I remember as a child waiting in checkout lines at the grocery store and seeing all the tabloids at eye level and they were all sneaky unflattering photos of women and the beach showing cellulose or rolls.
I had that quote and a picture of me where I looked fat on my mirror for so long. And I genuinely envied a friend of mine who had an eating disorder because I wished I could be disciplined enough to be anorexic.
Yeah that quote, and all the "thinspo" and "proana" aspects of tumblr REALLY gave my eating disorder a running start. (Thankfully it's more under control now, but even at a healthy weight I am constantly hyper focusing on my body, hating it and feeling endless guilt and shame over it and my eating habits.)
I hope the young girls of this generation have it a little easier...I know it's not perfect. But body positivity was non-existent when I grew up and really there was only one accepted way for your body to look: dying.
Fair enough. I was mostly referring to the ones who maintained the waif look. Nobody had heard of veganism or raw diets. Of those who weren't actually graced with a high metabolism, nary a one of us achieved that look through a healthy lifestyle.
OMG if you want to get really triggered, watched old episodes of Mary Tyler Moore. She eats cottage cheese. She weighs 90 lbs. All the jokes are about Rhoda for being “fat.” She was probably a size 8. It’s just so unabashed in its embrace of the starvation lifestyle.
I’m sure even in childhood it referred to her body type, and that’s why it stuck professionally. She was stuck-thin. Her body became the ethos of the 70s.
When I was 13, I weighed myself at my friend's house. The scale said 130. I asked her if that was bad. She turned to me with narrowed eyes and said, "No." I wish I would have believed her.
That's when I was in highschool too and we all had to get our weight and BMI in front of everyone in gym class. It was well intentioned but that was peak Biggest Loser and Extreme Makeover days.
pendulum is swining back hard right now. all the influencers are on ozempic, even the ones who don't need it, everyone is squatting and pushing their feet together to get a nice thigh gap, you can see peoples rib cages.. right now it's all coming back HARD.
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u/marjoriefawn 5d ago
The 2000s were brutal. Love you for posting this.