“Millions of women like me are seeing this latest cultural shift and thinking: We already fought this battle.”
Every time I see Ariana Grande on the red carpet or in interviews lately, I feel a mix of fear and anger. Not at her, her beautiful spirit, breathtaking voice or right to move through the world in the body she chooses. But at what she’s come to symbolize.
Extreme thinness is back, and it’s being packaged as aspiration. Grande and Cynthia Erivo are everywhere promoting “Wicked” in interviews, photo shoots, red carpet events. Their bodies and the ultra-thin bodies of other celebrities — small, smaller, smallest — are glamorized and showcased with the media positioning Grande as one the main figures to be celebrated.
Even though there has been some criticism, it’s been drowned out by the mega promotion machine that celebrates these figures, and plasters them everywhere with great fanfare.
And this is happening at the same moment weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have become omnipresent. These drugs are now so widespread — and will be even more so with the soon to be released pill forms — and easily obtained that people are using them whether or not they medically qualify. Not for diabetes, not even for health problems ostensibly related to “obesity.” But to chase the kind of extreme thinness that’s on every magazine cover, every blockbuster press tour and in every curated celebrity post.
This comes after millions of women, myself included, have spent years trying to unlearn the toxic messages we were fed in our youth. That beauty equals thinness. That discipline means restriction. That our bodies must be controlled and minimized to be acceptable.
We fought for size diversity, for the radical idea that you can be beautiful, strong and worthy without disappearing. And just as that movement was starting to shift the cultural tide, here comes this trend of pharmaceutical shrinking that pretends thinness is wellness.
This isn’t about calling out celebrities, and it isn’t about body shaming. It’s about the unspoken message all of this is sending: When it comes to health, thinner is always better. This isn’t just frustrating. It’s dangerous.
A danger I know intimately.
When I was a teenager, my mother used to say, “If you only lost weight, you could be beautiful.” She equated being thin with the worth of a woman, and believed it would grant her access to power, success and opportunities.
I was a 14-year-old desperate to fit in with the cool kids. So when a popular girl in my high school freshmen class turned to me and asked how much I weighed, I answered without much hesitation.
“About 130 pounds.”
She looked at me in horror, “Oh, my God. I would kill myself if I ever weighed that much.”
I stood there, the fluorescent hallway lights buzzing above me, trying not to let the heat rising in my face show. She had confirmed what my mother had drilled into me, that the most important thing to be was thin.
My mother had done everything in her power to get me to lose weight: She’d pushed, pleaded, threatened, bargained. And she wasn’t the only one spreading the message of thin worship. This was the 1980s, the era of low-fat everything, Slim Fast and Jane Fonda workout tapes. No one was talking about mental health or eating disorders, no one I knew anyway.
Instead of motivating me, this made me feel like there was something wrong with me. That I was unworthy and unlovable the way I was. So when I was 15, I went into the bathroom one afternoon, locked the door and pushed my fingers down my throat.
As soon as I emptied my stomach, I felt an avalanche of self-loathing and disgust, but also a kind of relief. I sat on the cold tile floor, throat burning, face tear-streaked, clutching the white porcelain bowl. That started a secret life I carried for the next 30 years.
Decades of compulsive binging and purging, of painful highs and crashing lows. Of hiding behind locked doors and running showers to muffle the sound of vomiting. Of looking into a steamed-up bathroom mirror at a version of myself I hated.
The new thinness cult isn’t just happening on red carpets. It’s happening on TikTok. In classrooms. In text threads between friends. It’s shaping how young people define health, beauty, morality. As a result, eating disorders are on the rise, especially among young girls. Treatment centers are seeing a dramatic spike in patients.
I don’t know these celebrities’ stories, their health journeys, or their reasons. But it’s not about personal beauty choices. It’s about systems. About money. About power. About a $450 billion global beauty industry and $163 billion weight loss market that thrives when we hate ourselves enough to keep spending.
My anger is at the cultural shift that’s pushing people, especially kids, toward disordered eating, mental health crises and lifelong shame.
By the time I was in my 40s, I’d found a way to make peace with my body. I finally believed, like so many others that had seen the body acceptance movement gain ground, that it was OK to be who I was. That worth didn’t have to be determined by how little I weighed.
Now, millions of women like me are seeing this latest cultural shift and thinking: We already fought this battle. We already lived through the eating disorders, the shame, the isolation, the obsessive calorie counting. We were finally starting to believe that health came in many forms, that beauty wasn’t synonymous with being smaller.
We deserve a culture that refuses to treat weight loss as a moral victory. So does the next generation — so young people don’t grow up thinking they need to hurt themselves to be beautiful or valued, like I and countless others did.
If you’re struggling with an eating disorder, call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org for support.
