Should I Delete That? - What happened to body positivity?

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

If you’re listening to this episode, we reckon it’s safe to say you’re well aware of the body positivity movement, or at the very least, one of the fractions of its evolution; whether that be the self love movement or body confidence one. It’s within those, after all, that we really made our names. Today, we’re taking you back to the inception of the body positive movement, which started by and for plus-size black women. In this episode, we dive into how the movement has changed beyond recognition - and where its future may lie. Thanks so much to our amazing guests who feature on this episode: Stephanie Yeboah, Jade Elouise, Holly Hagan and Phillippa DiedrichsFollow @stephanieyeboah on InstagramPre-order Stephanie’s book Chaotic Energy: The hilarious, heartfelt, must-read romantic comedy now! Follow @justjadeelouise on InstagramRead more about the work of Fat Liberation London hereFollow @fatliblondon on InstagramFollow @hollyhaganblyth on InstagramFollow @phillippa.diedrichs on Instagram Read more about Phillippa’s work at: https://www.phillippadiedrichs.com/ If you would like to get in touch - you can email us on [e-mail] Follow us on Instagram:@shouldideletethat@em_clarkson@alexlight_ldnShould I Delete That is produced by Faye LawrenceMusic: Dex RoyStudio Manager: Dex RoyTrailers: Sophie RichardsonVideo Editor: Celia GomezSocial Media Manager: Emma-Kirsty Fraser Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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If you're listening to this episode, we reckon it's safe to say that you're well aware of the body positivity movement or, at the very least, one of the fractions of its evolution, whether that be the self-love movement or the body-confidence one. It's within those, after all, that we've really made our names. Despite starting out in fashion and beauty journalism, most of my online work now revolves around body confidence and self-acceptance. I opened up about my struggles with eating and weight in an off-the-cuff Instagram post six years ago and everything kind of snowballed from there. I gained a following of mostly women who had also struggled and or still do struggle and I began to cultivate a space that strive to help heal bad body image and allow us to move to a place of body neutrality. I speak with less authority on the topic, but it's been a movement that I too have been a part of, or at least under the

umbrella of, because it's important here that we stress the distinction between body positivity and movements like the body confidence and self-loved ones that were born from it. Because honestly, our place as two straight-sized white women is not in the body-positive movement. A movement started by and four plus-sized black women. And so we want to be careful to make that distinction before we delve into the effects that the somewhat co-opted whitewashed version of body positivity, as we think of it now, had on society. And my, oh my, there is a lot to get into. But first, let's take it right back to the inception of the movement

and talk you through the history of body positivity. Body positivity has its roots in fat acceptance. A radical political movement started in the 1960s to liberate fat bodies. It was largely spearheaded by fat black women and women of colour as a safe space to exist in their own bodies, protected from a world where they were discriminated against and pushed to the margins of society. With the rise of Instagram in 2012, women from all corners of the world were able to use the hashtag body positivity to find other marginalised individuals, share support and advice and feel accepted.

But as body positivity gained popularity, its meaning became distorted and people in socially acceptable bodies, like me, it's worth admitting, began to populate the hashtag. This gained momentum and by 2020, body positivity had turned into a space dominated by privileged bodies. 2020 analysis of 246 body positivity Instagram posts found that only 43% actually featured larger bodies and 67% featured white women. Body positivity had also become an advertising tool, commodified and adopted by brands for commercial gain using a very narrow vision of fatness.

Women with hourglass figures, flat stomachs and no cellulites, all that otherwise fit the standard of beauty apart from being just a couple of sizes larger. The women were not marginalised, yet their images were used by companies to jump on the bandwagon of body positivity. This, in fact, just led to yet another beauty ideal, one that is unattainable for most fat women, yet one that, they are told, now represents them in the media. This further shuts out fat people and especially larger fat people, those who are truly marginalized and have been erased from the one place that they were safe in, while body positivity now centres the experience of people suffering from body image concerns, rather

than the experience of fat people, disabled people, black people, people of colour and trans people fighting for their right to exist in a world that is inherently against them. It's incredibly important that we recognise the origins of this now very mainstream movement and the ways in which it continues to ostracise the very people who needed it and continue to need it. Uncomfortable as it is to admit, I have definitely contributed to the problem here. With no idea of the origins of the movement initially, I interpreted body positivity, literally, naturally coming to the conclusion that being positive about our bodies can only be a very good thing, and I was really quick to join the trend,

despite being a white, a straight-sized influencer who wasn't even close to being a victim of marginalisation. I'm really grateful to creators like Stephanie Eboa, who helped educate me on the real, not only origins, but necessity of the body positivity movement and why it needs to be preserved, which is why when it came to this episode, it felt important to call on Steph for her knowledge. Can you talk us through the use of the word fat as a neutral descriptor? Absolutely. So with the word fat, obviously, we know that it is a term that has historically been used as an insult. It's been used as a way to taunt others about weight. And so because of that, it just has this really negative impact on body image.

And so I think I would say over the last 10 to 12 years since the rise of the body positivity movement, we have seen an increase in people wanting to reclaim that word fat because like other body types, such as, you know, slim, thin, tall, muscular, you know, fat is also a descriptive word. It just describes a body shape, a body type. There shouldn't be anything negative attached to it in the same ways that the other body descriptors are. But unfortunately, because we live in a very fatphobic society that kind of shames bigger bodies,

this specific word is incredibly loaded with negativity and it's seen as an insult. And so for me and other people within the community, we've kind of decided to reclaim that as a neutral descriptor because for me, it doesn't indicate. or have any bearing on my worth or my impact as a human being. And for me, I've always just thought, well, if I can call myself fat, what else can somebody, like, what is the worst thing that somebody else can call me outside of fat?

Because if I'm referring to myself as fat, then they can't really come back at me with anything else because I've already acknowledged that and I don't see it as a bad thing. And so for me and a lot of other people, it's just about reclaiming. that word and taking the negativity out of it and hopefully getting to a point where we can normalise fatness in a way where people just see it as yet another body type and not automatically demonise it. What does it mean to you personally to reclaim the word fat? So for me reclaiming the word fat is hugely significant to me because it was a word that really ruled me for a lot of my and early adult life, I tied all of my self-worth to that word. And because in my mind,

I've always seen it as a negative. It made me feel as if I was undesirable. It made me feel like I was almost dehumanized. It made me feel as if my body was the reason why people didn't like me. And so it was very important for me to reclaim that word because once I did that, I could take the power out of it. Once I stopped associating my self-worth with my weight, that's when I realized that things began to get a lot better for me. I started being able to do things that I wouldn't normally do because of the self-shame that I would normally feel that was attributed to these things. And also, it didn't give anyone power over me the way it used to. And that is a really freeing feeling when you can walk out into the world unapologetically in the

body that you're in and know that nobody's words can hurt you because you've already, you know, decanted the power out of, out of that word. So then it's like, well, that's not the worst thing somebody can call me anymore. And if the worst thing somebody can say to me is attributed to my body, then for me, it feels like I'm doing quite a good job because that must mean that my personality is great, my spirit is great, my aura is great, everything about me is great. And if the worst thing you can say is, oh, she's got some fat on her body, then I'll take it happily. It doesn't bear any worth on me at all. What does body positivity mean to you? And do you align with the movement where it is currently? The body positivity movement for me meant being in a safe space filled with

predominantly women who could share their stories and their anecdotes of growing up in a world that hated their bodies. At the time where we kind of had the third wave of it, which was predominantly online through platforms such as Tumblr and Facebook, and then it eventually moved on to Instagram. It was a community of people who were predominantly larger fat. And we just came together to kind of just share our stories,

to talk about what we went through growing up. It was a place where people would share their fashion as well. So it was like, you know, if you're plus size and, you know, we had such limited fashion places to shop back then. So if you found something that was awesome, you wanted to share it. And a lot of the time, it was ASOS. That was like the main place.

When ASOS started doing plus size clothing, we were all in these communities sharing, like the latest links and things. And so it was a place for us to share our fashion. It was a place for us to kind of share our stories and to feel seen, I think, was the big thing. Back when I was heavily involved in it, it was predominantly sort of larger fat, plus size.

and it was just a place to feel recognized and to feel humanized and to not feel as if your existence was a hindrance in any way. It was a place to make friends. It was a place to just share resources as well. And I would say, do I feel like it resonates with me in the here and now? I would say no. Only because over the last five years there has been a bit of a schism, I think, especially once the pandemic hit. I always say the pandemic was such a huge change when it came to body positivity because what that meant was, even before that,

we started to see body positivity hit the mainstream and brands started to latch onto this sense of inclusivity. However, what they would do is when it came to influencers, advocates, models, they would only use the smaller fat because that was what they saw as desirable. So once you kind of hit over a size 16, it was like, no, we don't want to use you. And so I think a lot of us started to see that

and started to feel a bit marginalized in a community that was meant to celebrate larger fatness. We started to see ourselves not be that standard of beauty in our own community. And I think once the pandemic hit and we started to see people at home a lot more, which meant a lot of people that had always been slim or smaller their whole life started to gain weight

because we were all at home, we couldn't go out. And so we saw a lot of mid-sized content because suddenly people that were size 10s were now size 14s and they didn't know how to, not exist, but they didn't know how to shape or to dress their new bodies. They weren't used to having this bit of weight on. And so we started to get a lot of content.

Rightfully so, we started to get a lot of content from people that were between a size 12 to size 16s, coaching women, talking to women about existing in these new bodies. which was absolutely fine. But because it ran so synonymously to the body positivity community, it started to kind of take it over to the point where a lot of larger fat women felt marginalised in their own community. And I think once brands and publications latched onto it,

they saw midsize as the new plus size. And so what you'll find is when it comes to things like models and things and clothing, you kind of don't really see a lot of plus size people in those positions anymore. society now sees like a size 16 as plus size which is inherently quite dangerous because then you have all of these people that are a size 22, 24, 26, 28 who now are not existent in the conversation

because we're not made to feel as if our bodies matter. So for me, I wouldn't necessarily say that I see the current body positive trend as representative of me. I think I've kind of moved on to like more of the neutral space. I think, because now I just don't give a shit about my body at all. I'm actually just tired of it, if I'm being honest. I'm tired of having to be positive all the time.

It's just exhausting. I just leave me alone. A lot of the people who the body positivity movement was made for no longer align themselves with body positivity. And one of these women is Jade Eloise. She started on Instagram as the body posy poet and spoke, to us about how with the evolution of body positivity, it's a movement that she now feels that she can no longer align herself with. Can you explain to us for those who don't understand

the true origins of body positivity? Because many of us have only witnessed its emergence on Instagram and through brands in recent years. And I think that's not like a bad way to come into body positivity at all. I think online spaces is where a lot of people have found body positivity. From at least my understanding of body positivity, it was almost an off branch of fat liberation and fat acceptance. Often, at least in the early 2000s and I guess in the early starts of fat liberation, which began kind of like 1960s, 1970s, it didn't include people of colour within that movement.

So when it came to a point of people of colour wanting to actually take up space and understanding that a lot of the anti-fat bias that we have, comes from racist origins and maybe we can talk about that a bit later I think people wanted to find a space where it was for all marginalised bodies and could be more inclusive. So with online spaces

it provided people with a platform to show up and take up space in a much, I guess, more of a soft protest way and I think that's what body positivity was born of actually just fat black people saying, I'm here and I'm going to take up space. I think now's a great time to talk about the anti-fatness and its links with racism. Could you explain that?

Yeah, absolutely. So there's a fabulous book by Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body. And within it, she looks through the history of how anti-fat and anti-black bias developed. So thinking around slave trade and how white society was introduced to black bodies, but wanted to separate themselves from what they saw as kind of second-class citizens. And black bodies were stereotypically quite voluptuous, curvy, larger. So the easiest way to then separate white society from black society was, okay, so white society is slimmer. So black society is bigger and we want to continue to make sure that we can show in a really obvious way that white bodies stay slim

and that being black is and being big is undesirable. So Sabrina Strings explains it far better than I ever could, but it's a really great book and exploration of how actually at various points in time throughout white society and throughout Western society, bigger bodies have been seen as desirable. But once the black bodies were introduced into Western society, that started to change. So there's really close links between how we view black bodies and how we view fat bodies, which is why it's so important that body positivity or any movements around body image also look at the links between racism as well. Can you tell us why in recent years you have stepped out of the movement and why you felt like it was no longer an inclusive and safe space for you?

Do you know what? It broke my heart to have to start to let body positivity go. It's been a huge part of my journey and my identity for a very long time. But I'd say over the past year and a half, two years I started to realise that body positivity no longer held space for bodies like mine. even though that movement was forefronted by fat black women we've just been entirely pushed out if you search social media for body positivity now you're very unlikely to see anyone that looks like me you're very unlikely to see much queer representation

much people of colour you're not likely to see various body sizes and shapes what you're going to see is mostly slim white women and you're going to see I guess what's been considered acceptable fat so being a small fat being a good fat, this idea that you're only worthwhile as a fat person if you're actively trying to lose weight or you're actively trying to keep fit, which is not what body positivity

was supposed to be about. Body positivity was supposed to be about understanding that actually no matter what your body looks like, you are deserving of taking up space and getting respect from society and being treated equally, it is within itself meant to be a social justice movement, whereas now it's become more about self-love and self-love is brilliant I think everyone deserves self-love but that isn't the roots of body positivity so I didn't feel represented by that space anymore

and lots of people I know that started in body positive no longer feel represented in that space and don't feel accepted in that space either we often get a lot of hate comments for even trying to show up in that space so I had to find another movement that worked better for me and I'd love to talk about the movement that you did find but before we do, what do you think it was that changed the body positivity movement?

When did you first start noticing it shift away from the social justice element and become more, I guess, palatable, marketable, or marketed? Like, when did you notice that change? And what do you think caused it? I think it's probably unfortunately quite a natural evolution that comes with a space where so many people were interested in body positivity. eventually capitalism was going to find its way into. And that meant more brand deals, more marketing opportunities for people in the body

positive space, which is fantastic. But unfortunately, the more mainstream that became, the more that different agencies, different corporations wanted to make body positivity more palatable, which meant removing marginalised people from that because they've watched things about who they're marketing that message towards. And I think body positivity, the naming around it is so soft. It doesn't necessarily say social justice. It doesn't necessarily say protest.

It's easily misconstrued to mean being positive about your body, which is not kind of the idea of the message. But because so many people took it to mean being positive about yourself, I think that's when we started to see less and less people of colour, less and less bigger bodies showing up in that space. or they were still there but they were just being overshadowed by the more palatable bodies

and I think also the way that certain social media platforms perhaps favour different types of bodies over others also goes a lot into that as well and which bodies are actually visible within social media platforms speaking about the people that came into the movement those who wanted to adopt a positive relationship with their bodies but who didn't need it in the way that a lot of people who'd previously been marginalised did.

Where do you think those people belong? People who are in more mainstream bodies, people who are smaller, but who still feel very unhappy within their own bodies, who still have insecurities, who still have never felt like they fit society's idea of beautiful because obviously we know that no woman ever will, because that's the point.

where do you see or where do you feel that those women belong within this conversation I guess it really depends what it is that you're looking for from your community because that's the thing whenever we're using any sort of hashtag or slogan what we're really saying is I'm trying to find people that are on the same journey as me and belong to the same community as me so if you're looking to love and accept yourself then there's self-love and there's body acceptance movements. If you're looking to actually release yourself from the shackles of diet culture, then an anti-diet movement would be for you.

If you're looking to actually stop having to think constantly about what you look like and what you're doing with your body and you just want to be able to just exist, body neutrality is perfect for that because it's less about feeling like you have to almost have that toxic positivity of always loving yourself and always being happy. yourself, but just accepting that no matter how you're feeling about your body, your body is always worthy and deserving of being treated well and with respect. That's the perfect movement for that. This is a big question and a broad one. But living within diet culture and living within a world that upholds it, where thinness is idealised, what is it like to navigate the world

as a plus size woman? Oh, that's a great question. It is complicated. everything that I do and everything that I have ever done showing up in the world, I have thought about my body. And that's exhausting. I don't want to have to think about my body all of the time. I remember when I was a teenager in my early 20s and I would go on dates with people. I thought about everything from the way I sat in my chair to my posture to my breathing because there's this connotation around fat people being out of breath because we're unhealthy.

So I'm thinking I have to regulate my breathing. I have to not be too hot or too sweaty when I'm going to the gym. And it's all of these thoughts that I shouldn't have to be having just existing in the world. Of course, if you go to the gym, you're going to get hot and sweaty. That's the entire point. But I felt like I had to somehow exercise because that's what I wanted to do and that's what society expects of me, but also do it looking as demure and feminine as possible because that's also what's expected of fat bodies to fit in.

So there's all these additional layers to how we exist, the way that we think, the way that we feel. And it shouldn't have to be that way. And I think that's the most tiring thing about existing in the fat body is knowing how other people view you and wanting to combat that messaging. And then when you add other layers of marginalisation into that, so then showing up as a fat woman and knowing that as a woman, so that's one layer of repression, then as a black woman, so that's one layer of oppression, then as a black woman, another as a fat woman another, even when I go to the doctors, I'm not believed for any health ailments that I'm struggling with because all the doctors see is someone who clearly doesn't know about her health and well-being because they think I'm fat and therefore have no knowledge of health. So yeah, really complicated. And exhausting. Yeah. Being black and queer means

your body is further marginalised and you just touched on it there. But do you think that has contributed further to your experiences. Absolutely, yeah. I think whenever we add different intersection identities into the mix, it really then creates different layers of nuance, different layers of difficulty and obstacles. And also just not everybody is going to understand your lived experience. We can only really understand fully experiences

that we've been through for ourselves. And even within, in fact, Liberation, London, everybody has different backgrounds, different life experiences and we can't expect to be able to understand everything each other have gone through but we can empathise with each other with the knowledge of we know what it's like to be oppressed from at least one of those angles and we come together to support each other and I guess hold space for those feelings as well but it's never as simple as just people treating me differently for being fat there is always those layers as well of I didn't think I could

show up as a queer person because I didn't know how people would treat me for having another thing that was different about myself. And it took me a long time to accept myself as a disabled person with chronic illnesses because I've been told for so long that I was just lazy and I was unfit because I was fat. And so the things that I was struggling with were just pushed the side because all people could see was the size of my body. So one of those different labels that people use to identify with, it's just us trying to explain to the world who we are. But the more labels we add, it feels like the more we shunned for it. What, in your opinion, are the most vital steps we need to take in order to continue

or to begin dismantling fat phobia forever? I think understanding our own messaging that we've experienced around fatphobia, whether it's come from people trying to police our bodies when we're younger and restricting our food or encouraging us to exercise so that we don't get fat, whether it's from being weighed in schools, whether it's from the magazines and the different media that we've taken in, or whether it's just a more generic feeling of that fear of getting fat, not wanting to be fat,

whenever your experiences are of fat phobia in your life, understanding where those have come from and unpacking what that means to you, I think is the best first step you can take. Then after that, it's just thinking about how you want to show up in society. do you want to be a person who thinks negatively of someone without any knowledge about their life or who they are just because of the size of their body?

Or do you want to be the person that treats everyone with equal respect? And if that's who you are, if you're someone who believes, no matter what you look like, you are deserving of respect, you are deserving of equal care, health care, and wellbeing within society, then you do have a body positive mindset. And if you want to then be an advocate for other people's body, then you're really embodying what body positivity was supposed to be. So let's dig a little deeper into the whitewashing of the movement.

The way in which brands jumped on the bandwagon and in doing so sullied the message. How exactly were the women who laid the foundations for the entire thing, subsequently pushed out of it? In order to do this, we need to rewind a few years to when the big, body positivity movement became mainstream because whilst it has undoubtedly caused damage, it has also done more for body diversity and representation in the media than anything that has ever come before it. It has been responsible for a cultural shift. And within that, it has enabled a lot of women to heal their relationships with their bodies to a place

that they may never have been able to imagine before. To put this into some perspective, I think we need to take a little minute to really look at how far we have come in what is a relatively short period of time. And yes, we have to stress that we have to stress that we never really got as far as we needed to get before the movement started to shrink back into itself. But a win is a win. So let's take a moment for the wins. Plus size model, Ashley Graham, is widely considered the poster girl of modern day body positivity and the 2010s saw her break a lot of new ground in the space. In 2016, she made history by becoming the first curvy model to grace the cover of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. 2017, meanwhile, saw the first ever step

into plus-size territory for revered fashion Bible Vogue with a cover depicting seven models, including Ashley Graham. It was in 2018 that a postpartum Ashley had a seminal Instagram moment when she shared an intimate close-up of her body. It showed stretch marks, cellulite and fat rolls. Do you remember this Instagram post? I do. Me too.

I can see it so clearly in my head. Extraordinary to think, you know, now, particularly the circles that we're in, the body confidence spaces that, you know, so many of the creators that we follow inhabit, this content is 10 a penny. It's everywhere. Right. But it wasn't. It was not. It was huge when it started. It felt like a real groundbreaking moment and the proof is in the pudding. The photo amassed almost 1.4 million likes and over 24,000 comments, most of which were women praising Ashley and thanking her for making them feel more just normal. The search of her, the search,

of appreciation was indicative of the appetite for this kind of relatable content and a stream of influencers followed suit, sharing their own authentic images on the app. Another plus size model who made waves in the fashion industry around this time was Iskra Lawrence, who became the ambassador for lingerie brand Airy in 2014. It was this year that the company announced they were stopping any airbrushing in their imagery, launching their airy reel campaign celebrating women as they are. I loved it. I remember it. Just distinctly and I loved it. But it has to be noted that any wins in terms of body diversity were always met with pushback.

Plus size model, Tess Holiday, was featured on the cover of Cosmo in 2018 and it was a huge deal. A spot previously reserved exclusively for very thin women. To see a size 24 women gross the cover of a glossy magazine was groundbreaking. But very predictively, it sparked national debate and I use that term loosely, mostly mostly revolving around Tess's health, which was nobody else's business but her own, but that didn't seem to stop the likes of Piers Morgan using his slot on morning television to fixate on the topic. God, do you remember the noise around this? I wish I didn't. A similar pattern played out again in 2019 when Nike introduced a plus-sized mannequin into its flagship

London store. This was undoubtedly a positive step for body diversity, but wow, was it controversial. The brand's move became a nationwide talking point and we were inundated with think pieces about how our society was enabling and promoting obesity. It definitely put a dampener on what should have been a really positive moment. On this, I actually think to take a step back from it, to try and explain it to an alien, what an extraordinary situation. We have spent the last six episodes really exploring the pressure on women to be thin and how exercise ought to be used as a tool in order to get there. For the first time in 2019,

they are using curvy women or curvy mannequins as part of the marketing push and then everybody's angry. So we've spent millennia telling these women, exercise, exercise, exercise, exercise. If you're fat, you need to exercise. But if you're fat, you should not be in exercise clothes. Right.

We don't want to see you. What are you supposed to do? Sizing or, well, yeah, getting the means to do so. Eat less and move more, but just do it naked. Quietly and non-visibly, thank you. At home. We don't mean to labour the point about positivity backlash, but honestly, another really important example that we need to cover is the rise of plus size singer Lizzo. She skyrocketed to fame in 2016 for her empowering lyrics that were full of affirmations like thick thighs, save lives and feeling good as hell,

cementing her as a body positivity icon. The image of the star strutting around the Glastronbury stage in a skin tight, holographic purple leotard playing a flute, lives rent-free in my head. But Lizzo's newfound icon status brought with it an army of naysayers who were just desperate to share their personal views and opinion on her health. Famously, Fitness Media Personality, Jillian Michaels,

discussed Lizzo's appearance in 2020 after being asked why people are celebrating the musician's body. Why does it matter, she said? Why aren't we celebrating her music? Because it isn't going to be awesome if she gets diabetes. Lizzo's popularity, it has to be noted, took a sharp down turn last year when the singer was hit by a string of allegations, including sexual harassment.

And earlier this year, she announced on Instagram that she was quitting music. It's important to note that in her statement about leaving, she cited part of the reason was being the butt of the joke every single time because of how I look. But despite all of the backlash, the needle was being moved. and we do have to celebrate that because bigger bodies were finally being allowed to take up just a fraction of the spotlight and any representation in the media is a big deal. This, along with posts like Ashley's, showing bodies outside of the narrow standard of beauty

we were so used to seeing encouraged a trend of women sharing their own non-airbrushed, non-posed bodies online, which we both tapped into ourselves. Body positivity becoming mainstream helped to shift the dial and I'm not sure we can downplay the positive effects that it had on an individualistic level to so many of us. I am one of those women. Like I grew up devastating me insecure. I honestly hated my body and I know that's a terrible thing to say, but I did. I always felt too big, too fat, too ugly.

I wasn't positive and I wasn't comfortable and my insecurities did dictate my life. I absolutely credit body positivity, body confidence, the self-love movement. Call it what you will with changing my life totally. It empowered me to stop wrapping a towel. around my stomach on the beach for the first time in my life. I wore shorts and I didn't just want to die. I ordered food that I wanted to eat and I learned not to care about who saw me eating it. I basically just let myself show up and be. And yeah, that doesn't sound massive in the scheme of like I built a spaceship that got everyone all the way to Mars achievements. But I don't

think it's particularly hyperbolic to say that this movement gave me a life. I actually think that it does sound massive because shifting your mindset after a lifetime's worth of conditioning is no mean feet. And I think it's really important to hear stories like yours and to understand the impact that this movement had. And I think it's easy for a movement like this to be criticized now that thin is back in or because they didn't or don't serve everyone. But your story is testament to the fact that visibility of larger bodies is not just important, but vital. Yeah, I think I craved connection throughout my teenage years. I think, you know, looking back, throughout all my insecurity, I craved connection with people and women showing up in a very real way gave me

permission, I guess, to show up for myself. I don't know, but I can't philosophize it totally, but I have to credit it with a massive shift for myself. But unfortunately, the world didn't change at the same speed as the bubble that we had suddenly found ourselves immersed in might have led you to believe. But it was thanks to this movement, we started to see women who didn't look like the flawlessly airbrushed and impossibly thin women filled the pages of the magazines I poured over as a child. Finally, the narrative was changing. And it was about more than just the representation that body positivity brought with it. We saw in real time just how right the customer always is. For as long as capitalism has

existed and for as long as diet culture has been a cornerstone of the world we inhabit, it's felt as if we, the public, were powerless to the strings that the marketeers pulled. But with the rise of the body positivity movement, the public appetite changed. And because of that, brands were forced to pivot on previously surefire ways of making money. Call them token tactics, call it woke, call it virtue signaling, call it what you want, change came. More model diversity was suddenly expected on the catwalks. Size ranges of high street clothing needed expanding and the rinse and repeat formulas we'd become accustomed to in our magazines and on our TV screens fell out of favor as quickly as they'd come in, leaving brands forced to shake up their marketing.

The most famous example of this is Weight Watchers. Amid an increasingly diet culture wary landscape in 2018, Weight Watches changed its name to WW, two letters now attached to the tagline, Wellness That Works, to distance themselves from the overt branding around dieting. As we said, we found ourselves in a bit of a bubble, but honestly, comparatively, it was a really good place to be.

Yes, we were still surrounded by all the wankiness of the wellness era that we explored in, last week's episode, and many of us hadn't even started to unpick all of the internalised trauma we accumulated throughout our childhood and teen years, thanks to the pervasive and insidious prevalence of diet culture, but it shifted something. Actually, in me, it shifted everything. It empowered me to question all that I thought I knew about life and how I was expected to exist within it. I still distinctly remember seeing those first few Pinterest quotes rebelling against diet culture and feeling my world's shift on its axis. In fact, so,

profound with the effects that I can recall the first one I ever saw with total clarity. It was a sketch of a woman sitting on a train, looking out the window, and the text read, in a society that profits from yourself doubt, liking yourself is a rebellious act. Dramatic as it sounds, I remember reading that and just thinking, whoa, this shit is feminist, and the more I thought, the more I thought, and I found myself inspired by a lot of the content I was seeing online, challenging so many of the thoughts I'd grown up accepting as normal. At the top of this series, we read the words by Naomi Wolfe that said, A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty,

but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history. A quietly mad population is a tractable one. And it genuinely excited me because I started thinking, oh my God, this is an agenda. Like this whole beauty ideal thing, it's about control and submission, and it's about making me small and keeping us distracted. It's not about my cellulite.

about your profit margins. The whole thing is a massive machine and we were all just pawns in it and what the fuck? It felt like the world in front of my eyes was changing. Helps no doubt by the fact that the soundtrack of the time was changing too. I remember Megan Trainers' song all about that bass. I actually remember my mum playing it to me so excitedly having heard it on the radio and I thought, oh my God, this is so cool. Like yeah, Megan was still relatively slim in the scheme of things, but it was 2015, and she had more curves than had hit the charts in a long time, and the lyrics were just different. You know, I won't be your stick figure, Silicon Barbie doll. So if that's what you're into, then go ahead and move along. Oh, I

loved it. I still maintain that is one of the best pop songs in existence, and I will die on that hill. RIP you on that hill, because yeah, I'm not co-signing that particular claim, but I completely appreciate how that will have felt really revolutionary for you. I am though honestly surprised to hear you talking about that time like that because I have to say none of it even registered for me and I wish I could say the same and I really do but I think that honestly I was still way to immersed in diet culture and probably my eating disorder at that point and nothing like that was ever going to even scratch the surface. I was just far too deep. That's really interesting to me. Like I'm desperate to know when it did kick in, you know, when you

you, yeah, when it got you, when it came for you, because our experiences of this period are so different. So different. And it's just so interesting that none of this registered for me, but that was only my perspective. And I do think that generally, looking back, there was a shift. And pop culture and pop music was a great indicator of the mood at that time, where Pink had always encapsulated the angsty complexity of the young woman's experience. By the 2010, she was releasing songs like fucking perfect. Demi Lovato hit us with Confident. Jesse Jay got us with who you are, along with singles like Scars to Your Beautiful, Fight Song and Love Myself before, of course, there was Lizzo. Now look, we don't really want to take you back to 2020 because we know all that

wasn't the greatest time in the world by any stretch, but it plays an important part in our body positivity timeline. Along with the unprecedented levels of stress, anxiety and depression, the onset of quarantine restrictions prompted a huge uptick in social media consumption. Essentially, we were spending all day, every day on our phones. And whilst there was some weight and body related pressure in the form of content on social media during this time, you might remember people talking about the quarantine 15, referring to the 15 pounds of weight gain, there was a parallel stream of hashtag body positive content. And the trend of people sharing their authentic, unretouched and unposed pictures, despite having already been established prior, really underwent

a meteoric rise in this period. No matter what their account had centred around previously most influences in one way or another took part in this trend. It felt like Instagram had exploded with stretch marks and cellulite and fat rolls and it was an enormous contrast to the glossy curated Instagram we were so familiar with. I well and truly jumped on this trend. At this point, I felt, actually, to come back to what you were asking previously about when all this hit for me, I felt like I was coming out of the other side of my eating disorder after a lot of therapy and I felt super motivated to kick my demons to the curb once and for all. And sharing photos of my body seemed like a great way to throw myself into the deep end, as well as trying to

help others struggling just to feel a little bit better about their bodies. I posted a series of photos of my bodies unposed, showing stretch marks, cellulite rolls, and just generally images that were stereotypically unflattering with hashtag body positivity quotes laid over the top encouraging people to tap into their own self-love. This all empowered me at the time and it really, it really did. The response was incredible and I felt so good about being accepted finally for who I really was. Not the previous me that I downloaded Photoshop before editing apps even existed to learn how to edit my body to within an inch of its life. But it was at this time that my desire to further educate myself around diet culture and body image really ramped up a gear and I threw

myself into research. The more I learn about this incredibly complex topic, the more I realize that maybe self-love and what we come to know as buzzy positivity might not necessarily be the right goal here. Loving our bodies, I cannot stress enough, is a great thing. Of course it is. But self-love for most of us feels like an impossibility, like reaching the summit of Everest without oxygen and wearing a t-shirt. We are so primed and programmed to loathe ourselves to perpetually analyze and monitor ourselves for flaws and to fixate on fixing ourselves that embracing and even celebrating our bodies just seems both completely inaccessible and also unattainable. Plus, do we need to love how we look? Is that in itself a good thing? I'm going to, I know it was

rhetorical and I'm going to let you carry on, but I'm going to circle back to this because it's an interesting question. Okay, I'm interested here. But taking you back to my mindset at the time, surely the goal instead should be body neutrality. That's where I landed at least, that we should be making peace with our bodies to allow us to live our lives without how we look impacting that. In an ideal world, our bodies wouldn't be a social currency, they wouldn't mean higher or lower social status, and they simply just wouldn't even be measured for how they look. Instead, they would be simply and solely the vessels that allow us to navigate the world. They would be instruments, not ornaments, to quote the brilliant Lindsay and Lexi Kite.

I felt like a focus on appearance like what I was doing with my Instagram account by sharing so many photos of my body wasn't necessarily helping that my body and how it looked was still the talking point and surely that's not ultimately helpful either so I eventually pulled back on this trend

I began talking about body image instead using my words to convey the message rather than my image I'm with you super important and you're right and also given the context of like body positivity and what we're talking about in terms of it as a political movement

it is right that we're not centering ourselves solely in this content and I think that is very big of you to be so grown up but I don't know for me I have an like a feeling of if you don't laugh

at me for this quote but if you shoot for the moon you'll land on the stars right like you might not get to the moon but you'll land somewhere great I think I have an element of this when it comes to loving myself It's like, I'm not going to aim for acceptance. Like, that's, that's like, that's just a bit tragic.

It's like, no, I'm going to dream bigger. I'm going to go massive. And if I don't get there, I'm still way better off than what I was. But doesn't that give you something then that is unattainable, a goal that is unattainable? And therefore, when you fail, when you're constantly failing to reach it, it's discouraging. Rather than like, okay, I'm going to start with acceptance. And if and when I get there, I can then move to. love and I think probably I should clarify that I was talking about not loving our bodies for

the way they look yeah like I think we should love our bodies for what they do for us but not for the way they look I don't think that that because if we focus on on that then it's always a focus on how our bodies look and in an ideal world there would be no discussion no acknowledgement of how our bodies look but we don't live in an ideal world we do not and there will always be an element of this there will always be and I think for me I always found body neutrality obviously and obviously this is all works to different people right everything works to different people but i think i've said this to you a lot the thing that i have found absolutely instrumental in all my body confidence endeavors and learning to love myself and this was particularly

true postpartum was i never allowed myself to hide from myself like because my body changed loads when i had arlo obviously because it does and i made myself every day blow dry my hair naked like or do my head get ready naked like I still do that like I get ready every day in my underwear in front of a mirror because I don't want to hide from myself and I think that's the acceptance for me is like this is what I look like and like fuck if I'm not going to love this thing like I'm and and I think not getting there every day I'm like okay whatever I don't feel like I failed I feel like I'm trying and trying feels quite good but you're not but are you try are you trying to look at it and think I love the way this

that this looks. Yes. Good, that's great. Look that. Like that little meat suit. Like a hunk of flesh. Love that. And I think, and that's where body positivity and the content and whatever has been

incredibly helpful for me. Like seeing a lot of it, like seeing beauty in women's bodies, because you can see it so much more easily in other people's. Right. So I'd argue that still seeing other women's bodies, seeing your body, seeing other people's bodies helps me because I see you looking beautiful. And if I think, well, she looks beautiful. I look like that.

I look beautiful. that helps me. Yeah, I agree. And to stress, I think that this iteration of the body positivity movement of all of these photos was absolutely needed from the place that we come from. That's why seeing that post of Ashley Graham was just so shocking. It was honestly really shocking because we'd never seen anyone, we'd never seen anyone represented that lay, that fell outside of the standard of beauty unless it was in a before context like this is their before picture they don't like this horrendous none of us like this is bad this is really bad yeah wait to what we see after we never saw anything like that any bodies like that being celebrated or embrace it that's

that was really exciting and I do think we of course we definitely still need representation yeah it felt for me that the emphasis was too much on how our bodies looked and if that was going to continue, we were never really going to get to the root of why we all feel so bad about our bodies. Yeah. I think I'd always been on a quest to make it look a certain way anyway. I don't think I'm ever going to not. I think it's more achievable. Maybe it's a big claim. I think it's more achievable for me to love myself than to ignore myself. I think I've been so fixated on my body for so long, it's an easier thing for me to transfer those feelings to being ones of love to just having no feelings at all, to making it go away. That's, yeah, I mean, that's amazing.

If the focus is there anyway, I'm like, let's fucking go. Look at those saggy booth. Like you say, we're not in an ideal world and our appearance is still, you know, it's a social currency and we're still valued on how we look. I also say this as someone who is thin, like, and I say this as someone who, even when I'm feeling insecure in my body, still has a very societally accepted body. Even after I had my baby, it wasn't, you know, like... That's the thing. It's so complex. And so individual. So individual. So whether I have a place in the movement talking about loving myself is one thing. And perhaps I don't, because perhaps that's not helpful, because I am still, you know, very accepted body type.

But for me on an individualistic level, it's like, oh no, like we're going, I'm going ham on this thing. Like, I'm going to love her. It's going to be awesome. And that's tied with all of it. That's tight with all I can do and running and eating shit and dancing and just getting dressed and it's all fun. Another point on the like, on the sea, on the like seeing other people's bodies as well is that ultimately it all comes down to a comparison. But again, it's not an ideal world and we're humans and we're hardwired for comparisons but the problem is is that we pin these like newfound feelings of uh appreciation towards our body on people that look like us say you're like oh she looks beautiful she's about my size she looks beautiful that means that i can

look beautiful but what happens if that person loses weight which is what's happening now with the rise of olympic then it gets complicated because still then your self-worth and your is attached value is attached to external validation. Yeah. It's complex. It's so complex and I actually don't know what the right thing is to do. But I think we are testament, this conversation is testament to the fact that there is not a one-size-fits-all situation here, not least of all, because as I've learned to love myself, and I don't know what came first, I do not have the capacity to judge other women's bodies anymore negatively.

and I think it's because I don't judge my own so I kind of keep their bodies over there and my bodies over here I see the beauty in them and then I kind of and I don't know what came first on that I don't know if I learnt to love myself so I could love them too or I learnt to love them

and that meant I could love me so interesting it does mean that I don't hugely associate my worth as in a comparative sense but then that's not the case for everybody it's I know which is why like Adele when she lost weight there was like this people were global outpouring of like rage that's how it that's how it manifested initially

was like angry at her and what it was was people feeling triggered because it was like she represents me she looks like me I can feel better about myself because I know that I've there is someone hugely celebrated that looks like me and suddenly she doesn't like me anymore she looks like everyone else that's already celebrated and that's painful. When it comes to your body neutrality for you, if we go back to our differences here and our differences in like goals and actionable points, how does body neutrality work for you? Is it a case that you just, I'm not going to focus on my body? It's the least interesting thing. And what happens then when like you go swimming or you go on holiday? Like do you still have those feelings? Like what

happens to those feelings, the old feelings? Well, I would, I try and transfer them to, well, I try and transfer them to a place of neutrality, like, rather than, oh God, my, like, I'm thinking about, I'm sat here in my bikini and I'm thinking about all the things that are wrong with my body. It's like, I'm sat here in my bikini. I'm so lucky to be on holiday. Like, this is so cool. I get to go in the sea. I get to, like, soak up the rays and enjoy the sun. I get to play with my baby or be with my family. Try and like reframe that to things that are just nothing to do with my body. It's not going to work for me to try and shift from, I don't feel good about my body to like, my body's incredible. My body is amazing. It like looks amazing. I love how it looks.

How did you feel then posting that content at the time when you were doing it? Posting that content that was still centering your body in the conversation. How did that feel internally? But like I said, It was empowering because people were celebrating it. And I had never felt my entire life, I'd never felt like my body was something that was worthy of celebrating unless I had changed it to a point that it was like, unrecognizable of me. Yeah.

So it felt really good. But it got to a place where I just started to question, I don't know who or why I'm doing this anymore. Yeah. I don't think it's helping me anymore. But I mean internally, like when you see those photos, Is it, how do you feel when you look at photos before you get the validation and before you were getting people being empowered by them? How did you feel about them?

It's a really good question. I think I, but again, I think I only, I don't think I felt great about them before I posted them. And when I did and when I got all the validation, then I felt better about them. But initially I was like, this just goes against everything that I'm totally. that I'm taught is beautiful and again like in relative terms like a still a straight size woman you know in the context of what we're talking about right now I don't think that's relevant I think how you feel to your body right is incredibly valid and I that's the one part of this that I get very wary of is that I do still want there to be space totally for you to

have feelings about your body and me to have feelings about my body because yes we haven't been marginalized but as we've just gone through in the last six episodes we've been fucking targeted and abused and treated terribly the standard of beauty cannot stress as enough is so narrow what's so narrow that even if you were a size 12 arguably even sometimes a size 10 you would still not be small enough to fit into that standard of beauty I spent my whole life as a size 12 and I never felt beautiful it's I'm I've really enjoyed this conversation and I've really enjoyed this conversation actually. So interesting to talk about it. And yeah, I don't know if I'll, it's, it's interesting to talk about that time because it's still like super recent. It's still like, it's

only like four years ago. Yeah, I'll ask you again in five years. Yeah, ask me again in five years. But I guess that just goes to explain where I was at in the time with that decision of pulling back on, on focusing on my image. And I feel like the decision coincided with the sentiment of the time. As with all trends, they come and go and body positivity definitely seemed to be dying down on Instagram. The shift was slow and subtle, but the authentic images gradually became replaced with the flawless post that we used to associate with Instagram, and it felt like the public backlash against body diversity entered new territory, with more and more people loudly voicing their objections to the movement. Many influencers deemed body positivity a lie.

Instagram users took to the app to explain how consuming body positive content had led to weight gain and the conversations around the link between health and weight seemed to take on a new life. You couldn't scroll for more than two minutes without discovering an impassioned rant from a man with a microphone telling us they're all going to die instantly if a BMI is over 25. I think you should have to take a test, like just a driving theory test. If you're a man in your 20s or 30s who wants to buy a microphone. I don't make the rules, but I should. So just like that, the body positivity era was over.

Brands were just as quick to jump off the body diversity bandwagon as they were to jump on. And the fashion industry, a space, of course, historically riddled with fatphobia and the unashamed glorification of thinness, was suspiciously eager to lean back into the thin ideal. After several years of breaking new ground by showcasing plus-size models on the runway during fashion weeks and extending clothing sizes, all of which honestly feel pathetic to even, read. The focus of accommodating not only women of a size 8 was downgraded as a priority and people living in larger bodies once again found themselves lacking the representation they deserve.

The Kardashians, meanwhile, known for spearheading the slim, thick trend of the 2010s, noticed the slim down themselves and were even reported to have reversed their BBLs. A BBL is a surgery called a Brazilian bum lift, which essentially takes fat from the waist and injects it into the bomb. We spoke to Holly Hagan about her experience with this particular surgery. I already had a boob job before even going into Gehaw. I was already insecure. I didn't have much self-worth or self-esteem. I remember going out on a night out and one of the guys being like, see if you just had tits like that, like you'd be amazing. And my friends who had big boobs was just like, yay. And I'm like, oh, I've got nothing here. There's nothing there. But, you know, I just, I wanted a boob job from

literally before I'd even started puberty. So that was always going to happen. I think the only thing that would have potentially prevented me from getting surgery as, like, a normal person probably would have been the finances. You know, when going on Jordy Shaw and we started getting paid after Series 3 and we started getting paid like pretty well, you're then giving like, what, a 20, 21 year old access to all of this money and I didn't have any bills apart from like a phone bill, a car, didn't have a mortgage or anything. So what else am I going to spend my money on when I'm, I have low self-esteem and self-esteem.

worth, of course I'm going to book in with a surgeon and see if I can change the things that all of these people are saying about me and try and make myself look like a Kardashian because they were so at that time at the BBL, they were just so admired and everyone loved them. And I was like, yeah, I can just try and look like a Kardashian and then life is going to be okay. Unfortunately, now looking like a deflated water balloon because of everything, but you live and alone. Do you regret the BBL specifically? Specifically the BBL. because do you know what, now that I am a PT, I am an online coach, I am a nutrition coach, like I've gone through all of these things.

I've just done my pre-impersonatal as well, which I needed after giving birth and everything. But now that I've educated myself and now that I know what my body would be capable of, I didn't have the education in fitness. I didn't have the education in food. I didn't know how to eat well. I didn't know what a calorie deficit was. I didn't know that I could manipulate my body naturally if I just went to the gym and, you know, change these certain things and actually had a coach. Now because I have had BBLs and I have got more

fat around like my hips and bump area, it is going to be so much harder for me to actually be able to get, you know, that kind of like gym body and that proper build that you see people get when they work really hard and they try and build their glutes naturally. My not always going to have so many more fat cells above that. So it's going to be really difficult for me to achieve like that gym body look. I'm always going to have this like abnormal size backside if I do ever gain weight. And this is the reason that I'm actually slimmer now than I ever have been, is because I've been working so hard to get rid of the BBL. Because if I put any weight on, it goes straight to my bum. So I'm now kind of held by this like imaginary crutch being like, well, you, I can't put weight on

now because I can't fit through doors. I literally, if I gain any weight, it goes to a my hips and bum and I look silly. So now I'm just like, oh my God, it's annoying. But, you know, if I ever get pregnant again, it's going to happen again. I'm going to have to go through all of this again. So I can't even gain weight in peace because I'm still reminded of this large backside and this mistake that I made like seven, eight years ago. It wasn't specifically what we wanted to talk to you about. But I do think it's really interesting in the idea that that our bodies and diet culture and all of this is so trend-led and how we are really, I mean, we're kind of like shopping for body parts

in the kind of way that we shop for like anything else that goes in and out of fashion. Is there anything that you would say to your younger self about that sort of thing? Because you, I suppose, have had, I guess, at the different times, the boob job and then you had like Botox or whatever in your face and then you had a BBL.

Obviously, you're not going to regret all of it because some of it is great and some of it's a part of who you are. But is there anything you'd tell your younger self about the kind of trend-specific element to plastic surgery or to figure-enhancing treatments? 100%. I think when, even now, it's like, God, if I just,

I would be happy with my original boobs now at the age of 32. And it's like, I wish that that girl could have seen that these, when you live in it, you don't know that it's a trend, you're just living in it. So at 18, you haven't really had the time or experience to know that boobs are just a trend.

and a couple of years ago they weren't a trend and then they're not going to be a trend again. So to actually see it now as a 30-year-old woman and seeing how boobs were a trend back in when I got mine done it in like 2008 and seeing how BBLs were a trend in like 2011 to 2015, I can now see that all of those different things are going to come and go and now everyone's on a ZemPEC, everyone wants to be super skinny.

So these things are trend-led and it's just to not follow the trends and know that just because you have boobs, it doesn't mean that boys are going to fancy you or not. Like, a man isn't just there because you've got boobs or a bum. And this is kind of what I used to think. I used to genuinely think that the reason people fancied me or didn't fancy me was literally down to body parts.

And then you see me realise that if that actually is the case, they're not the ones for you. And now, obviously, I'm with Jacob and he loves me at any size, any shape, whatever. And he is, like, he's just taught me that actually it doesn't matter what my body looks like. he's always going to be there, he's always going to love me. Yes, we do prioritize our health and we do prioritize exercise. He is a footballer and he does keep me kind of on track and everything, which is great. And he does really help me to live a healthier lifestyle because I am a sloth by nature. I like to do nothing. I like to lay on the settee and I like to eat a lot of food, but it's just allowing me to strike that balance now between, okay, you can be a sloth sometimes

and then if you just exercise sometimes, then you'll be okay. You're getting that nice middle ground. yeah, I'd love to just say to my old self that please don't do that. And not only is a BBL, like, going to look horrendous after you've had a child, it's also so dangerous and you could literally die. And that is not worth anything. At the end of 2022, the New York Post published a headline declaring, Hehram and Sheik is back using the same trend-focused language that we apply to a new pair of genes to refer to our actual fucking bodies and the same language that caused women like Holly to choose to undergo major surgeries like BBL to fit that trend. Although the publication copped a ton of backlash for the article, it seemed to be the final nail in the coffin for

body diversity in the media, and in turn, of course, our cultural acceptance of it. We asked Professor Philippa Diedrichs about the roots of this cultural shift. It does feel, unfortunately, like Thin is back in. I wonder if you see this as somewhat of an inevitable backlash to body positivity and how big body positivity became. And I wonder, and this analogy doesn't reflect my own views, but I wonder whether you think society, this general feeling within society that the pendulum swung too far

with the body positivity movement in terms of accepting larger bodies and embracing larger bodies. Do you think that's what's happened and the pendulum always swings back and that's what's happened here? I think if we zoom out a little bit, there can be a tendency if we want to explain trends or what's happening at the moment to focus onto the immediate trend before.

But I think if we zoom out and look across decades and perhaps even centuries, there have always been trends around beauty and appearance and fashion. And this is amplified if you live in a capitalist society where people are selling products, services to appeal to trends and this idea, selling something new drives up desire. So I think it's probably a combination. I think we see trends in what's appealing for body sizes and shapes. They evolve throughout centuries, you know, if you think about Victorian women, to have like, you know, a bustle and to really exaggerate, you know, your butt so it looked massive but to have a very narrow waste that changed to more curvy figures at different points

in time. So beauty ideals and trends change throughout history. They change between cultures as well. So I think there's an element of that. And also how do you get someone to talk about you, particularly if you're a celebrity that's known for that your body? How do you get press and attention? Well, I can change my body and probably do it in a really extreme way so that I can get, you know, I will get attention and also be at the cutting edge of a new trend and set the trend. And then I probably have a range of products and things that you can buy to help you with that. So I think there's an element of that. I think as well, there's still fat phobia, a lot of fat phobia and also with new quick fixes. And also we can't not acknowledge the

role of public health and government campaigns around obesity. And that's a word that I use because people, lots of people understand what that means, but around weight and health. So people have, it's really challenging to work out what is a healthy weight, what is a healthy way to be in your body. So I think you've got all that going alongside of it. One of the questions I've always been asked throughout my whole career, my PhD looked at body size diversity in advertising. And back then it was like using plus size models as they were called, which back in 2006, hardly any companies or brands were doing. And one of the most common questions I got asked from journalists, but also other health professionals, and I still get

asked this all the time at conferences, if you move out of the body image space and eating disorder space, aren't you worried that by promoting positive body image, you're promoting obesity? And I feel like there's so many assumptions because then, you know, you're assuming that I think being in a larger body is a problem, which I don't necessarily. Our relationship, you know, our health and the relationship with weight is so much more complex than just a number. But also you're disregarding all the evidence which shows that actually when people have positive body image. And by that I mean accepting their bodies for the most part, not every single day and every single aspect of your body, respecting your body and taking steps to try and protect yourself in your body

by for example unfollowing problematic social media accounts listening to podcasts like this that's positive body image and all the research decades of research shows if you have positive body image you're much more likely to have better mental health and well-being your weight is much likely to be stabilized because you're not dieting and yo-yoing you're much more likely to move your body, eat fruits and vegetables, go to the doctor, go for preventive health checkup appointments, to socialise, to have better relationships and better have better well-being in general. So there's all of those things happening at the same time.

Beauty norms, ideas about health, industries profiting off this as well. The societal shift coincided with the FDA approval of semi-glutide. more commonly known as OZempic for weight loss, and I guess it's safe to say it was a perfect storm. Any vague progress we thought we'd made seemed to be wiped out with the arrival of this shiny new needle promising rapid weight loss, and people clamoured to get their hands on their weekly injections.

We asked F. Yaboa, what this means for a representation of people in larger bodies? I don't really know how we're going to move forward with regards to the representation of fat bodies, because a Zempic is here. And it doesn't look like it's going anywhere soon. And unfortunately, and I'll be very honest, I spoke about it on my blog recently. We are in a time now where because these methods are so accessible,

how can I say this? We are witnessing the decline or the shrinking of advocates, activists, models and influence. everyone's getting smaller. And I don't discount myself in that because I'm very aware that I am smaller. For me, it was due to gym and other things. It wasn't intentional,

but it's just annoying that it's happened around the same time as everybody else. And so I do mourn it, if I'm being honest, I do mourn the community that we used to have because now it just feels like who is flying the flag for like the Gen Z fats and the Gen A fats, there are some influences that I know who are still like, you know, flying the flag. But I think now that we're in a community where these weight loss injections

are so accessible and fat phobia has reared its ugly head yet again to the point where it's just, it's just awful. I don't know. I really don't know how we can get back there. I think the most that we can do as individuals is to just keep pushing for that inclusivity, to keep having those conversations to keep challenging the government and the NHS and any kind of media outlet that tries to change society with their fatphobic views, like the whole thing with Labour government and them wanting to give OZMPIC to the facts so that we can go to work, which totally gives eugenics, by the way. It's giving workplace eugenic. I have, yeah, I have thoughts on that. I just think it's an ugly thing that I've ranted about on my Twitter. But yeah, I

I genuinely don't know where it will go from here. Yeah, you're right. It is, and I hadn't even thought about that, but as the community shrink, literally, shrink in size, it also shrinks in numbers. So it does feel like a shame for representation. But I guess, I mean, this is tragic, but this is the point. It's like it goes in cycles, and it feels like we're just at the start again somehow.

The cycle seems to have started again. And with it, Victoria's Secret Maiden, interesting return to its famous catwalk show in 2004. Since this inception, Victoria's Secret had unapologetically leaned into a very narrow and impossibly flawless standard of beauty and had made very few attempts to be inclusive. But against an increasingly diverse landscape, you remember that Savage X Fenty blew us away with their pioneering, incredibly inclusive catwalk show in 2018, there was a growing sense of discontent gaining traction online against the brand.

The nail in Victoria's Secret Coffin, however, came in late 2018 when former chief marketing officer Ed Rasek told Vogue magazine that the brand had no interest in casting plus or transgender models in their fashion show. He said, shouldn't you have transsexuals in the show? No, no, I don't think we should. Obviously here using an outdated term for transgender people, he cited the reason for the lack of plus size models in the show being that the show was meant to be a fantasy. The reaction to Rizek's problematic remarks was strong and widespread, and the brand scrambled to redeem their reputation. He apologised, and just months later, Victoria's Secret hide its first transgender model, Valentina

Sanpio, and cast its first ever curve model, Ali Tate Cutler. Despite being steps forward for the brand, the moves felt performative and weren't enough to undo the damage caused, and the same year, Rezek resigned following public pressure, and the famous lingerie show was cancelled. Yet its return, after a six-year hiatus, was announced. in 2024. This is purely speculative and pretty much thinking out loud because we hadn't connected the dots before researching this series, but wasn't the timing of its return rather coincidental, that it just happened to fall in so nicely with the return of thinness,

especially considering that the 2024 runway show was pretty lackluster when it came to diversity. Yes, the show featured two trans models, Valentina Sampayo and Alex Kansani, disproving Razek's remark that there isn't a place for a transgender model as a Victoria's secret agent. But as we watch thin model after thin model on the runway, we realised that not much else had changed. The brand didn't seem to actually care about inclusivity. There was a token attempt at showcasing body diversity with the inclusion of Ashley Graham and Paloma El Sessa. But both models are a very palatable take on plus size, more midsize than plus and a more conventionally attractive hourglass shape. What's more, both models felt more covered up than the

thinner counterparts. Paloma wore a dress and Ashley wore a corset under a lacy robe. Their outfits seemed in contrast to the midriff-bearing string two pieces worn by the other straight-sized women. Paloma and Ashley aside, we were treated to a display of women who embody the same, very narrow lens of beauty that was so damaging to our formative minds. Tall, tanned, extremely lean, abs and zero cellulite. It felt just like the old days of Victoria's Secret. At the time, I saw this as a missed opportunity for the brand to use their global stage to showcase a wide and varied range of beauty and body types. turn, make women across the world feel seen, celebrated and welcome in a space from which they have always been excluded. There's no doubt that the brand did miss that opportunity, but

crucially, do they care? And does it matter, given that as a collective, our interest in body diversity has waned, and we are craving thinness once more. Looking at the TikTok videos that surfaced following the show, showing girls eating ice to recreate the famous BS body type, and posting videos of the angels for motivation, I'm not actually too sure. that the lack of diversity ended up being too much of a bad thing for the brand? Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I think on balance, obviously, they didn't give us diversity in a way that they could be particularly proud of.

I do think it was a big shift from the old shows. I think having two transgender models, two, and I use the term loosely, plus size models, I'm loath to call Kate Moss a diversity hire but at 50 that's not a small deal Tyra Banks walk the show she's also older

and they did have models from 23 countries which again isn't a bad thing it's not fenty it's not the change we wanted, right? It's not a cross-section of society, let's say.

It's certainly not. But I think to put that show up next to a show of 10 years ago, I can see a difference. Thin is back, 1,000% not disagreeing with that. It's toxic, it's trouble. Troubles are ruin. But I do think, with everything, the pendulum swings too far one way,

too far the other way, and then the change happens with the tiny little shifts that the whack of the pendulum gives you every time it goes. And I think it wasn't very big, but this shift was a shift. And do we have to wait for diet cultures cycle the next 30 years before we get another one?

Maybe. Is that depressing? Yes. But I think maybe it's shifted a little bit. I appreciate your take on that. And whilst our opinions on this might be inconclusive, one thing is certain. Like you said, thin really is back in. And we can't help but wonder Carrie Bradshaw style whether this renewed desire for thinness for the tiny ballet body

poses an even larger threat than in previous years because it now coincides with the new revolutionary tool for weight loss, OZMPIC. We explore the GLP1 drug and its potential effects in next week's episode and it is a biggie. We've spoken to experts, psychologists and people who've taken it to get to the bottom of the diet landscape changing phenomenon that is ozempic. See you then. Should I delete that as part of the ACAS creator network?