On resilience in a post-Ozempic world

Body culture's rough. Time to be tough.

iStock | Gelu Popa

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I’ve seen statements like this online for a while now. When low-rise jeans started to come back, think pieces popped up about how they were reminiscent of a time we’d hoped to forget: the early aughts, when all the celebrities were skinny, mainstream media was relentlessly cruel to anyone who wasn’t, and no one blinked an eye at the avalanche of “advice” aimed at young women about how to get thin or die trying.

Then, as more celebrities, models, and actors appeared who were bigger than a size 0, and as the culture began to have less tolerance for unabashed anti-fatness in movies and television, people felt the icy grip of mandated thinness loosen a bit. Body-con dresses and skimpy garments still existed of course, but fashion changed, too — girls weren’t going out in pube-baring denim but in floaty dresses, shapeless tunics, and peplum tops¹. Maybe we thought those dark times were behind us.

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Now, many people are feeling challenged by a cultural moment wherein celebrities and regular people alike are shrinking quickly due to the new weight loss drugs on the market. In recent years cropped tops came back, miniskirts came back, body positive influencers are losing weight, Oprah’s losing weight — feel that icy grip around your shoulders again?

I don’t blame you. I’ve written thousands of words about how other people’s thinner or shrinking bodies have made me feel worse about my own because I compare and despair. Plus, I wasn’t just not as skinny as Lindsay Lohan in the Y2K era, I was inarguably fat. They didn’t even have low-rise jeans in my size in the store². How it felt to grow up in a culture that had zero tolerance for my body will be imprinted on my psyche forever. It gave me an eating disorder. It fucked me up. I get it.

Is any woman *not* a little fucked up about her body?

But.

I’m not surprised that thinness is “back,” or that Y2K clothes are back, because that’s how these things go. In the past century alone, the waifish flapper girl look eventually gave way to the buxom Marilyn Monroe look³, then the lithe-but-“toned” aerobics-class look, which circled back to the thinness of “heroin chic,” and so on. More recently, being thick or curvier seemed to be on-trend — or at least more visible — for a while, then suddenly it wasn’t.

Any kind of “thick is in” moment we had felt so short because every moment feels short now. Trends explode on TikTok and disappear in a week. Everything is an “era” or an “aesthetic” for about as long as it takes an army of influencers to make videos in corresponding Shein garments they’ll never wear again. It’s a hideous reality that body shapes and sizes are trends, and our trends don’t last very long anymore.

While thinness was never really out — as Juno Kelly writes:

What’s occurring isn’t the sudden resurgence of thinness following a body-positive idyll, but a return to the unabashed, public coveting of emaciation …

— the public coveting of it might someday wane again. The new weight loss drugs might make such predictions harder now. But even if obvious and mainstream horniness for thinness fades in the future, we can’t rule out that it would someday charge back into our consciousness and onto our screens again. This could happen, because this is what’s happened before.

Bummer!

So what to do?

In case I haven’t mentioned⁴, I’m writing a book, and one of its key points is the importance of resilience about body stuff. I did not go from hating my body to being mostly OK with it because people suddenly became kinder, or because someone in charge decided that thinness has had a damn good run but it’s time to take it behind the garage and put it out of its misery. It also didn’t happen just because I lost a lot of weight, because let me tell you — if feeling better about your body depends entirely or primarily on weight loss and maintenance, you will be forever hypervigilant and anxious, always fearful that the next night in with pizza or vacation buffet or injury that keeps you from exercise will completely ruin you. No, I went from hating my body to being mostly OK with it because I got tougher and more unbothered.

My book is about how exercise — changing the size/look of your body not required — helps cultivate resilience, among many other valuable traits and skills. Pushing myself through challenging exercise has made me tougher. So did working out when I didn’t want to, seeing the power my body is capable of, and developing the confidence that comes from being a woman in the gym who knows what she’s doing. Failing at exercise made me less bothered by failing in life. Exercise is Building Resilience 101.

But you also become more resilient by doing what I’m always yammering on about doing — identifying your values.⁵ Here are two posts all about that.

Don't change how you exercise or eat without doing this first

What Ballerina Farm gets right (gasp!)

If you do the icky, sticky work of figuring out what you truly care about, you will become more resilient because you will learn what you don’t care about. If you really no longer care about being thin because you value other things more than what it would take to be thin, you will be less bothered by other people becoming thin. If you’re still really bothered, it’s because you still really care. While it would be great if the culture didn’t encourage you to care, you can opt out a little. You’re ultimately in charge of figuring out how to care less if you value caring less. Distract yourself. Find a new purpose or interest. Do stuff for other people. Most importantly: Decrease exposure to internet and celebrity culture.

People are constantly screaming about how toxic and harmful social media is to their self-esteem and while we have to do a lot of our lives online now, yes, you actually are allowed to spend less time there. They will not throw you in jail. You can pay your bills online without spending three hours on TikTok looking at skinny 20-year-olds. If you’re getting mad at me right now, let me ask you: How many people, really, in your life are losing a ton of weight on weight loss drugs? How many people that you know personally are parading around in Y2K crop tops with their hip bones poking through their micromini? Is it your actual life that’s spooking you right now, or is it the total strangers you see on the internet who have nothing to do with you?⁶

I don’t mean to be insensitive — every moment of feeling challenged or pulled under into misery by body bullshit is understandable. For a time my life was nothing but a series of moments like that. I’m not saying toughen up, buttercup, because I think you’re less than for being profoundly destabilized by a thinness-obsessed culture. But I am saying that building more resilience is your best option to counteract it.

You’ve got to be able to see diet culture-y garbage in media, and celebrities shrinking down, and you coworker losing 30 pounds and never shutting up about it, and a terrible TikTok video about how to get a thigh gap, and increase — even by a little bit — your capacity for letting it roll off your back. You’ve got to find a way to return to some degree of peace or equilibrium within yourself when the world around you is swirling with the chaos of beauty and body standards. I am not saying that you will or should do this instantly or easily. I am saying that cultivating the ability to withstand the slings and arrows of thinness culture is a more meaningful and more realistic goal than trying to change everything about the culture overnight.

This doesn’t mean we stop trying to make our body culture better. We don’t give up on the concept of body acceptance and any of the myriad ways we can define it for ourselves. We don’t tolerate our family members’ shaming of our bodies like we used to. We don’t make anti-fat jokes. We don’t have to roll back the clock. But we have to put our oxygen masks on first — if we’re trying to make things better where bodies are concerned, we have work to feel better in our own. Resilience helps us get there.

The unfortunate truth is, if your eating disorder recovery or peaceful relationship with your body depends on celebrity culture, the fashion industry, people in general, and American culture at large being fully and permanently bought into the body acceptance and anti-diet movements, you’re putting yourself in a perilous position. I can’t wait around for everything and everyone else to change in the ways that would be ideal. I have a life to live. I just don’t know any other way to cope on a day-to-day basis than to adopt a kind of “Girl, get the hell over it” mindset. Self-love doesn’t always help me. Self tough-love often does.

1. Which were apparently “flattering” because they “defined our shape,” or as one bitchy saleswoman once pointedly said to me, “hides the belly.”

2. Because there was a time where you’d go shopping, and because you were a young woman you’d shop in the juniors’ section, and the biggest size there was a 12.

3. Being skinny was not what you wanted.

4. Imagine a writer not mentioning this, not making it her entire personality for years, not driving everyone around her insane about it, lol!

5. Exercise also makes you more motivated to do that, because it make you more motivated in general. Amazing.

6. Two people in my life tried weight loss drugs, per their doctors, and they barely lost any weight and then stopped the medication. Only one person in my life has lost any observable, significant weight in the past few years and it’s because she became a professional bodybuilder. No one in my life is wearing low-rise denim again. Pretty much everyone in my life talks about dieting, weight, other people’s bodies, and their own far, far less than they used to, if at all. For me, this is very much an “internet problem.”