This story has mentions of weight loss, disordered eating, and suicidal ideation.
It is the eve of Remi Bader’s 30th birthday. Donning a cozy white sweatsuit, she’s in full glam and feels good about the photo shoot she just did. She’s ambivalent about the milestone but also reflective—she tells me she’s proud of the work she’s done to get to a better place, both mentally and physically, in the last year and a half. But this newfound sense of ease hasn’t come without its challenges.
In a tearful September 2023 TikTok, Bader told her million-plus followers that she would stop speaking openly about her body and health. Since then, Bader, who rose to social media stardom as a plus-size influencer, has lost weight—seemingly a lot of it—without acknowledging how or why. A quick look online makes it clear that her fan base has noticed and wants answers.
While she is uninterested in responding to bad-faith commenters criticizing her every move, she understands that people find her silence alarming: “I get the frustration there.” After all, Bader is known for sharing everything with her community, and she has spoken openly about her mental health, struggles with binge eating, and a failed Ozempic attempt.
At the same time, she’s tired of onlookers who insist that losing weight must equate to her happiness. “No, you’re literally fucking wrong,” she says. Bader’s story is much more complicated than that, and what we see on social media only scratches the surface.
The truth is that Bader survived one of the scariest, most transformative years of her life. Struggling with a host of health issues that made the career she loves nearly impossible, Bader entered a cycle that included binge eating, weight-loss drugs, debilitating gastrointestinal issues, more than one wellness retreat, therapy, and finally, a harrowing procedure that left her bedridden for weeks.
Now, on the upswing of recovery, Bader is ready to tell her story on her own terms.
Bader built an online following doing something most people hate: trying on clothes. But she was having fun with it. Her early TikToks, which started to go viral in 2021, consisted mainly of what she coined “realistic hauls”: bits where Bader sported outfits from retailers like Anthropologie or Zara, poking fun at the models and how the trendy silhouettes fit on her plus-size body. And people loved it.
Diet culture and weight struggles are a throughline in Bader’s life. Hailing from Manhattan, Bader estimates she went on her first diet at around 10 years old. Dieting was something she regularly did growing up—she recalls doing WeightWatchers “10 different times,” and “something called the Fast Metabolism Diet” with her mom. Bader says she regularly felt hounded by her family to lose weight. At one point a family member even offered her “a thousand dollars to lose 20 pounds.”
“I would always do the diet and restrict cycle, which only got worse over time,” Bader says. In a 2019 email to her dietitian, Bader wrote, “If you have any tips, I am getting pretty desperate…. It’s scaring me because I can’t seem to snap out of it.” She was diagnosed with binge eating disorder later that year. So began an onslaught of mental, physical, and medical hurdles that brought her to where we are today.