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.
“I loved being curvy my whole life; I just did. It was who I was,” she says. So when her health issues came to a head, she felt like “it was a battle” with herself. “I will always believe that you could be a bigger size and be healthy and happy. I was for a while, that wasn’t a lie. But there was a point when it shifted, and I became really unhappy.”
In 2020, right around the start of COVID, Bader was prescribed Rybelsus, an off-label oral semaglutide medication, for her binging. It didn’t work, so her doctor put her on Ozempic, also because she was prediabetic. “It’s different for everyone, [but] I was throwing up every day from it,” she says, so she came off the medication after only a few months.
Over the next two years, desperate to get help for her binge eating, Bader tried a variety of treatments, some of which she shared with her followers—and some of which she didn’t. She saw a therapist; met with a psychiatrist who specializes in disordered eating; tried both Contrave, an oral weight loss medication, and Wellbutrin, an antidepressant; and went to a few Overeaters Anonymous meetings. In May 2022, she attended a six-week outpatient eating disorder treatment program that focused on intuitive eating and employed the Health at Every Size (HAES) model. After leaving the program, her binges returned “almost immediately.” In September, she gave Mounjaro a try, “very secretly.” “This is the worst thing I could be doing,” she thought at the time. “I just talked about how I went to treatment…. No one could ever know about this.” Again, she was throwing up daily, so by January her doctor switched her to Ozempic, and added Metformin. The vomiting persisted anyway, and Bader decided to go off the medication for good. In a last resort, in June 2023, she tried Vyvanse as prescribed by her doctor. But that didn’t work either.
All of the yo-yoing left Bader with emotional whiplash, and her eating disorder came back with a vengeance. According to Sasha De Jesus, MD, a board-certified obesity medicine specialist and founder of MetaboliK Health, while drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro may be good for treating binge eating disorder in the short term, “symptoms may return—or even intensify—after discontinuing the medication, particularly if underlying emotional, psychological, or environmental triggers weren’t addressed. The contrast between being on versus off the medication can be jarring and may make symptoms feel worse than baseline.”
“I didn’t know [I gained weight],” Bader says. “It was the internet that really told me. I wouldn’t even really look in the mirror at my body. I would only look at my face.” Other physical effects of her binging were harder to ignore. Bader was struggling with debilitating back pain, something she had already had surgery for; she was in bed for a month because of it, “couldn’t sit up straight for more than five minutes” at a time, and “wore Dr. Scholl’s tennis shoes for events because I couldn’t stand in heels without my knees and back going out.” She was sweating all the time to the point where she felt embarrassed at events: “Makeup would drip off my face 20 minutes after getting glam.” She “couldn’t film hauls anymore because they became so difficult.” She had sleep apnea. Her blood report was scaring her: Her cholesterol was high, she was developing heart issues, and she was diagnosed with fatty liver disease—a condition that could lead to serious damage and even cancer. She also started having a full period, constantly. “My doctor told me I was becoming infertile,” she says. “And I would say that definitely scared me more compared to other things.”
“I was just so uncomfortable,” she says. But she pushed through. “It’s my business…[so] I flew with my back out to LA for this 12-hour shoot and did the whole thing, and it was the most painful thing of my life. And maybe that was also when I was just like, I'm done,” she says.
It is almost impossible to decide what is right for your body when everyone around you has an opinion on it—particularly when it comes to why, how, or whether to lose weight. How do you separate a desire for positive health outcomes—for feeling better—from the cultural and social insistence that the size of our bodies reflects our well-being, character, and worthiness?
Bader grappled with this tension. “I think it’s a constant battle of: What do I do that's right? What do I do for everyone else? What do I do for me? It actually was making me lose my mind.”
Bader never just wanted to lose weight—and she certainly didn’t want to do it for anyone else. She was ready to get off the Ferris wheel: She wanted to feel better. But nothing could have prepared her for what was to come.
It was the fall of 2023, and Bader decided to act fast. She’d watched TikTok videos about weight loss surgery. The idea was scary, but she knew she needed a change and felt out of options. She asked herself: “If no one existed, what would I do? I would get the surgery.”
So she called her back surgeon to ask for a referral. She trusted him, and he immediately connected her to one of the premiere bariatric surgeons in New York City. “I called him the next morning. Didn’t tell anyone.” The doctor told her to schedule an appointment, and Bader asked for it to be virtual. “I didn’t want to go in person and [have] people see me,” she says.
There are multiple types of bariatric, or weight loss, surgery. A sleeve gastrectomy removes 80% of the stomach so it can’t hold as much food. Bader’s doctor advised against it—he said that if she started to binge again, her stomach could stretch back out. Another option was a gastric bypass, in which a surgeon cuts the stomach into a walnut-size pouch so that food bypasses most of the stomach and the first part of the small intestine. As a result, people must eat less in one sitting (the stomach goes from being able to hold three pints of food to one ounce of food) and the body absorbs less fat and calories. Bader says the doctor worried it would make her too nutrient deficient.
Instead, she says he suggested a newer procedure called single anastomosis duodenal-ileal bypass with sleeve gastrectomy (SADI-S). A SADI-S includes the sleeve gastrectomy followed by a procedure that closes off a section of the small intestine and instead connects the stomach to the lower small intestine, giving the body “less time and distance…to absorb fat and calories,” according to the Mayo Clinic. The description of the new procedure gave her pause. “I don’t know if I should be doing something I’ve never heard of,” she thought at the time. But she had already decided to move ahead with it. Dr. Christine J. Ren-Fielding, surgeon and head of the division of bariatric surgery at NYU Langone Health, says that patients who decide to have bariatric surgery usually come to it as a last resort: “Nobody wants to have surgery,” she says. “[Patients] usually come to me when they’ve tried every option to lose weight…diet, exercise, inpatient weight management centers like Duke. They’ve been on low-calorie diets, Atkins, keto—I mean everything—and they’ve either lost a lot of weight but weren’t able to maintain it, or they did not lose enough weight because it was just too difficult to stay on that plan for a prolonged period of time.”
Bader was excited but anxious. She finally shared the decision with her boyfriend, saying, “I want to let you know I’m doing this surgery. I’m not asking. I just want to let you know I’m doing this for me and my health.” When she told her parents, she says, “I felt their joy from the other end of the phone, which bothered me. But they said, ‘Do whatever is best for you.’” She decided to tell a few more people in her inner circle, but she knew this was a decision she was making for herself.
The surgeon said he could do it soon, as long as she got through the insurance approval process, which included meeting with a dietician, a therapist, and a few other specialists. After two and a half months, Bader was approved, and the surgery was set for December 11, 2023. She was under the impression that the recovery process would be relatively quick. But that’s not what happened.
“I need to say that it was the most brutal thing.”
“I get the surgery. I was in recovery hours, hours, hours, hours, throwing up. It was not normal. I was supposed to leave [the hospital] in one day. I could not stop projectile vomiting, and I couldn’t drink water. They won’t let you leave if you can’t drink water,” she says. “I actually can’t explain how horrible it was.”
After three full days she was discharged, and went to stay with her parents to recover. “They didn’t know what to do. They saw how sick I was. No one knew what to do.”
This went on for six weeks: She couldn’t eat or drink, and the vomiting continued. She felt like an outlier, especially because she saw so few people sharing negative experiences with bariatric surgery on TikTok. (Dr. Ren-Fielding says the recovery time for SADI-S is usually one to two nights in the hospital. The entire recovery process, she tells her patients, is two to three weeks.)
From the surgery in December to mid-February, Bader says she was “not fucking okay.” She posted less and told her followers that she was going through a hard time, but the reality was far grimmer. “I’d gotten into a very, very deep depression, and it was truly the scariest time of my life,” she says. “I couldn’t tell people. I really—I wanted to die.”
Her psychiatrist raised her dose of Cymbalta, a serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI) commonly used to treat depression, and put her back on Wellbutrin. Bader says both helped. After two months of intensive recovery, Bader finally felt like she could get out of bed and have a meal and maybe even a drink. She celebrated Valentine’s Day with her boyfriend, and felt like things were going really well between them.
To her surprise, one week later, the relationship ended.
The days and months that followed had their ups and downs, but slowly she regained her confidence. “It happened very subtly,” she says. She became motivated to figure out how to care for herself. “I never went off of the anxiety or depression medicine because it’s made me feel so much better,” she says.
She’s worked hard on her body-mind connection and self-acceptance, including a stint at one of the Hoffman Centers, a residential retreat dedicated to “transformative adult education” and “spiritual growth.” She works out, regularly doing Pilates and yoga, saying she’s proud to have found workouts that work for her body right now. She sees a therapist who specializes in eating disorders and has experience working with patients who have had bariatric surgery.
“My binge eating is better,” Bader says. “I’m still struggling and I have those thoughts, but I can’t physically binge as much because I don’t have the room for it.” The surgery has made it so she has to be very careful with what she consumes. “You cannot drink and eat within the same 30 minutes,” she says. If she does, her body rebels: “Sometimes I’m out to dinner with friends, and I run to the bathroom. It’s also hard; I’m going to these events and dinners, and I’m constantly getting sick,” she says. On her most recent trip to Paris, she had an episode where she felt like food was “stuck” in her chest and stomach. “It’s also making me nauseous at the same time. So it’s like, okay, am I about to throw up or should I sit and make myself deal with this and maybe walk around?” She’s dealt with other side effects too. “I had a very intense amount of hair loss with chunks coming out of my hair daily for a good six months,” she says.
The biggest shock to her system, however, has been the speed and amount of weight she has lost.
“I never thought it would be this quick,” she says. “I never wanted to be this size…I’m probably the only person that's ever gone to a doctor for weight loss to be like, Okay, but can I still be curvy?” she says. “It's really confusing to be so quickly in a different body but have the exact same brain.”
A few days after we meet, Bader posts snapshots from her 30th birthday celebration on TikTok. They suggest she is embracing this new version of herself—she’s at the club in a sequined mini dress, dancing and singing. (Even 50 Cent makes an appearance.) But there is always more to what we see online. “I’m still uncomfortable. I’ve never looked like this. I’ve never felt this way. I’ve never been this size,” she says. “So when people comment now, ‘Tiny, skinny. Oh my God, your legs, your arms, this, this,’ that’s really triggering for me. It’s just, I think people think that was all that it took to be happy…. It’s just not true.”
Bodies are complicated, after all, and so is taking care of them. When you go through a major transformation, it’s normal to have conflicting feelings around those changes. “Am I happy overall right now, happier than when I was dealing with the health issues and the back pain and all those things? Yes. I have more energy. All of my health stuff went back to normal after years and years and years. I have zero knee pain…I have less back pain. I have normal periods again,” she says.
But weight loss isn’t a magic bullet—it doesn’t make all of our problems go away. (In fact, this includes physical health issues too: Studies show that losing weight doesn’t necessarily correlate with lower mortality rates among people who are classified as having overweight or obesity per BMI.)
Bader feels this deeply. “I was lost with my identity before,” she says. “I wasn’t big enough at first and plus-size enough at first for the plus-size community. Then I became too big…for some brands even to work with. Now I’m too small? I actually don’t know where I’m supposed to be.” No matter where she lands or how her body continues to ebb and flow (as all bodies do), Bader insists she will always be an advocate for size inclusion. She recently launched a collection with Sam’s Club and made sure that it went up to a 6x. “I still believe in that,” she says, though she finds she gets some resistance.
“I just think it’s fascinating, the way the world is treating me,” she says. “I still want to fight for inclusivity and all these things, but I feel like I’m not allowed to. People are like, ‘Well, you no longer relate to us.’ And I'm like, Why is that fair? Because I actually feel like I’ve been in so many different bodies and so many different situations, why can’t I still be the one advocating?"
When asked if she regrets the surgery, she says today she doesn’t think so. “I don’t want people to go and run and get a surgery that I’m not fully advocating for. I’m saying, I think it helped me, but will it help me in a year? What if I gain all the weight back? What if I get sick from the [lack of] nutrients?” she poses. “I’m not a doctor. I don’t have it all figured out.” She does want people to know that you need support to make a decision like this for yourself—especially therapy—before, during, and after the surgical process.
“I think I’ve let so many people take my power away for a long time,” she says. “I will never regret having my time to heal, and I’m still healing and figuring it out…. That was none of the internet’s business—these people that don’t know me—and that was for me to figure out.”
Ultimately, she wants her followers to know she is still, well, Remi. “I’m going to continue to be online and cry and share and not share and be me, and that’s not changing. ”
If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, help is available. You can contact the Alliance for Eating Disorders' fully-staffed helpline at 1-866-662-1235 or visit their website for additional support. You can also reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988 anytime.
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Photography: Sofía Alvarez. Wardrobe styling: Virginia Ray. Hair: Jerome Cultrera. Makeup: Natalie Lageyre. Production: Melissa Kramer.
