GUYS ON THIN ICE
No ♥ for men only lured by loss of weight
Think you’ve got a shot with these curvy girls just because they’ve lost weight? Fat chance.
Brooklyn Kennedy’s jaw nearly hit the floor in late 2022 when she received a flirty direct message on Instagram. It came from one of her hottest, most popular former high-school classmates.
Back then, she was a plump theater geek and he was a ripped jock on the football team who wouldn’t give her the time of day. Then she dropped 140 pounds after undergoing weight loss surgery in March of last year.
But rather than feeling flattered by his sudden interest, she was grossed out.
“It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I got creepy crawlies all over my body,” Kennedy, 26, an actress living in Brooklyn, told The Post. “He had literally written me off in school, but now he’s hitting on me years later because I’m smaller?
“I was awesome and beautiful then, too. My weight shouldn’t have mattered,” the Colorado native argued. “The fatphobia is unreal.”
She tearfully aired her grievances against the would-be Romeo, as well as other men from her past, on TikTok, publicly reprimanding the dudes for failing to appreciate her inner and outer beauty until she became slimmer.
“To think that people truly have written me off because of my size makes me feel gross,” she said. The video gathered a whopping 417,800 eyes on the app and an additional 10.2 million views when it was reposted to X, née Twitter.
Heavy burden
Antagonists body-shamed Kennedy and told her to deal with the “reality” that fat people are “less attractive.”
She continued in the clip: “I don’t want anything to do with people who love like that. I don’t know any other kind of love besides unconditional love.”
Unfortunately, despite the recent body positivity movement — led by 35-year-old A-list advocates Lizzo and Ashley Graham — folks are still limiting their love to the thin and trim worldwide.
A March 2019 study on gender differences in body evaluation by the Institute of Psychology in Osnabrück, Germany, found men have a tendency to “devalue non-ideal bodies and upvalue ideal bodies.” Analysts from Durham University in the UK uncovered a correlation between male attraction to thinner women and incessant TV watching that same year.
In December 2015, researchers at the University of Toronto determined women hoping to lose weight need to shed approximately 14 to 18 pounds — specifically from their faces — in order to be found more attractive by the opposite sex.
Hope Schwinghamer, 25, who once weighed in at 214 pounds, told The Post that she gets “the ick” every time a former bully asks her for a date now that she’s cut 70 pounds of excess fat.
Blocking out haters
“Guys would literally tell me to end my life and say I looked like a whale, or if they saw me eating they’d be like, ‘You need to stop,’ ” said Schwinghamer, a fitness content creator from Los Angeles. “Now, those same vicious men are trying to get with me.
“Men sexualize my body rather than praise me for the hard work I put in to losing weight,” she griped, adding, “It’s sad and embarrassing that they’re so shallow.” Kennedy agrees. “Hitting on someone only when they lose weight is not about having a physical preference,” she said. “If dating a fat person is not an option [unless they become thinner], that’s intolerance. It’s hatred.”