I don't know how women survived nineties and 2000s weight loss culture

But we need to understand it because three decades later, it’s happening again

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TW: Discussion of body image, disordered eating, and diet culture. If these topics are triggering or don’t make you feel safe, please look after yourself by skipping this week’s essay.

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You look so well, Charlie.

They said it over and over. People I haven’t seen in at least six months.

The difference between six months ago and now? I’ve lost weight.

The reality is that I am not especially well. Early menopause has gifted me brain fog and bleeds that last weeks, and has robbed my ability to sleep. Low iron levels make me tired all the time. My doctor tells me the fat in my blood is at higher-than-normal levels and I must get it down (hence the weight loss). I’m psychologically reeling from infertility.

But I look “better” because I am thinner.

I’ve been here before. For various reasons, my weight yo-yos, so I know how the world treats women when they are slim, and how it treats them when they are bigger.

I have been both.

I am also a child of nineties and 2000s weight loss culture. I, like millions of other women, know what it’s like to have your weight say something about you and your place in the world.

Because it’s what we were taught to think.

Fat bitch, he spat, before walking away.

It was 1998, and I was 13 years old. I was incredibly thin. A despondent teen, I craved control, so I stopped eating.

And I was rewarded by being called fat.

Even then, I knew it was a ridiculous insult to throw at someone as thin as I was, but I also understood it was an insult of the highest order. Because whilst it would be another decade before Kate Moss said nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, everything we watched, read and experienced back then told us being fat was terrible.

We watched British TV presenter Chris Evans weigh a post-partum Victoria Beckham live on air to see if she’d lost her baby weight. We read magazines which gave us unholy amounts of body image advice. Here is a snippet, for instance, from a 1993 edition of Seventeen magazine:

Get killer legs with the following exercises that stretch and elongate your leg muscles. Do them with smooth, fluid motions; tight, jerky moves will give you bulkiness you probably don’t want.

It wasn’t any better in the 2000s — my late teenage and early twenties years — also considered one of the most toxic decades for body image.

We had Jessica Simpson fat-shamed for being a US size four.

In the UK, we had Heat magazine — which sold over two million copies at its height — with its “circle of shame” which highlighted fat on paparazzi-obtained celebrity pictures.

TV shows from FRIENDS to How I Met Your Mother used fatness as a punchline.

This is what it was like to be a woman in the 90s and 2000s. You might have been one of the 45% of women on a diet. You were probably watching TV, which means you were more likely to consider thinner women more attractive. I’d bet you were reading fashion magazines which positively correlate to body dissatisfaction in women.

Perhaps your mum or another influential female family member was on a diet, or praised you when you lost weight. Maybe you watched or read Bridget Jones’ Diary and wanted to be like her so much, you started a diary, recording weight and daily calorie intake.

Or perhaps that was just me.

Maybe you were reading the early days of online gossip columns like TMZ — an outlet later accused of being run like a “sexist, misogynistic boys club’ and frat house” — which made a fortune dissecting women’s bodies.

It’s not hard to understand why up to 84% of women experience body dissatisfaction.

And why I receive so many compliments whenever I lose weight.

When you’ve been brought up in a world that values thinness — as I argue most Western people are — it’s damn hard to untangle losing weight for health with the social value that comes with being slim.

Being thinner means you are more likely to be hired. You are more likely to earn more. If you are heavier, you are considered more lazy. You may even be considered someone with less moral character.

Being both slimmer and fatter over my years means I’ve seen both sides. I’ve noticed how many people tell me I look great when I’ve lost a few kilos, and how they stay silent when I haven’t.

Most concerningly, I’ve noticed how my confidence increases as my weight decreases.

I know why it happens — I better fit into my society’s vision of how women should look. But I hate that it happens. Because when you believe that women should never be valued by how much they weigh, a weight loss confidence boost is a hard thing to square with yourself.

But we have to because, by all accounts, 90s and 2000s-style weight loss culture is back and affecting a whole new generation of teenagers and young women.

Brace yourself.

I would love the world’s obsession with weight to die with my generation.

That’s not what I’m told is happening. I’m told that skinny is back in fashion.

A 2024 report by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons noted a rising trend in the “ballet body.” Slim, small, and contoured.

In its spring/summer ’25 size inclusivity report, Business Vogue reported that the body positivity movement has lost steam in mainstream culture as the pendulum has swung back to the glamorisation of thinness.

One study showed that 95% of models in 208 recent fashion shows were size zero.

#skinnytok accounts for half a million TikTok posts (it is worth noting however that the hashtag was recently banned).

You could argue that the perceived “virtues” of being thin never went away and I would agree with you. But there was a period when body inclusivity wasn’t such a crazy idea. The biggest example is of course, the body positivity movement. This was an important movement for many reasons, not least because, as a 2023 study proved, even a small exposure to body positivity content can improve body image in young women.

For a while, it felt like the tide might turn. But you only have to look as far as Victoria’s Secret to see that this is no longer the case.

Last year, the Victoria's Secret fashion show returned after a four-year hiatus. The gap happened largely because viewership numbers were down (9.2 million in 2014 to 3.2 million in 2018). There were also:

changing perceptions to the company’s marketing — which a retail analyst described as encouraging women to objectify themselves to “impress men”

Now, the fashion show is back and in the words of The Guardian’s “Today In Focus” podcast presenter Gina Tonic:

It’s one of the most pervasive, toxic event in the fashion world calendar … It’s essentially a circus of competitive anorexia where the models are pushed to such extremes to lose weight…It’s a constant cycle of guilt and shame for them and yet culturally it’s so rewarded — The Guardian’s “Today in Focus” podcast.

It seems that being slim truly is back in vogue, and women have to figure out a way to navigate that world.

Again.

I’m in my forties, which means I’ve had three decades of considering what I eat, how much I exercise, and attempting to judge the line between weight loss for health and weight loss for social value — a web I don’t know how to untangle, woven as it was by the toxic diet culture I grew up in.

But I do know that I am tired to the very core of my being of thinking about my weight. I know I’m not the only one.

I also know many young girls. Nieces. Friends’ daughters. Many are too young to yet be exposed to weight loss rhetoric in any meaningful way but that will come.

And I don’t want to add to that noise. What we say to them matters — a lot.

We can’t help it if we grew up in a toxic wasteland of diet culture. All we can do is be the change now.

And if 90s and 2000s weight loss culture is indeed back with vengeance, Lord knows these girls are going to need all the help they can get.