The ‘strong not skinny’ fanatic is fading as the cult of thinness is making a dangerous comeback.
‘How to snatch your waist’, ‘running for your figure’ and the ‘ballet body’ have increasingly become regular social media features as the ‘gym rat’ has faded into the background and the ‘running girlies’ have their time in the spotlight. Classic posts of ‘before and after’ meet the new ‘what I eat in a day’, a trend dominated by protein bars, low-fat Greek yoghurt and an unfathomable amount of fruit and vegetables. This is for certain: food consumption and slimming down is re-entering the public consciousness.
“The body positivity movement has lost steam in mainstream culture as the pendulum has swung back to the glamorisation of thinness”
Vogue Business, 2024
In 2022, Kim Kardashian infamously pursued a dangerous diet to slim down and fit into a dress once worn by Marilyn Monroe, losing 7.3kg in three weeks. She told Vanity Fair that she ‘would wear a sauna suit twice a day, run on the treadmill, completely cut out all sugar and all carbs, and just eat the cleanest veggies and protein’. Reminding fans and followers of the dangerous ways to lose weight, her decision has allowed extreme dieting to re-enter the public psyche and has pushed the narrative that we are made to fit clothes rather than clothes being made to fit us. What happens when an inspirer of BBLs abandons her curves for the ‘ballet body’? Everyone flocks towards the skinny ideal.
Ever since, Kim has appeared to lose weight in favour of this skinnier body type: regarding her BBL, friends claim that ‘she had it topped up every so often throughout her marriage to Kanye but now she’s over that look’. The messaging is clear that our looks must keep up with what others desire of us.
The latest celebrity obsession has been with Ozempic, a weekly injection designed to treat type 2 diabetes, yet also slows digestions and tells your brain that you are full. Ozempic is not currently licensed for weight loss in the UK but has taken over the domain of social media: celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk, Kathy Bates, Kelly Clarkson and Whoopi Goldberg have all spoken about using Ozempic or equivalent drugs. This extends to the mayor of Rio de Janeiro saying he would make the drug available through the city’s public health network; this only perpetuates the culture of weight loss for aesthetic, rather than health, purposes.
Extreme thinness is further taking over modelling. The Vogue Business size inclusivity report shows ‘very limited progress in size inclusivity’ for the Spring/Summer 2025 season, with global fashion weeks containing 0.8% plus-size models, level with last season, and ‘more models at the extremely thin end of the scale’.
More people are going to extreme lengths to follow this damaging ‘trend’: published NHS figures show hospital admissions due to eating disorders almost doubling from 13,200 in 2015-16 to 24,300 in 2020-21. This sharp increase in weight consciousness and extreme attempts to lose weight emphasise the danger of skinny culture.
The question is, how can we adopt healthier attitudes if models, celebrities and influencers all show something unattainable?
A popular online solution is the Body Positivity movement across social media, containing videos pushing for self-love, self-expression and a healthy relationship with food. Body Positivity rejects the cruel culture of ‘trends’ in women’s bodies and shapes, advertising that all bodies are different yet equally beautiful and lovable. Despite the honourable effort of this movement, diet culture seems to have won the battle of the 2020s. But why is our body shape more important to us than our mental health?
The words of a few can only go so far when battling a trend with roots that have never truly disappeared. Cultural fatphobia, sexism, classism and racism have ensured that we maintain harmful relationships with our bodies. Whether we were celebrating curves or trying to slim down, fatness itself has not broken away from associations with failure and worthlessness.
Ever-changing ideals for the perfect woman demonstrate a display of accepted misogyny as our bodies go in and out of fashion, perpetuating our obsession with diet and exercise. How is it fair that we describe women as appearance-obsessed while creating new standards before we can catch up with the olds ones?
Until we address these underlying issues, small changes can constantly be made to the ‘ideal body’ to keep women at the whim of large corporations and fashion trends. It is essential we scrutinise skinny culture to remove size from the forefront of the female consciousness and not allow our bodies to be a trend.