‘fair game’ to talk about. Which is how Davina McCall recently found herself explaining not a new project, but her body, after speaking to Women’s Health magazine about her divorce and the changes that followed.
“It happens to so many people I know. It was nothing I did. I was just running on adrenaline,” she says. “Quite a few people (understood) and were like, ‘I think she’s having a hard time, maybe we should lay off.’
“But there were lots of people who didn’t. There are some really mean people out there and there are also some very uninformed people who don’t think about the story behind the sadness.”
The “story behind the sadness” is the part the internet never waits for. It prefers the shortcut: praise, suspicion, judgement—sometimes all three in the same breath. Yet bodies don’t operate on gossip; they operate on hormones, inflammation, appetite signals, sleep debt, medication effects, and the sort of life events that don’t arrive with a press release.
The biology the comment section ignores
McCall was judged by some for her weight loss, which Dr Deborah Lee from Dr Fox Online says “probably happened as a result of her real-life biochemistry, and the world would do well to try and understand this, and not point fingers. After all, this is only likely to make things worse and can only add to her stress and increase the risk of a serious poor health outcome.”
That’s the detail worth sitting with: judgement doesn’t just sting emotionally—it can compound stress, nudge behaviour, and worsen health trajectories. The modern habit of narrating other people’s bodies has a very real downside, particularly when weight change is unintentional, medically driven, or psychologically fraught.
And if you need a grim reminder of how badly we can misread the signs, it’s hard to top what happened around Chadwick Boseman.
After it was announced that Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman had died from colon cancer, a tweet from Jordan Sumbu went viral, reading: “Chadwick Boseman was relentlessly castigated over his drastic weight loss to the point where he had to delete pictures and turn off comments on IG [Instagram]. Let this be a lesson to be please be mindful about your words & judgements. You don’t know what type of battle people are fighting.”
The lesson isn’t subtle. We just keep failing it.
Hidden reason #1: Stress
Stress is an expert shapeshifter. For some, it drives comfort eating and weight gain. For others, it shuts appetite down, disrupts digestion, and leaves the body running on fumes. Either way, it’s not a moral tale—it’s physiology.
“Chronic stress has numerous negative effects on health,” explains Lee, as it can cause “alterations in the levels of many different hormones.” Other potential physiological side effects include “raised blood pressure and irregular menstrual cycles,” she says, noting “some of these changes directly affect body weight.”
Lee continues: “Stress has many specific effects on the gut itself. It’s been shown to affect appetite. Autonomic function [your body’s unconscious functions] is stimulated by stress, which can affect gastric emptying, gastric transit time and absorption of food through the gut wall.
“Stress stimulates the immune system, and as the gut wall is full of clumps of immune tissue, this can cause an increase in gut wall inflammation. Stress can also affect water absorption from the bowel. Many people for example with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), find their symptoms flare up with acute stress. This can then affect their eating patterns and general wellbeing, and can result in either weight loss or weight gain.”
Read that again: stress can change the gut, appetite, inflammation, absorption—then eating patterns—then weight. So when someone looks “different,” the most sensible response isn’t a diagnosis delivered via emojis. It’s restraint.
Hidden reason #2: Cancer
“Unexplained weight loss is a recognised symptom of many different types of cancer,” says Lee. “For the person going through it, this is an extremely anxious time, and they need support and understanding from everyone around them.”
The medical term is cachexia, and Lee explains: “Patients with cachexia report wanting to eat and knowing they should eat, but being physically unable to do this. Some say they feel full quickly at mealtimes, or that physically swallowing food makes them feel sick. Sometimes they may have added problems such as a sore mouth, or mouth ulcers, making chewing food very unpleasant.”
Unfortunately, cachexia is often a “biochemical and physiological outcome of the cancer process,” says Lee. “It is not something the sufferer has any control over, and is exceedingly difficult to treat.”
The NHS recommends seeing your GP if you have unintentionally lost 5% of your body weight in 6-12 months. Lee says: “People either don’t realise their symptoms are serious or don’t want to waste the doctor’s time. Raising awareness of the importance of early symptoms that may indicate cancer, for example, unexplained weight loss, is important.”
3. Eating disorders
Sometimes unexplained weight loss isn’t a lifestyle flex or a new routine. Sometimes it’s a symptom—one that arrives quietly, long before certainty does. In those moments, what people need is support, not commentary.
“Unexplained weight loss is a recognised symptom of many different types of cancer,” says Lee. “For the person going through it, this is an extremely anxious time, and they need support and understanding from everyone around them.”
The medical term is cachexia, and Lee explains: “Patients with cachexia report wanting to eat and knowing they should eat, but being physically unable to do this. Some say they feel full quickly at mealtimes, or that physically swallowing food makes them feel sick. Sometimes they may have added problems such as a sore mouth, or mouth ulcers, making chewing food very unpleasant.”
Unfortunately, cachexia is often a “biochemical and physiological outcome of the cancer process,” says Lee. “It is not something the sufferer has any control over, and is exceedingly difficult to treat.”
There’s also a practical, unglamorous point here—one that gets drowned out by “before and after” culture. The NHS recommends seeing your GP if you have unintentionally lost 5% of your body weight in 6-12 months. Lee says: “People either don’t realise their symptoms are serious or don’t want to waste the doctor’s time. Raising awareness of the importance of early symptoms that may indicate cancer, for example, unexplained weight loss, is important.”
In other words: if weight change is unplanned and persistent, it’s worth checking—not celebrating, criticising, or crowdsourcing.
Hidden reason #3: Eating disorders
If stress is complicated and cancer is frightening, eating disorders are often both—plus secrecy, shame, and misunderstanding. Which makes public judgement not merely rude, but risky.
“Far from helping people lose weight, stigmatising weight gain only increases unhealthy eating patterns and increases weight gain further,” says Lee. “As stigma increases, obese adults report more binge eating, more disrupted eating behaviours, and can develop more eating disorders.”
She says we need to “regard obesity in a much more empathetic and positive light,” particularly as there are so many genetic abnormalities that can contribute to weight gain and obesity.
The point isn’t to police language for the sake of politeness. It’s to avoid doing harm while pretending it’s curiosity. People can be sick, grieving, stressed, medicated, recovering, relapsing, coping, barely coping—often in ways that don’t show up in a photo until they do.
What we should take from this
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we’ve normalised treating bodies like public property. But every time we turn weight loss into entertainment—or weight gain into a punchline—we’re gambling with someone else’s health, and calling it “just an opinion.”
If there’s a grown-up response to all of this, it’s wonderfully boring: keep your guesses to yourself, offer kindness when it’s appropriate, and remember that a changing body can be a sign of change everywhere else, too—biological, psychological, and painfully human.
