The Era of Thin Is Back and It’s More Fatphobic Than Ever.

While I don’t usually spend a lot of time catching up on the news surrounding pop-culture, I have a twenty-four-year-old sister who is a stylist, model and aspiring actress and she normally fills me in on things she believes I will wish to discuss but when she called to gab about all the celebrities who are suddenly debuting their new bodies after significant weight-loss, she didn’t have to fill me in. About a year ago, I noticed the death knell sounding for the decade of (mostly performative but at least, prevalent) body-positivity and since then, it’s been a parade of increasing announcements of celebrity weight-loss, normalisation of GLPs used for cosmetic weight-loss, mainstream stores going back to stocking tiny-ass clothes and a slow but persistent increase in attacks on larger bodies.

Most recently, Amy Schumer deleted all her pre-thin era pictures from Instagram to feel good about herself and Megan Trainor (of All About That Bass fame) says she is shocked that people would be critical of her “best life” messages attributed to her weight-loss when she feels so good and happy. Now, let me clarify a few things right off the bat. I am not saying I am against the use of GLPs like Mountjaro or Ozempic for the management of chronic weight-issues that have caused health-problems. I think there are situations in which it would be warranted and perhaps even the best course of action for qualified doctors to prescribe these pills/shots after conducting all the necessary testing and discovery to ensure the patient needs and can safely take them. It seems alright to prescribe them in cases of medically-necessary weight loss, and that is different from cosmetic weight-loss.

It’s like “fluid therapy” which is medically-necessary if you are dehydrated from an underlying cause like diarrhoea or a bad flu, but will still make you feel good, in a short-lived kinda way, if you just don’t drink enough water and/or have poor nutrition, and you get a blast of vitamins and fluids into your veins because it’s in vogue to do so. Dare I say, it might even make you glow and because you can get it in the same establishment where you get a blow-dry, I suppose, you expect its effects to last about as long and can, in your head, treat it like a facial instead of medical intervention. Secondly, I do not think that these people—Schumer or Trainor—have betrayed a movement of body-positivity simply by the act of losing weight (and not just because I, personally, don’t consider a song about big-asses or being a shitty comedian as being at the forefront of the body positivity movement anyway).

Here’s my problem with the Trainors and Schumers of the movement. They now, very conveniently, sublimate this weight-loss under health, and attack anyone who dares question them by saying that they are at their healthiest and happiest and for people to be anything other than thrilled for them is preposterous, but back when they were fat and making bank off being the faces for body-positivity, I didn’t actually hear them talk about all the health-issues they were facing because of the weight. Back then it was all about calling out the industry, the gendered expectations and the pressure to be thin that was disproportionately placed on women, and how they were sick of it and weren’t going to stand for it. Cue the slogans: Fat is beautiful. Rail-thin is not necessarily healthy. Healthy bodies come in all shapes. Cha-Ching. Evidently now, I am to believe, that back then you were actually riddled with health-issues that were related to your weight? And now, you are thin and medicated, and you are not, but now I am sceptical of how you are defining being healthy.

Right now, I can see that you are skinny and you claim, this is the healthiest you have been but for the audience, the weight is the only observable factor, I did not see the results of your physical or your bloodwork back when you were bigger and I cannot see them now. I don’t even demand it but I reserve the right to draw conclusions based on what I see, and I see that back when you were fat you said you were beautiful and healthy, and now that you are not, you say that actually, now you are healthy and no longer have issues, which either means you believe weight determines health (not so body or anything positive) or you’re just a hypocritical fucking liar willing to exploit any movement for your clout and bank-account or, and this is the one I will go with, both.

I see no issue in desiring weight-loss, even I desire it, I think it will allow me to move with more agility, improve my balance in yoga, allow me to climb uphill faster and hold predicament-torture positions longer. Whatever the shape and size of our bodies, it has some ergonomic consequences and we all desire to change something or other about them. My spouse has a real flat-ass and I bet he would love to have a little more flesh in there so he could sit on hard benches without developing a back-ache. The problem really isn’t wanting to change things about one’s body, we all want that, the problem lies inside the why of it. Cosmetic weight-loss is not about health, it’s about beauty and more importantly, it’s about the beauty standard, and the reason the Ozempic-thin are being condemned for their “weight-loss” is not because they’re expected to be unhealthy, it’s because they once, on their own, took up the cudgel of changing the beauty standard and are now telling us that they are at their happiest because they are finally thin, very much confirming they never really believed in their messages.

They are erasing pictures of themselves from when they were fat because those pictures, that once allegedly were about letting real women, rejoice in their real bodies now make them feel bad about themselves. In a way, I suppose, there is a refreshing honesty here. We’re no longer pretending we even really believed in any messages of body inclusivity, positivity or ambivalence. We’re just saying the beauty standard was the beauty standard all along, but now that it is more possible for the beauty standard to be achieved (because pills, shots, back alley markets, surgery, prescriptions, clinics that need no licenses or medical backing abound and are as acceptable to use as lemon-water), there’s really no need to even pretend other sizes of body were ever acceptable.

It is about the acceptability of body-sizes, by the way, it is about fatphobia and not the idea of the “right” way to lose weight. There are many ways to be thin, I suppose, and some like “eating healthy and exercising” are considered virtuous, others like dieting and allied culture are less virtuous but more normalised in our day-to-day habits and others like surgery that are considered extreme (but more and more accessible and acceptable) and that hides that the real message of body-inclusion is actually a person who is not perfectly-skinny and is not trying to get there because they feel healthy, beautiful (if they want) and satisfied with how they feel (and possibly, unconcerned with how they look).

This isn’t about condemning GLPs so people can lose weight the right way, that still hides the real issue, which is that people don’t always need to lose weight. Weight isn’t the singular determinant of beauty, it isn’t the singular determinant of health, it isn’t thing towards we must all be working at all times and that message is getting erased before it was every fully written out on the board. The prevalence of GLPs, the changing representation/messages of celebrities and the accessibility of these drugs mean that the social standards are shifting. There is no excuse to be fat anymore, and it’s not just that you cannot justify being overweight anymore, you cannot even justify having a little flab, cellulite or anything that isn’t perfectly carved anymore. They might be losing weight using drugs but they are all sure to tack on the fact that they are eating healthy, working with nutritionists, exercising and taking care of themselves as well, so that you cannot say that weight-loss is inaccessible to you, because okay, maybe you can’t get the pills or afford a nutritionist, but you can exercise and eat well, right? They did that too, why can’t you?

That thing that people have always said we need to do to lose weight, come on, that’s really at the heart of how Trainor and Schumer lost the weight, it’s not like that was always accessible to them and the only thing that has changed is the accessibility of GLPs. No, no. You are just lazy. You just don’t prioritise yourself. You don’t love and care about yourself enough to centre yourself in your story. You don’t chase your happiness. You aren’t manifesting it. Don’t you know self-care means doing everything to make yourself beautiful, especially, making yourself thin.

This attitude, it pushes people to put their money and effort into being able to afford things they deem necessary to be “healthy” (and of course, beautiful) and this information about weight-loss drugs being the healthy choice fail to centre the hypoglycaemia, potential liver issues, chronic fatigue, digestive issues, dental issues and blood-sugar issues associated with these drugs, not to mention the rampant unregulated usage of them that has way more dire consequences. They are also now creating a mass-confusion about what a healthy body-weight actually is, and that is where cosmetic weight-loss enters the picture. This is not about a healthy weight, it’s about skinny as beautiful. A healthy weight is different for different people and its distribution is different as well. I can be the “right” weight and have a little arm flab. You can be the wrong weight but have it be evenly distributed.

My weight could be more muscle than fat. Yours could be more fat than muscle. Some of these hyper-muscular men you see at the gym who are the very picture of perfect fitness could have higher weight, muscle-mass and cholesterol than their bodies can sustain, and many of them have hypertension as well, but they look good, so they must be healthy, right? It’s much like that now, all of these people who wanted to be the heroes of the body inclusion business, most of them didn’t really seem like they were at an unhealthy weight, but now they are all as skinny as can be which brings us back to the era of heroin-chic (which, I guess, we can now call ozempic-pretty) as the standard for thin. I’ve heard my 24-year-old, model sister who mostly wears a size small, eats very healthy and exercises every day, but has some meat on her thighs called fat over a dozen times in the last couple of years. This is not a sane standard of sizing.

It’s not a health-focused one either. However, you can be sure that the economic, social, legal and political environment is going to support this for more reasons than the misogyny and sexism of it. It allows them to shift the focus of obesity and chronic weight/diabetes-related issues from their unwillingness to regulate the massive fast-food and processed food-industries that are owned, increasingly, by single-umbrella, massive corporations who fund their campaigns. It’s much like allowing coke to fund studies that prove that drinking sugary beverages doesn’t have health-impacts so long as you exercise it away, if we’re all aspiring to medically-assisted thin and the medicines that enable it are made as accessible as possible, our governments don’t have to do the work to make clean, healthy, good food accessible and available to the entire population.

Admittedly, this problem is worse in some countries than others, but even in India where medicine and vegetables are both regulated to keep prices accessible, the most affordable thing at your corner-store isn’t a sack of potatoes, it’s instant noodles, tiny-packs of chips kids can buy with loose change and hard-boiled candy and in the meanwhile the prices of real food (which is the food not quite subject to the recent GST cuts because it wasn’t quite subject to GST in the first place) have skyrocketed. But it’s cool, no? The governments continue to get their funding from large FMCG corporations (who, at least in India, also control a large portion of our energy, oil and trade) who are quietly, by the way, developing ways to create processed food that overrides the desire-suppression mechanisms of GLPs and if we all just take the medicine and lose weight, they can also use that metric to prove public health is better even if more and more people develop actual health-issues we could previously file under weight-related issues.

We buy meds, we buy ultra-processed food and the “economy” flourishes while we sit here wondering why we are thin but we feel like shit and have no energy to do anything at all. But hey, come on, at least Amy Schumer and Megan Trainor are the happiest and healthiest they have ever been! Don’t be a hater. You’re just jealous.