being thin is always on my mind
I can’t really share this with my boyfriend, because men don’t get it.
When the Posh Spice and Paris Hilton era of thin was in, I was too young to understand how this was affecting girls and women around me, I blissfully read OK! Magazines and marvelled at the outfits, clueless to the subliminal messages being fed about the right type of body. Now that I’ve become a prime target for this indoctrination, I am finding it impossible to resist the urge to take weight loss medication.
I’ve spoken to people who are on ozempic/wegovy, I’ve sat down at work dinners and noticed everyone eat less and less, swirling the food around their plates like children - all the while I’m fighting through some tough health issues which keep my thighs thick and my bottom plump (just 3 years ago, this was great news!) How can we keep up with thinner, the zeitgeist of 2000’s? I feel like we’re in a secret society here, so between you and I, being thin is always on my mind.
We’ve awkwardly reached a cultural moment where the thinner you are, the more you exhibit discipline. How virtuous and dignified of you to deny yourself food continuously over months to shrink to size 4? How glamorous is your life that you can function being slightly light-headed from a lack of carbs and protein? It’s ironic because food waste has also become a distinctive marker of excess. Farm to table meals, organic grass-fed meats and long aged cheeses signifies a surplus of money, food and time. I am on no high horse here. I regularly shop in Waitrose, I look better because I do. It’s important to know that you really are what you eat.
“I would kill to have your body” truly detracts from what I’m saying, we are witnessing celebrities slowly becoming size 4, 2 and 0. Models on the runway have hip bones that jut out through low rise jeans, and some the biggest creators in the world are slowly vanishing before our eyes. A very popular influencer regular poses with her spine jutting through her skin. “Chic” “Beautiful” reads the comment section. I do feel this imminent pressure to shrink, I think about what I’m eating, when I’m eating and how much I’m eating… but no one else seems bothered by it. It makes me wonder if there’s something wrong with me for feeling this way, if I should be getting on with it and losing weight because I work online. Am I doing something wrong?
There is no positive uplifting message about weight at the end of this post, simply because I’m not there yet. I’m trying to ignore the food noise, and eat without feeling self-conscious. As someone who is chronically online for work - it’s difficult to separate real from reality, especially when they are so deeply intertwined.
This resonated so deeply with me. After newly recovering from an ed the resurgence of thinness is something that has really hit me. I look back on older videos of myself and think I used to be so disciplined rather than acknowledging how everything else in my life crumbled. But at the time because of how thin I was I felt beautiful like I’d won so nothing else mattered. Now I can feel myself slowly sliding back into bad habits. What I will say was a big revelation that helped my recovery was acknowledging my existence as a black woman. I attended the Wizkid concert back in 2021 and I remember seeing thicker body types, different body types, different forms of black women and I was in awe. Living in the western world and all over social media we’re constantly exposed to the European standard of beauty. I know you can exist in any size at any race but that’s something that kinda helped me shift my perspective. Thank you for sharing, it’s comforting to see I’m not alone in feeling this way💕
what a painful reality for so many of us. I sometimes struggle with feeling unattractive because I’m not thin. it also doesn’t help that people literally hurl insults at women with my body type without a thought of how it affects bigger women to have mean comments thrown at them all the time. even if it’s not posted at me directly, seeing or hearing someone speak down on a bigger woman is something i take personally because the woman they’re talking about looks like me. fighting to love your body and do what’s best for it without being obsessing over losing weight as the end result is very hard when the media — and the world hypnotized by media’s romanticization of skinny —feels like it’s working against you and the body you’re in right now.
thank you for this post! «subscribing»