I lost over 100 pounds, now men who bullied me say I’m hot — it’s gross

Think you’ve got a shot with these curvy girls just because they’ve lost weight?

Fat chance. 

Brooklyn Kennedy’s jaw nearly the floor in late 2022 when the 26-year-old 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.

Until she dropped 140 pounds after undergoing weight loss surgery in March of last year, that is.

But rather than feeling flattered by the hunk’s sudden interest, she just felt grossed out. 

“It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I got creepy crawlies all over my body,” Kennedy, an actress living in Brooklyn, New York, told The Post of reading the heartthrob’s spicy message. “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.”

The voluptuous brunette tearfully aired her grievances online against the would-be Romeo, as well as other men from her past, 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,” moaned Kennedy in an impassioned TikTok address. The video beckoned a whopping 417,800 eyes on the app and an additional 10.2 million views when it was reposted to X, née Twitter.

There, 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 promoting the celebration of all shapes, sizes and numbers on the scale — folks are 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, in part, that men have a tendency to “devalue non-ideal bodies and up-value ideal bodies.”

Analysts from Durham University in the UK uncovered a correlation between the male attraction to thinner women and incessant TV watching that same year.

And in December 2015, researchers at the University of Toronto determined that 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. 

Kennedy’s far from alone in her disdain for men who only find her slenderized look attractive. 

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. 

“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.”

After being diagnosed as pre-diabetic in mid-2021, she embarked on her weight loss journey — for which she adopted a strict eating regimen and a new gym routine — in the hopes of becoming healthier for herself and not hotter to guys. 

“Men sexualize my body rather than praise me for the hard work I put in to losing weight,” Schwinghamer griped. “They’re, like, ‘Oh my God, you’re so hot now’ or “I wanna see you naked.’ 

“I would prefer compliments on who I am and not what I look like,” she added. “It’s sad and embarrassing that they’re so shallow.”

Kennedy agrees. 

“It upsets me that for these shallow people, I’m not a [romantic] option until or unless I lose weight,” she told The Post, noting that folks online have argued that some have a preference for skinnier women.

But she’s not biting.  

“Hitting on someone only when they lose weight is not about having a physical preference,” Kennedy insisted. “If dating a fat person is not an option [unless they become thinner], that’s intolerance.

“It’s hatred.”