The Cutprice Guignol

Self-control, discipline, hard work, luxury – thinness is back in style, along with the virtues ascribed to having a thin body. But I want to talk about how weight loss represented, for me, the most out-of-control I’ve ever been – and how dangerous the valorisation of thinness and weight loss can be.

Thinness has been at the forefront of cultural conversation about bodies for the last couple of years, with a number of prominent celebrities losing significant amounts of weight (often via the use of weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy) and a new wave of influencers promoting smaller bodies (mostly for women) via social media trends like SkinnyTok. The thin body is back in fashion, as absurd as it is that body types can go in and out of fashion at all.

Look, I’m not trying to argue that there are no good reasons that a person could work towards losing weight – fundamentally, my philosophy is to do what you want with your body as long as you’re not using it as a way to punish or harm yourself in the process. Which is very much not where I was at when I was in the midst of an eating disorder which spanned several years of my early-to-mid twenties; I’ve written a bit about that experience before, if you’d like to read about it, but the main detail to know for this subject is that I was the thinnest I was as an adult during the time that I was most unwell.

So much of this talk of weight loss is couched in language that is meant to frame it in a certain light; as a virtue, a skill, even a luxury good, proof of your discipline and self-control. Studies repeatedly show that thinness is perceived as a signifier of positive traits like higher motivation and higher levels of social competence. Quotes framed as weight loss motivation frame thinness as having inherent value (“skinny is the outfit”, “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”) and anything that counters is as unworthy or even inhuman (“you don’t need a treat. You’re not a dog”). “Being skinny sends a message…that you’re not just hot, you’re high-value”, as popular TikTok user Brooke Moly (who describes herself in her bio as “ur skinny bestie”) puts it – while a thin body is functionally neutral, culturally, it’s come to represent this almost alchemic blend of beauty and personal virtue.

And it was that which made recovery from my restrictive eating disorder even more difficult than it already was. Because it wasn’t just that I was giving up the habits and coping mechanisms that had made life bearable when it had so frequently felt the opposite, but I was giving up a body that reflected, to many people, positively on me. My thinness – and particularly the weight loss that led to it – were spoken of and framed in these terms of self-control and virtuousness. People complimented not just my body, but the perceived discipline that I must have used to achieve it.

The irony in it for me, though, was that I was never more out of control or undisciplined than when I was at the height of my eating disorder. While EDs can offer some sense of stability and comfort at first, as they take hold, the control moves from the sufferer to the illness; where once I felt like I was making the disciplined choice to exercise for hours at a time or to eat a specific low-calorie meal plan, by the time I entered recovery, those decisions had become painful, miserable compulsions that I was too wracked with anxiety not to force myself to see through. I was bingeing frequently, completely lost to that frantic demand my body was putting on me to eat something, anything, to the point that I often ended up in excruciating pain afterwards. I was purging in ways that I found disgusting but that I couldn’t stop doing. I have long-term stomach issues to this day that I likely would never have experienced had I not launched an full-frontal attack on my digestive system for years on end. I was out of control, completely, utterly, even if my body was sending the message that I wasn’t.

Self-control, for me, came in the form of recovery. Eating a reasonable amount, exercising moderately, and, yes, gaining weight became the symbols for discipline instead of the over-exercise and excruciating all-consuming obsession that an eating disorder had dumped into me. It was hard, far more difficult, in many ways, than living in the grasp of that illness had been. I had carved these grooves into my mind that were easier to follow than to defy, and unsticking myself from them is one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done.

Weight loss can be a matter of self-control and discipline for some people, but it’s not inherently demonstrative of those attributes. I loathe this particular cultural place than thinness seems to have taken (or, rather, re-taken); when weight loss or maintaining a low weight is viewed through this lens of the virtues ascribed to it, it ignores the harm that people can do to themselves, either in pursuit of or as a result of their lower weight.

Matters of body image are decidedly personal, but when they become mainstream, I think it’s important to discuss both sides of the equation – not just the virtues that are so commonly associated with weight loss and thinness, but the ways in which weight loss can represent a loss of control and wellness. I would be very interested to hear your experiences of weight loss and weight fluctuation with regards to societal trends and perception, so if you’re comfortable sharing them, feel free to do so in the comments below.

If you’d like to support my blog, please consider supporting me by buying my books or dropping me a tip via my Support page.