It is a balmy evening in early July. I have finally managed to get both of my small children to sleep and I am engaging in what has become a new and unhealthy ritual: scrolling through Instagram and trying to work out which of the people behind accounts I once followed for their body positivity content are now taking weight-loss drugs. I take a break from scrolling to pinch layers of fat between my thumb and middle finger, willing them – as I have since I was a child – to disappear. My fingertips trace the folds of skin that have appeared between my hips and ribs since my youngest son was born last summer, then over the raised red zigzags that have emerged all over my tummy since I first began growing children in 2021.
By the time my partner has made his way up to our room, I am sobbing. His face bears the slightly pained but loving expression of someone who has seen this all before. Without a word, he draws me in for a hug before taking the phone from me. “I just … ” I say between sobs. He nods as I finish my sentence “… wish it were me.”
You’d be forgiven for finding this melodramatic. But at 37, I can count on one hand the years I have spent free from anxiety about the shape and size of my body – and two of them I spent pregnant. The rest of my time on the planet has involved either outright hating my body or – more recently, in the shadow of the body positivity movement – trying to accept and maybe even love it.
But something is changing. Gone are the days when there was a deluge of messaging that told us to love our bodies no matter their size. When brands were falling over themselves in the who-can-shout-self-love-the-loudest Olympics. When Vogue, once a shrine to the skinny, declared three plus-size women were the new supers and plastered them on the cover. Instead, in a change I’d never have believed possible just two years ago, we have somehow been thrust back into a noughties-level skinny worship culture that is bringing up the same feelings I’ve been running from since I was a girl.
If first there was Hot Girl Summer, then Brat Summer, I reckon we are now living through Shrinking Girl Summer. I say this with no judgment or malice, but simply to hold up a mirror to a pervasive trend. Quietly, everyone seems to have been getting smaller and smaller.
For Alex Light, a British body-positive influencer, things had started to change even before the arrival on the mass market in the UK and US of GLP-1 inhibitor drugs used…
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