Oh, we’re in the age of nostalgia, all right, and if the tsunami of breathless “weight-loss wonder-drug” stories are anything to go by – the latest being that two millennial scientists may have created a “natural Ozempic” – what we really want to bring back is super-skinny.
But hang on, isn’t thin-thirsting extinct? Toxic diet culture died, right? Hell, we danced on its grave: white bread and French cheese in one hand, the other putting a match to our “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” posters. Right?
Sorry, but no. Not even close. It was simply dormant, a slumbering beast just waiting. And now, with the arrival of “injectable size zero”, a backlash against progressive movements like body-positivity, and a new powerful wave of red-pill misogyny, it’s awake and roaring.
While these drugs were developed for medical good – specifically diabetes (Ozempic), chronic weight management (Wegovy) or both (Mounjaro) – it was only a hot-minute until the big-O was prescribed off-label for weight-loss, and then the alarm sounded on online, unregulated purchases of these injections, not to mention the danger they pose for those with eating disorders.
This affects more than those using or even seeking the jab, though. The laser-focus on restrictive eating and on weight, specifically losing it, has spread society-wide, super-powered by the stories – and oh so many pictures – of super-quick shrinkings.
Diet culture is now not only relevant again, but also something to be desired, something that’s – god, help us all – aspirational. And now, with the added bonus of being acceptable, being legit. Well, it’s medicine isn’t it?
It’s a wild time to be living through as a woman who already lived through the apocalyptic diet culture of the 1990s and noughties. It was alive and kicking before then – most Hollywood silver-screen actresses dieted; Susie Orbach’s seminal book Fat is a Feminist Issue came out in 1978 – but they were the very darkest of days.
I remember the celebration of “heroin chic” and “size zero”. I remember barely-there stars fronting “diet specials”. Hear’Say singer Kym Marsh being told “the goose has gotten fat” on ITV. The distressing pictures of Nicole Ritchie in a bikini that Star magazine annotated, pointing to her bones and missing muscle. The Heat magazine cover with the headline “Cellulite!” handily designed as an arrow and sent jutting into Beyoncé’s thigh (which they also circled for good measure).
Even then, the evidence of not just the danger, but harm, piled up. Studies linked “the thin ideal” in media to women’s increased body dissatisfaction and negative moods, to eating disorders and depression.
More devastatingly, it was crystal clear that we were destroying our girls. In 2004 – the same year as those Nicole Ritchie pictures, that Heat cover – almost every teenager who answered a survey by girls’ magazine Bliss said they “hated” how they looked. Just shy of seven in 10 thought they “needed” to lose weight, and two in three under 13 had already been on a diet.
That was also the year I was a 23-year-old Now magazine staff writer, and found myself on the “Get a Stomach Like Britney Spears in Six Weeks” plan for a story. Which on paper meant diet and exercise, but in reality, meant starving myself almost-mad for six weeks.
square LIFESTYLE At 52, I'm a happy size 16 - but my friends keep telling me to take Ozempic
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But even before that, and for a good few years after, I longed to be thin, taking extreme measures in my attempts to melt away. I was never ill – these episodes were brief and, well, we all put our bodies through the wringer – but I knew those who were.
We tell ourselves we’ve come a long way since; I tell myself I have. Yet analysis across 2024 showed that 95 per cent of fashion catwalk shows featured size-zero models.
We can’t continue to pretend that we’ve laid our body issues to rest. And neither can I. So, a confession. Last year, after noticeably dropping weight while unwell, I received several concerned messages on Instagram – my neural pathways lighting up like a one-arm bandit paying out the jackpot when I read the words. I hated myself for it.
So, perhaps the most painful truth isn’t the rise of a quick-fix for skinny, or that dangerous diet culture is back, or even that it never went away in the first place – but that it’s been kept alive, given new blood, by us.
Sure, by the men who ran cinema, media, and fashion for years (and still do in many instances) and dictated that the ideal female body was one as small as possible. But also, yes, by me and you – the women who either slipped into the patriarchy’s warm embrace or were pulled in by force. Who internalised it, who bought into it, who used it against fellow women, our sisters. Used it against ourselves.
But then, change – true, no-bulls*** change – will only come from us, too. Only we can choose to no longer want to disappear. To find a thrill in our solidity, not in our own absence.
Only then will our daughters be safe from that which has only ever slumbered. Only then, will we be able to dance on the grave of diet culture.
I’m up for it. And I’ll bring the brie.
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