#Skinnytok is taking over my Instagram algorithm, and it’s pissing me off. (Yes, I realize that I’m curating my own shitty feed by hate-watching these videos.)
Influencers with no professional health or fitness background telling you that if you just “do skinny girl activities” — i.e. drink green tea for breakfast, or hit 20,000 steps a day, or only ever limit yourself to one bite of dessert — then you’ll look exactly like them.
And the bait works. Commenters crave their secrets: “girl what’s your diet??” “what brand of green tea?” “ur such an inspo.”
You probably don’t need me to expound on how harmful this content is, not when diet culture had whole generations of women in a chokehold for so many years. But it’s also fraudulent, even if we choose to believe they really did achieve their dream body by filling up on egg whites and celery. These people can’t sell you any worthwhile secrets because just like there cannot be a true one-size-fits-all garment, what shapes someone’s body in one way might shape yours in a drastically different way.
We are forgetting the power of genetics. It’s like how most people with perfectly clear skin don’t follow some sort of intensive, top-secret skincare regimen: They’re often the ones who can wash their face with a splash of water and wake up glowing anyway. I’m not trying to assert that the way we look is predetermined at birth and that we can do nothing to change it. My point here is that two people can follow the exact same diet or exercise routine and see vastly different aesthetic results.
I’m also not saying weight loss always demands excessive deprivation — of course it can be done in a healthy way. But if you have to go continually hungry to maintain a certain size, then that is not a healthy body even if you do manage to shrink yourself into whichever standard of thinness society is valorizing at the moment. Conversely, genetically thin people shouldn’t be accused of starving themselves or pressured into gaining body mass, either.
But as the cultural pendulum swings back toward tumblr-era ED culture, women are outright encouraged to starve themselves again because so many fitness grifters are trying to convince you it’s all down to “eating clean,” lowering calories, and logging hours on the StairMaster even when your body needs rest. Obviously, what you eat and how much you move are important to your overall health. Living a healthy lifestyle is great, if done in earnest. What i take issue with is the weaponization of fitness culture to enforce homogenized body standards in a way that neglects nuance.
Barring hurdles like disabilities, chronic illness and other structural barriers, most people can benefit from adopting habits that support their health and fitness. But even as those habits do beget physical results, no amount of effort can override the limitations of genetics. You might get so lean that you can trace your own abs, but your waist may still never be as small as you want it to be unless you remove a rib. So if the healthiest version of you doesn’t match your aesthetic ideal, it’s easy to fall into a trap that leads you to undereat and overtrain in pursuit of a look that’s neither realistic nor healthy for your individual body.
Many of us subconsciously use health as a cover for aesthetic goals, and that’s where it gets dangerous. It’s okay to want to achieve a certain look — there’s no shame in wanting to grow your glutes or define your back or whatever — but we lose the plot once we start envisioning only one type of body (usually, a thin one) as the definition of “healthy.” If nutrition is truly important to you, you’d listen to your body by fueling it when it’s hungry. And if you care about fitness, you’d exercise to achieve physical goals (e.g. aerobic endurance, muscle strength, bone density) that may not exclusively align with thinness.
Consistently working out and eating healthy (which includes eating enough) is going to give you the healthiest body for your genetics, and that looks different for everyone. Some people’s peak physical fitness will happen to line up with conventional beauty standards, but for many others, it won’t. If you’re not thin, but you can run a marathon or lift twice your bodyweight, how can anyone genuinely tell you you’re less healthy than someone who fits an XS but loses their breath walking up a flight of stairs?
People love to tie thinness to discipline, and it’s not an inherently unreasonable correlation to make: calories in, calories out, yap yap yap, we know this. But we’ve all met people who can eat junk and bedrot all day without ever fluctuating in size, or people who live a perfectly healthy lifestyle and still aren’t perceived as thin. If we’re honest with ourselves, it’s pretty clear that the link between hard work and thinness is too oversimplified a correlation to deserve its place on such a high pedestal.
I’ve been nervous to write about body image because it’s so deeply personal to everyone, which makes it such a sensitive subject. At the risk of coming off as gloating, i acknowledge that my own life is made easier by my body aligning with societal beauty standards without me having to “earn” it. It’s genetically easy for me to gain muscle mass and stay lean, and that’s an unfair aesthetic advantage. But body neutrality isn’t only worth upholding when we’re struggling with body image. It’s a framework toward finally freeing all of us from the cruel and obsessive rules we impose on bodies, whether our own or each other’s.
The world is full of bodies I admire, bodies with more defined muscles or more noticeable curves than mine. But I would never want to swap my body for another’s. Not because mine is the most beautiful — and how beautiful i find my body is irrelevant to its value — but because mine is the one that has fought for me all my life. It’s helped me mend my injuries, sweat out my illnesses, even unlearn my psychosomatic defense mechanisms.
I know my body well, and I feel incredibly lucky to have the freedom it’s given me to move throughout this world. Few things feel more rewarding than being able to push this body through experiences like lifting heavier at the gym, figuring out a new wushu kick, or finally landing an aerial. Something as fickle and subjective as beauty could never eclipse the gift it is to be able to steer such a vessel.
Still, preaching body neutrality often ignores the inescapable power that conventional beauty holds. We strive to squeeze ourselves into these ever-changing templates because, consciously or not, we understand the consequences of falling outside societal beauty standards. There have been studies on the numerous ways conventionally attractive people receive more opportunities and bias others in their favor. Search “pretty privilege” on any social media platform and you’ll find thousands of anecdotal examples, too.
I’m not trying to convince anyone to opt out of a system that’s, in practice, impossible to disentangle yourself from without suffering real social, personal and professional ramifications. And I cannot judge anyone, including myself, for trying to benefit from societal beauty standards when given the opportunity.
But to me, body neutrality means realizing that those standards are arbitrary. Just look at how beauty ideals have fluctuated throughout history and across cultures, as well as how easily they’re swayed by profit-driven corporate whims (I recommend the book “Butts: A Backstory” by Heather Radke, and I’m sure there are many more fascinating reads on this topic).
You might have a “trendy” body type today, only for everybody to covet a vastly different size or shape a month, a year or a century later. Maybe the same body that fuels your insecurities now was once idealized in a different time and place. Maybe you tried everything you could to shrink your massive butt growing up, but now everyone wants one like yours. Maybe you shelled out your savings and risked your life to get a BBL, but now “heroin chic” is back in fashion. Or maybe, if you’re lucky, you were born with a set of features that just happens to be glamorized throughout your lifetime.
So whether you fit into them or not, you can at least realize that our perpetually inconsistent beauty standards are not a reflection of your discipline or inherent value. Even if you cannot dismiss the systemic power these standards hold, you can reject their inordinate control over your sense of self-worth.
How rewarding might it be to nurture our bodies instead of beating them into submission? This mindset shift, if even possible, would call on all of us to interrogate our values and perceptions. Fleeting beauty ideals will never show you loyalty, but your body will serve you for life.
