so, you're skinny. what else?

on existing as a woman with a body and the religion of thinness

When you spend most of your childhood and adolescence being told you need to lose weight you carry that thought into adulthood.

Even after years of therapy I still struggle with a predisposition to emotional eating and low self esteem. Voices reside in my brain, whispering cruel observations, making me feel anxious and guilty about food or skipping a day at the gym. I resist. I tell myself that recovery is not linear. That I am allowed to slip and indulge. I just can’t let myself get sucked into the vicious circle again.

When I was still on Twitter, I noticed that a lot of anorexia, restrictive eating, and dieting content began circulating on my timeline. At first I was surprised that the same content my impressionable brain was consuming at the age of fourteen on Tumblr was making rounds on Twitter, in between tweets about ClubChalamet and Brat Summer. I didn’t gave it too much attention, but then I realized it wasn’t an isolated incident. Everywhere I looked, there it was, the thiness propaganda, spreading like a fungal infection. Superficial, in some cases. In others, so detrimental that it went right up to the brain. The subject too far gone to even notice the illness it carried.

This content wasn’t just on Twitter. My TikTok FYP started showing me low-calorie recipes, flat tummy workouts, and videos of women talking about how green tea was nature’s Ozempic, saying I needed to start drinking chia seeds, do the 12-3-30, and change my weight lifting work-out to pilates.

Both disgusted and entranced, I was unable to scroll past these tweets and videos. I figured that even if I wasn’t doing what they told me, I could at least watch them do it. It was punishment, and it gave me enough satisfaction without jeopardizing my progress. Before falling into a vicious cycle I knew too well, I had to snap myself out of it. I muted the words edtw, thinspo, and calories from my account settings because I didn’t trust myself to not engage with this type of content.

Yet, nothing scared me more than thinking my algorithm knew me so well that it knew I was susceptible to pro-ana propaganda.

I don’t belive that anymore. I don’t think our algorithm knows us as well as they tell us. I believe that this phenomenon is so pervasive in our culture that it is almost inescapable. Apps are most likely showing this content to people who have managed to skip the disordered eating phase in their life, leaving barely anyone unscathed.

Here’s the thing: I was able to stop engaging with this content before it was too late. But, I’m sure other women and girls weren’t.

Since childhood we have been conditioned to use most of our energy and mental space to care about our weight, and with the expansion of globalization and the fact that kids as little as 8 years old have social media accounts, so called “thinspo” seems unavoidable. It’s in our house, school, billboards, commercials, place of work and of course all over social media—I can barely make it a day on any app without seeing something about Ozempic, green juice, reformer pilates and guilt free brownies that probably taste like eggs and shit.

I could aquire all the tools and techiniques in the world to help me regulate my emotions and radically accept my reality, but what are those worth if everything in my enviroment tells me I’m wrong for existing as I am? How long do I have until I fall down the rabbit hole again?

A few days ago, in the middle of a conversation with coworkers, one of them confessed using ozempic for a month. She said “I lost 3 kg the first two weeks.” My other coworker’s eyes glistened as she listened. She looked like a kid in candy store and said “I can’t believe I didn’t know about this. How much did you pay for it?”

I tried my hardest not to start a rant. I knew that this was a conversation where my opinion was going to go above their heads. Choose your fights wisely, they say. “Weren’t you unhappy? I mean food is not just substance, eating is also part of our culture and social life” was what I asked her. “Vanity above all” was her response.

I thought in real life, I wouldn’t have to be subjugated to the thinness propaganda, but lately it seems like there is not a place on this earth where I can just exist as I am. People might not be telling directly to my face that I need to loose weight. But they are implying they would do anything in their power to lose weight. So, why shouldn’t I'?

Even on Substack, a platform where people claim to be more critical of this type of behaviour I find notes like this circulating my home page.

It’s not that I want women to be ashamed of their struggles. But it seems like talking like this is now the norm and it shouldn’t. Something that was once kept like an embarrasing secret has become so normalized it is spoken as if it were the weather.

If talking about our experiences, the good, the bad and the ugly is what we strive for, there are many ways to do it with care and respect. Recently two of my favorite writers on this app (eve and

Lucie Eleanor

) published pieces talking about this.

I can’t wait to be thin

You're So Vain

I felt very seen and could relate to a lot of their struggles while reading them. It made me feel less alone to know I am not the only one troubled by this. But, overall I just feel sad that women all around the world are on the same path of vanity and self hatred.

All women eventually recognise the importance placed upon their bodies. It is as though girls are walking through a forest unaware and are then shown the trees. They can wonder how the trees got there, how long they have been growing and how deep their roots really go. But there is little they can do about them and it is almost impossible to imagine the world any other way.

The economics of thinnes (2022)

Thinnes as religion

For centuries women have been as devoted to their physical appearance as to the god they believe in. Our dedication and obsession to thinnes is so strong that it resembles spiritual allegiance.

We worship our imaginary bodies and the way they would look if we lost 5kg. We dream about looking like runway models, because we have convinced ourselves that’s what heavens must feel like. We count calories, macros and track our daily steps to keep us in check. We even have our sacred images. Pictures of women we would like to look like. They are our saints, who we pay tribute to, who we aspire to be. Gluttony is the sin we are more scared of. We mustn’t eat more than absolutley necessary to survive. We mustn’t be greedy. We must remain obedient. But to who? Who is our lord in the religion of thinness?

In Gender, Power, and the “Religion of Thinness”, Michelle Lelwica argues that women devoted to losing weight may not constitute a religion in the traditional sense, but the rituals, the beliefs and the sacrifices we must uphold in the persuit of thinnes function much like a religion. She writes,

Through her dieting rituals— counting calories, going to the gym, confessing “slips,” stepping on the scale— a woman’s body is distinguished and sacralized, her fears and dreams are stimulated and managed, and prevailing social norms and structures are negotiated and reproduced… As part of a larger network of cultural norms, beliefs, and images, weight-loss rituals do not simply create an ideal female body; they generate a worldview, an embodied sense of self-definition, and a precarious method for navigating the limits and possibilities of being female in America at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

When my coworker told me that she didn’t care about the consequences of supressing her hunger because she cared more about losing weight than living a fulfilling life, I started to think about how much the pursuit of thinness resembles religious practices. Acts like controlling your hunger, ignoring your cravings, eating plain food instead of feasting are all based on guilt, restraint and fear. Emotions that most religions have use historically to keep its followers in check.

According to some religions what you put into your body and how you treat it is a reflection of who you are. Lelwica, explains that “mastering one’s physical urges has been central to the Christian life, for example, not because flesh and spirit are separate in classic Christian theology, but precisely because they are hierarchically linked. Thus one’s physical body can be used to improve the state of one’s soul.”

I am not a religious person, and I don’t believe people need to be part of a congregation to live a fulfilling, peaceful life, but I do think that for some people who don’t follow any religion there are certain things that can replace the void that religion might fill in others. Food was that thing for me.

After sworing I wouldn’t let orthorexia ruled my life I decided that I could eat anything I wanted, even when I wasn’t hungry. Food made me feel full and I desperately needed to fill the emptiness inside me. It was like all the hunger from years of restriction had awoken and I couldn’t have enough. Eating more than I could stomach felt like I was revealing against the culture that told me I was too fat to be worth anything. The same culture that made me loose so much weight I looked unrecognizable and that rewarded me for making myself sick.

I used to believe indulging in carbs, and dense calorie foods was an act of resistance. But I’m not so naive now. Personal choices don’t matter as long as the machine keeps working and feeding thinness propaganda. Individual actions might feel empowering to us but they don’t really have an effect on society unless they become group actions.

What influence does my individual choices have if every woman around me keeps upholding unsustaniable beauty standards? What does it mean when they tell me “you are beautiful” but we share the same body type and they keep talking about how much they hate theirs?

Lelwica, further argues that the “religion of thinness” is seductive because it fosters a sense of virtue, purity, and self-worth without requiring one to delve into the deeper issues of what it means to act ethically in our complicated world. In this sense, I believe that for a lot of people the persuit of thinness is not about health or aesthetics, is about feeling safe in a hostile enviroment.

For some women it might be easier to focus on their physicality and have a “vanity above of all” mentality than facing reality. To them I ask: has been thin brought you any real happiness? Has your lack of proper nutrition made you a mean and miserable person? Is skinny all you are? Is there more to you?

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I used to think that if I had defined abs my life would drastically change for the better. But even underweight I never got those defined lines in my abdomen, and to be honest, thinness never brought me any real happiness. It was not at all worth the pain. I don’t look back to that time wishing I still looked like that. When I look at my pictures from 2019-2021 I just remember how afraid I was to eat butter, or fried food and smile because of how far I’ve come. Now, my belly is all soft and when I sit rolls form, and I’ve never been more neutral about my body.

The recovery journey is long, and some days it feels so far away I think I’ll never reach the other side. But I have accepted that I am not the type of person who wants to engage in restriction in any shape or form. I want to live life fully. I want to practice hedonism when I can. I want to feel more joy than guilt. Weight management is one of the ways society controls women and I want no part in that play.

Spending your whole life performing rituals to downsize your body it’s an impossible task most of us will never achieve. The demands are too high, and the benefits too small. I will never be the “right” size if I want to stay up partying late, or smoke cigarrates, or eat carbs. Most things in this life who produce us joy will make us bloated, or accentuate our dark circles. But, so what? At least we lived, and laughed, and ate, and had a good fucking time.

Articles cited

The economy of thinnes by The Economist (2022)

Redefining Womanhood: Gender, Power, and the “Religion of Thinness” by Michelle Lelwica (2006)