IS IT just me or does everyone seem to be thin again?
Almost overnight, Instagram appears to be filled with images of vastly reduced bodies.
In recent months, celebrities including Kelly Clarkson, Jessica Simpson, Christina Aguilera and Katy Perry have showed off considerably slimmer frames.
They join Sharon Osbourne who lost three stone in 2022 and 2023 after taking weight-loss drug Ozempic (“too much”, she admitted) and EastEnders actress Letitia Dean who recently dropped four dress sizes after cutting out junk food.
What’s going on? Did the body positivity movement actually happen? Or did we never abandon our obsession with being thin, and instead just stop talking about it?
I have spent decades trying to be thinner than my body will ever allow.
For as far back as I can remember, my life has been an eternal cycle of exercise binges, starvation, excessive eating then depression when the scales didn’t budge.
I have spent almost two-thirds of my life on some sort of eating regime (low-carb, zero-sugar, eating nothing but Ryvita and those plastic cheese slices that look like reconstituted Barbie), yo-yoing between a size eight and size 14/16.
Over the course of my 45 years, I have taken laxatives to be thin and even ordered “diet pills” from eBay that came in a doll’s head and gave me heart palpitations for days on end.
I have a busted knee from years of overexercising and have often wondered if my inability to get pregnant was down to stalled periods between the ages of 13 to 17, most likely caused by self-imposed starvation.
I wish it wasn’t this way. But like many women of my age, I have spent the longest period of my life wanting to be one thing — thin.
When I was younger, I wanted to be thin more than I wanted to be clever.
I wanted to be thin more than I wanted to be a success. I wanted to be thin more than I wanted to be loved or happy or well.
This is unfashionable to admit but true. I just stopped talking about it for years, cowed by the capricious mobs — on social media but also peers — who feel such an admission is to betray all the work women have done to try and steer the conversation away from size zero.
By the way, as the former editor of Cosmopolitan and the first editor to put a truly plus-size model, Tess Holliday, on the cover, I played my own role in trying to shift perceptions.
The truth is, women’s bodies have always found themselves at the mercy of both fashion and cultural change.
In the 1920s, relative emancipation led to flat-chested, boyish bodies being all the rage.
A generation later, in the golden age of Hollywood, full-breasted stars set off a vogue for boobs and hips.
In the 1980s, fuelled by the decade’s obsession with fitness, the “strong” athletic bodies of supermodels like Cindy Crawford and Elle Macpherson were the gold standard.
But bodies in the recession-hit 1990s drew inspiration from the most alarming source of all — drug addiction.
Xylophone torsos, and sharp, angry hip bones as well as legs like biros redefined the term “thin”.
I was born at the tail end of the 1970s and, growing up, our body idols were Jane Fonda, Princess Diana and Demi Moore — all of whom, it later transpired, had eating and/or exercise disorders at the height of their fame.
I was 13 when the supermodels arrived and 15 when heroin chic happened.
In my early twenties, size zero was all the rage.
My generation was brought up to believe calling someone skinny was a compliment. This is not to say we believed that this behaviour was right. It is simply all we knew.
And then one day, just like that, everything that we knew was wrong — dangerous and wrong. Talk of diets and wanting to drop down a dress size before your holidays was met with silence or raised eyebrows.
Asking someone if they had lost weight was no longer considered a compliment.
A couple of things happened to me around this time which made me realise how quickly the world had moved on without me.
The first was when I posted a picture of my lunch on to Instagram. I was on Weight-Watchers at the time and for reasons unbeknown to me I was to eat only chicken and blueberries.
I thought it was harmless enough — funny, even — until a few hours later when someone alerted me to the fact that an aspiring body-positivity activist had reposted my picture across her social networks.
The irony that I was supporting a movement I was unable to be part of was not lost on me
Farrah Storr
Never had a picture of a Tupperware box caused so much shock and outrage.
Then, as a magazine editor, I com-missioned a journalist to write about her drastic weight-loss after a terrible divorce. The piece was excellent and filled with compassion.
But, in a meeting, almost everyone raised their hands to suggest the story was too dangerous to publish.
After that, I kept quiet about bodies. The only women I could talk to about my weight were those older than me — and even then we spoke about it in hushed tones, as though we were plotting an Anthrax attack.
The body positivity movement has, for the large part, been a wonderful balm for women’s bodies and I did much to support it during my time as editor of both Cosmo and ELLE.
The irony that I was supporting a movement I was unable to be part of was not lost on me.
“Love your body, whatever form it takes” was the unofficial mantra.
But what if you felt incapable of feeling that way?
My public beliefs no longer mirrored my private ones.
I proudly talked about being a size 14 — but at fashion weeks I wept in my hotel room when it dawned on me, yet again, that I was one of the biggest editors sat on the front row.
When I edited ELLE, we were often sent clothes as gifts — a lovely perk of the job, but one filled with humiliation as I almost always had to politely return the size small they had sent me.
I have left the fashion world now. I no longer work in an office with dozens of young, beautiful colleagues.
I spend more money on gardening equipment than I do on clothes.
But the truth is, I never stop wanting to be thin. Though age and time have made me accept the body I have — currently a curvy size 14 — I will always yearn to be smaller.
It is tiresome and tragic and, in a world of terrible suffering, more than a little self-obsessed. It makes me cringe.
Am I dangerous for confessing all this? I hope not.
On balance, I think it’s far more dangerous to present as being accepting of your body when the closeted truth is far darker.
I know countless women who still diet, but mask their behaviour as a food intolerance.
Exercise bingeing is still alive and well, but goes on behind closed doors, with back-to-back online classes rather than public three-hour gym sessions.
True body acceptance is accepting that not all women can suddenly — or perhaps ever — accept their own bodies
Farrah Storr
Fasting and health cleanses are a more socially acceptable way of rebranding restricted eating.
The sheer number of women who appear to have shrunk overnight — famous and otherwise — suggests behaviours have not changed as drastically as we would like to believe.
Instead, they have simply gone underground.
For every non-self-conscious 20-something who is wielding gloriously thick thighs in a pair of cycling shorts, there is a 40-something still counting the calories and dreaming of one day being able to fit into her size 28 jeans again.
True body acceptance is accepting that not all women can suddenly — or perhaps ever — accept their own bodies.
Pretending that we do not exist — or worse, labelling us as outdated for the beliefs we have been saddled with — does little to help.
Our views may be old-fashioned, but the price that we pay for having them is far, far worse.
