Image Source: Courtesy of Pink
Take one scroll on TikTok, and it’s hard not to come across a Remi Bader video. Her wildly popular realistic clothing hauls are distinct in their style, candor, and sheer comedy as she manages to call out the size discrepancies within the fashion industry. But equally as popular are her videos about mental health. The curve model has been open about her struggles with binge eating, announcing in May that she was officially seeking treatment. When POPSUGAR caught up with Bader for a check-in, she said there is “a lot more work” to be done.
“I would say that that’s still something I’m struggling with,” Bader tells POPSUGAR. Doing six weeks of treatment for binge eating isn’t “the end all be all, which I guess I kind of hoped it would be,” Bader says. It’s hard to break patterns when you’ve been “thinking a certain way for years.” She says that she’s still in the recovery process and isn’t quite ready to go into details about the treatment publicly. “Once I figure that out for myself, I will definitely share more with my followers,” Bader says.
In the meantime, she’s learning to give herself grace — especially when it comes to having bad days. It’s one of the reasons she’s been adamant about not being called a “body-positive” advocate. She feels that the title limits her range of emotions and places pressure on her mental health to always see herself in a positive light when that’s just not her reality.
“You’re supposed to be saying that you love yourself and love your body every day . . . I’m just not there yet.”
From Bader’s perspective, by accepting the label of body positive, “you’re supposed to be saying that you love yourself and love your body every day,” Bader says. “But you’re allowed to have negative days, and you’re allowed to be down on yourself.” The key is to not let it hold you back from “doing life and continuing to move forward,” she says. While Bader applauds influencers and friends who call themselves body positive and “feel like they truly have gotten to that point that they truly love their body every single day” — Bader says, “I’m just not there yet.” Instead, she tries to emphasize to herself and to her followers that “it’s okay to feel good some days and bad some days about yourself.”
But getting to this place of compassion has taken Bader some time. She started her mental health journey in middle school, seeing her first therapist in eighth grade. Since then, “I’ve had different therapists for eating, for anxiety, for tics,” Bader says. The latter is something she hasn’t talked much about publicly but has struggled with since childhood. As a kid, Bader says she would make “different movements or sounds that went along with my anxiety, but I never knew why.” It wasn’t until she was a teenager that she started taking medication and went to therapy for her tics. “It’s gotten better with time,” Bader says, but tic content is something she tends to avoid on social media. “When I actually see it more, it tends to make me do it more. So I don’t really watch people that go through it.”
Being open about her struggles is something Bader says she’s always up for. It’s one of the reasons she recently partnered with Victoria’s Secret Pink to codesign a T-shirt in honor of World Mental Health Day.
The slogan Bader chose for the shirt? “Trust the timing of your life.”
“It’s just a reminder that it’ll all work out. Trust the timing of where you are right now,” she says. And right now, Bader is a work a progress. “There’s always things I’m still working on and going through,” she says. But all things considered, “I’m in a pretty good place right now.”
Image Source: Courtesy of PINK