ChaoticMusings

The final videos posted to Brittany Sauer’s TikTok page make for upsetting viewing. Speaking tearfully to the camera, the 31-stone social media star, who often posted defiantly ‘body-positive’ content about how ‘hot’ she felt in certain outfits, admitted with shocking candour that she had ‘ruined her life’ with food and binge eating.

And it had left her, aged just 28, full of regrets.

Brittany had been a virtual prisoner in her own home for two years, dealing with type 2 diabetes and repeated bouts of the skin infection cellulitis which had caused a growth in her pelvis weighing more than two stone. She had even been forced to ask someone else to cut her toenails, as it left her ‘too breathless’.

Yet she hoped, desperately, that it wasn’t too late to save herself. ‘I’m scared I’m going to end up in a bad place that my body can’t recover from,’ she said to her half-a-million TikTok followers. ‘I want you to know it’s not worth it – food isn’t worth your life.’

Within a week of posting the film last December, Brittany was dead.

Her death turns a spotlight on the controversial body positivity and ‘fat acceptance’ movements that have seduced Brittany and millions of vulnerable young people like her.

The past decade has seen extraordinary momentum building around a central argument that being obese doesn’t have to mean unhealthy. In other words, you can be fat and fit.

 Some say this so-called ‘body positive’ approach is also putting vulnerable young people at risk by failing to point out the unpalatable scientific truth: that obesity dramatically increases the risk of a wide range of chronic and life-limiting diseases