Everything Tastes Better Than Skinny Feels: Rejecting Diet Culture
By Catherine Murphy
Image Sourced through Pinterest
In the early 2000s, it was fueled by tabloid culture and the pro-ana Tumblr movement. Pictures of bone-thin girls with Lana lyrics over top. Dark eyes and an unspoken knowledge that they were suffering for their art. The art of their body. And while we’ve repackaged now to fit influencers in hundred-dollar Lululemon sets, the core remains the same. They have what you want. The children who grew up reading People magazine covers that bodyshamed Kate Winslet and Renée Zellweger are now adults trying to understand their relationship with their bodies. We had a brief shining moment in the late 2010s, early 2020s, where there was at least forward momentum into body positivity. That’s not to say that we had perfect progress or that we had come to terms entirely with fatphobia, but there was the illusion of change. Something we can no longer say.
Image Sourced through Pinterest
According to Glamour, in September 2023, New York Fashion Week saw 70-plus-size or curvy models. The following year, this dropped to 46, and in 2025’s recent season, this September, we saw only 23 plus-size or curve models. The same trends appear in Milan, London, and Paris. Even at the height of representation in 2023, there was a wild disparity between the bodies strutting the catwalk and those of walking the streets. Although it may sound encouraging, 70 models only account for roughly 2% of all those who walked at NYFW that year. Most American women, however, an overwhelming 68%, wear over a size 14. Without seeing themselves on stage, or even being able to find their size in stores, who are these designers marketing to? This is just one way in which we can clearly see the pendulum swinging back on body positivity. We’ve become desensitized to the prioritization of thinner bodies in the fashion industry. There’s importance in pushing back against the assertion that this is the “normal” or even average body type, but this can seem impossible when we are bombarded with messages to the contrary.
It’s worth noting that our cultural bias against people with larger bodies is nothing new. Its roots can be traced back to antiblack sentiments during the slave trade. While curvier figures were once viewed as desirable and a sign of wealth, it wasn’t until Europeans began to see these traits in Africans that they began to change the narrative. Scientists began to posit the now-debunked theory of environmental determinism, the idea that warmer climates, such as those in African countries, made a person unmotivated and even uncivilized. It was racist thinking like this that was used to rationalize the mass enslavement of African people. It was then in the 17th century that being considered “overweight” was considered a moral failing; a sign that you were lazy and overindulgent. While we don’t often make this connection as explicit today, it is still apparent that praise of thinness and praise of whiteness are intrinsically linked.
In this historical discrimination, we can see the beginnings of anti-fatness as more than just an aesthetic discussion. We've gone as far as to moralize body types and “health.” To be thin is to have moral superiority. But it's not enough that you lose weight; you have to do it honorably. We can see it clearly with the talks of diet pills and Ozempic. The discourse often revolves around the concept that it’s the “easy way out”. You should be putting in suffering before reaping the reward. It's the same pull yourself up by your bootstraps strategy that capitalism offers to us to find financial success. And much like in business, it's a complete sham. There are those who have the time, energy, money (and natural genetics), and there are those who don’t. We want their effort to look effortless in a way that makes our own shortcomings more apparent. There are countless structural reasons why a person might not be able to exercise or have access to healthy foods. There are people with disabilities, those working multiple jobs, or some who live in food deserts. Most importantly, some people simply don’t care about losing weight. You can be unhealthy in any size, and you can engage in harmful behaviors that have no impact on your weight. But we are far more likely to accuse people in larger bodies of “promoting unhealthy lifestyles” than we are of people with any other alleged vice.
Image Sourced through Pinterest
And it's never been clearer how political health has become. With the rise of Make America Healthy Again, conservative fear-mongering has crept into the diet realm. Every aisle of the grocery store is filled with secretly poisoned food, but the story is always changing. One day, we must move away from foods fried in animal fat. The next thing we learn is that seed oils will most surely kill you. Even if you want to eat healthy, it feels impossible to do it right. We’ve created phrases like “overprocessed foods,” which essentially serve as a replacement for the term “junk foods”. Though we may feel we understand, in reality, we have no meaningful value as a descriptor. What they do accomplish, which may be their intended goal, is to divert our attention. Disordered eating and the constant goalpost moving of the perfect body are time-consuming projects. You don’t just think about it at mealtimes, you think about it constantly. And it's about all you have the brain power to do. When you deprive yourself of the calories and nutrients you need, you enter into a brain fog that makes even the easiest of tasks impossible. There’s enough to worry about in daily life, with attacking yourself from within.
You are entitled to love your body. But you are also entitled to not give any thought to the way you look. Because your body is the least interesting thing about you. We’re setting ourselves up for failure when we begin to place too much stock in our jean size or if we have a thigh gap. Because our bodies are bound to change without warning and on occasion without reason.
