Singer Adele Loses Weight To Become Skinny

Bad news for anyone who feels comforted by the sight of a celebrity larger than a size 8: Adele got skinny as hell. After months of largely staying out of the public eye and years of not releasing any new music, Adele posted a photo on Instagram for her 32nd birthday; it was a post thanking folks for the birthday wishes and a shoutout to frontline workers, but it also showed off her noticeably thinner body.

Photos of a thinner Adele first surfaced last October, when she went to Drake’s birthday party and indeed looked like a completely different person. “I used to cry,” she wrote on Instagram then, “but now I sweat.” It was a supposed nod to just how much she’s been exercising. She also apparently told a fan in January that she had lost around 100 pounds.

The discourse around Adele’s weight loss — without her really saying a single public word about it — is already kind of unsavory. Some people are cheering for her, as if her Oscar and 15 Grammys and multiple world records aren’t enough for her to feel like a success. Her weight loss, any way you cut it, pales in comparison to the other things she’s done in the first three decades of her life, yet it’s being framed like the most incredible thing she’s done in recent memory.

Conversely, there are plenty of people who feel a little mournful about her weight loss since Adele was a hero for fat (or otherwise non-thin) people. She proved you could be successful at a larger size without that weight defining your personal narrative. (It also helped, of course, that she’s white and conventionally attractive and, even at her largest, was not that fat.) Her success doesn’t get to be merely her own, because inadvertently she’s become a symbol of something more important to people longing for more fat role models: Being fat doesn’t stop you from anything. Just look at Adele.

“Would I show my body off if I was thinner? Probably not, because my body is mine,” she told Rolling Stone in 2015. “But sometimes I’m curious to know if I would have been as successful if I wasn’t plus-size. I think I remind everyone of themselves. Not saying everyone is my size, but it’s relatable because I’m not perfect, and I think a lot of people are portrayed as perfect, unreachable, and untouchable.”

For what it’s worth, Adele was never all that “relatable” if you actually call her what she is: a multi-award-winning musician who can sing better than you can do (I’m guessing here) literally anything. Even at her heaviest, she was still exceptionally beautiful, which is maybe all part of the myth of Adele, that her weight is what made her approachable (along with her attitude and pleasant accent and chain-smoking). In losing that, we’ve lost Adele to the celebrity machine that turns people into the kind of unattainable figure that feels cookie-cutter: rich, blonde, talented, and, now, thin.