Does the desire to be thinner ever really go away?

In my family, to be pinched is to be loved. Aunties and uncles would nip my cheeks between their fingers and coo. They’d grab my thin arms and ask my mother if I was being fed. She later told me this made her feel like a bad parent, but I learned that I enjoyed adults showing concern over my frame, even at the age of five.

The desire to always be thinner feels never-ending.Credit: Dionne Gain

When I became a tween, thinness was a privilege I needed to maintain. The 2010s were filled with gossip magazines and online posts celebrating disordered eating habits under the guise of wellness: the Kardashians promoted detox teas (glorified laxatives). Celebrity trainers promoted the “baby food diet” of only consuming puréed food. A two-week lemon juice cleanse to remove all the toxins from your body had “worked wonders” for Beyoncé. During these formative years, the world told me that chewing was out and liquidised food was in.

On Tumblr and Instagram, girls with aspirational “thigh gaps” shared their diets: an apple for breakfast, green tea for lunch, and three rice cakes for dinner. Somehow, they would say, they never got hungry, they just didn’t have a big appetite. I followed their directions for as long as my body could withstand before I would inevitably give up and eat something delicious, associating my appetite with failure.

As I aged out of my teenage years, this thinking continued. The issue is: I thought I’d grow out of feeling and thinking this way. That when I started working, I wouldn’t have the time to care. My life would be too glamorous, too sexy, and too exciting to be bogged down by the pursuit of thinness. Yet, I still find myself thinking about my body more times a day than I care to admit.

Even though I’m the fittest I’ve ever been, and we live in an era of so-called body positivity and acceptance, the feeling of inadequacy hasn’t faded, and the diet recommendations never seem to abate.

The demands feel like a punishment for meeting too many levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Only eat between 1 and 4pm. Don’t eat fruit. Drink apple cider vinegar. Carry a five-litre bottle of water on you at all times.

This depressing bank of knowledge might sound like I have an eating disorder. I haven’t been diagnosed with one. Many people around me exhibit these behaviours, and if you ask around, you’d likely see their prevalence too. Older women complain about their weight and say things like, “Oh no, I just couldn’t” when they’re offered anything delicious at a morning tea. I look at them and wonder if it’s a sign of what’s to come for me, if I will still be internally battling myself at their age.

At a wedding, an older woman told me she had stopped eating to fit into her dress. At a clothing store, the salesperson, a woman in her 60s, tells my petite mum she needs to drink smoothies to flatten the lumps on her belly – a body that carried three babies. Self-hatred and the desire to be skinny isn’t a teenage obsession, as I had once thought. It’s a lifelong ambition.

“My grandma says the worst thing you can be is ugly,” my friend tells me. The “Almond Mum” is someone who tells their daughters things like nuts are “little calorie bombs” and asks questions like, “Are you going to eat all of that?” And it makes sense: Gen X and Baby Boomers were surrounded by Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, and ultra-thin celebrities who were ridiculed when they dared to gain the smallest amounts of weight.

One of the major plot points in the 2001 film, Bridget Jones’ Diary, was her weight, and how much better her life would be if she could just get skinnier. At the start of the movie, when she was at her “heaviest”, the scales revealed her “fat” weight to be 61 kilograms, while the goal weight written in her diary was 52 kilograms.

It would be easy to blame social media for these feelings. But we know toxic diet culture predates the past 15 years. In the Victorian era, women would swallow a chemical often found in household cleaners and ingest tapeworms to meet the corsetted, thin-waisted ideal. At the height of the flapper era in the 1920s, tobacco companies promoted chain-smoking to suppress appetites. And now, weight-loss injections like Ozempic are becoming the norm. Sure, social media is exacerbating the problem, but the burden of skinniness was around long before its arrival.

Writing this feels exhausting. Even with social changes and the positivity movement, the results of disordered eating are still overwhelmingly celebrated, while the suffering it causes remains hidden behind closed doors. But it also feels embarrassing. As an adult woman with a privileged lifestyle, I feel expected to pretend I don’t care, that I should be smart enough to rise above societal pressure, and that I shouldn’t be worried about something so trivial.

I know the ultra-thin ideal is irrational. What’s more, I don’t believe that anything less than tiny is perfect. I know the definition of health is vast and looks different for everyone, but the clash between what I know and what I feel is a regular one. I remain firmly stuck in its clasp with no end in sight.

My relationship with my body is improving. Maybe because I refuse to accept a future of self-hatred and mimic those around me. Or is it perhaps because my life really is just too glamorous, sexy, and exciting to care?

Support is available from the Butterfly Foundation on 1800 33 4673, Lifeline on 13 11 14 and Eating Disorders Families Australia 1300 195 626.

Abbir Dib is a social media producer and columnist for The Age.

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