Body positivity, body acceptance and learning to love your body in the last few years felt like real progress - not perfect, but better than what we experienced in our teens and twenties. But you can’t have helped noticing that lately - skinny celebrities, impossible beauty standards and even microdosing of weight loss drugs is in.
The pendulum has swung - hard and fast - and it feels like we've been transported back to the 90s. So is body positivity over? And what does the return of skinny mean for you?
In this episode, I'm breaking down why this shift is happening now (spoiler: it's not just fashion), how beauty standards are designed to be unachievable, and why body acceptance is something we all need more of. If you've been feeling the pull to "get smaller" again, this one will give you a new lens to see it through.
What we’ll cover:
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Welcome to the Busy Woman's Guide to Fitness and Wellness, where we celebrate you exactly as you are and help you to be the fit, strong, confident woman you deserve to be.
We tackle everything from diet, culture and body image through to how to let go of the hustle, the pressure and the overwhelm and find your balance and energy in a busy life. I'm Alix, women's fitness and wellness expert, therapeutic coach, founder of Life Edit with Alix and mum of two.
And I'm here with your weekly dose of inspiration, helping you to rewrite the rules and live life on your own terms. Hey. Hey Big.
Welcome back to the podcast this week and this week is all about a topic that has been brewing with me for a little while which is all about body positivity.
Is it over with the advent of all of the weight loss drugs that we're seeing going on and the actually pretty aggressive return of skinny to the red carpet in recent months? Because I do not know about you, but it feels like we have somehow been transported back to the 90s and noughties recently.
And you know what, I even noticed this when I went shopping with my daughter recently. There are so many clothes out there for her age, she's 17, that are really reminiscent of what used to be in fashion back then.
And it's unfortunate enough in itself because I was looking around and thinking, oh my God, if we're going to go back to any era, please let it not be the one that had low slung jeans and handkerchief tops and those bloody velour tracksuits. But I think the return of the ultra skinny that's been dragged with it is more disturbing than any, any low slung jean can ever be.
And they are pretty damn bad. And I think that we all have felt over the last few years that we were, we were starting to make progress with women's bodies, right?
There was body positivity out there, there was dove campaigns with models in all sorts of different sizes, models on magazine covers, and yet they were still pretty flawless. But at least they were starting to exist in bigger bodies.
And it was not perfect, but it certainly felt like progress compared to all of the things that had come before. But the pendulum has well and truly and quite violently started to swing back.
And it feels like it's kind of happened overnight, literally over the last six months or so. It just seems to be really in our face all of a sudden. And I think it's quite hard as well, isn't it?
Because people are commenting on it and then other people are seeing that as Body shaming. But actually, we need to have a conversation about this.
We really, really do, because it's really important for us to understand where this fits into our own.
Where this fits into our own feelings about our bodies, to understand where this fits into a society that quite honestly feels like it doesn't want us to thrive. And I think that's the really sad thing about it. And I will go into a little bit more of that later on.
But at the moment, I think we're just seeing headlines about heroin shake coming back.
We're seeing the explosion of weight loss drugs, which, on the one hand, they have helped an awful lot of people, but on the other hand, they're also being used by people who do not need them to achieve levels of skinny that were previously unattainable to them.
That's why we're seeing so many of these women showing up on red carpets and things who are looking ultra, ultra skinny, like, even more than they did before, because these weight loss drugs are being used by people who don't actually need it. They're doing the micro dosing. There are skinny celebrities everywhere.
And I always used to think that when stuff like this happened, it was just a fashion moment, it was about changing trends. But the truth of it is actually a lot, lot, lot more disturbing than that.
And I think when I think about it, maybe I was naive to think that we could continue on the path of a bit more body positivity. But when I think about it, the return of skinny was kind of inevitable, and it was inevitable now.
And that is because what we're seeing on the red carpet cannot be ignored alongside the politics of what we're seeing at the moment.
And I don't want to go too deep and everything, but I think it's important that the link between these two things, because what we're also seeing right now is rights being stripped back, particularly for groups like women. So, for example, abortion rights. Now, we've seen that play out in America. We've seen the devastating consequences of that.
We've seen the ways in which women's rights just are not considered at all, really. And we can sit here in the UK and we can pretend that were immune to that.
But if you look around you, if you look at the press coverage, the quite frankly biased press coverage, then they are promoting groups, they are promoting political parties who also have things to say about abortion rights, for example. So rights are being stripped back there, employee rights.
So again, parties out there, political parties, talking about drawing back our employment rights so that companies would Be able to get rid of women for being pregnant without any kickback at all. There's also been some discourse recently about working from home. And of course, who does that benefit the most?
It benefits women a lot more than it benefits men. So I think that we. We can't look at these changing trends.
We can't look at kind of the disappear, not disappearance, but the pushing down, I suppose, of body positivity and the rise of the return to skinny without looking at things that go alongside it as well. Because these things go hand in hand. We have got to a place where men, those in power, usually rich white men, right? They need us distracted again.
They need us distracted by our weight, because that is the way in which they can push through some of these things where they can start to strip our rights back. And we haven't maybe got the energy or we don't know that that's happening maybe.
And women will be disproportionately affected by those things because those who are in power obviously feel threatened right now.
They feel that the only way to stop their privilege from being reduced is by taking away the rights of certain groups, one of those groups being women. And so what better way to do that than get us distracted by our weight again? To get us distracted by the conversation about what's too skinny.
To get us distracted by the conversation around, is it body shaming or not to get us distracted around conversations about weight loss drugs?
Because when we're obsessed with our bodies, when we're obsessed with, I am not measuring up here, I'm not good enough, then we're not necessarily paying attention to the systems that are failing us.
You know, when you're caught in the diet binge cycle, you're not organizing when you're scrolling before and after photos at midnight, you're not a threat to power. So diet culture is not just annoying, it's actually a distraction tool. It keeps us small.
It keeps us small physically, but more than that, it keeps us small politically.
And it feels like right now, when there is so much at stake in the world, where there are so many forces that are not for good going on around there, the return of skinny feels pretty damn convenient, I'm gonna say. And I just don't think that we can separate those two things out. Let's tell women they're not enough.
Let's tell women they need to take weight loss drugs. Let's tell women they need to start microdosing. Let's tell women they need to start comparing themselves to other women again.
Let's tell women they need a thigh gap. Again, let's tell women that they're not small enough. However small they are, they're not small enough.
So this is a really important part of the context right now. And what we really need to be asking is, who is benefiting when we are buying into this, who is benefiting?
And just as a little example, if you look at the body positivity community, there's quite a few that I follow on Instagram, for example, which do you know what? They have all really helped me personally over the last few years in my relationship with my body.
Being able to see diversity out there has been really, really important. But those body positivity influences have split into two camps at the moment.
There are those who are still very much about the body positivity movement, but then there are those who were part of that and who have now gone on weight loss drugs. And there's a lot of conversation around that and around, you know, have they done us dirty?
Were they only a body positivity influencer because they were in a bigger body? And now that they're not, then they're not part of that movement anymore.
There's a lot of conversation around that, and that in itself creates distraction. And the thing about all of this is that beauty standards are by their very design meant to be unachievable because they are not about health.
They're about status.
They, they're there to show that you have time to work out, to meal prep, to invest in yourself, that you have the money to buy the right foods, to buy trainers, to buy procedures. They signify that you have discipline. And that is the ultimate currency right now, isn't it?
The ultimate currency in a culture that glorifies and also has glorified control. So it's not really about health, but it's about status.
And the thing is, as soon as too many normal in inverted commas, people get access to that and they start to close the gap between those who have a high status and those who don't, then the goalposts have to be moved again.
So when plus size women start to reclaim a bit of space, to reclaim visibility, to reclaim a situation where you can exist in a body regardless of size, then the standard has to be shifted again, right? We need to take the attention away from that because if everyone can have it, it's no longer exclusive. So the upshot for us is this.
We will never win the game. And that's the truth of the matter that we need to get our head around.
And for Many of us, we have spent many years of our lives chasing the game, trying to win the game, trying to get on top of the game. It's never going to happen. We're not supposed to win the game. There will always be a part of us that's lacking.
You know, if we fix our size, then we need to fix our wrinkles. If we fix our wrinkles, we need to fix our jawline. If we fix our jawline, we have to sort out our hair goes on and on and on.
And that is not to say that we can't do those things.
But what I am saying is that if we keep chasing confidence through all of those means and telling ourselves that we can't be confident until we do, then all that happens is we stay trapped in a game that we are never, ever, ever going to win. So we get to choose. Do we continue to play the game? Do we continue to let all of this bullshit dictate how we feel about ourselves?
Do we allow old, white, rich men to ultimately decide how we feel about ourselves? Or do we allow ourselves to step out of the game? Do we allow ourselves to recognise that the game can only ever change with us?
And the thing about this, that is difficult is that we can't opt out entirely of that culture. We can't exist outside of that unless we move to the woods. We have no phone, we have no tv, we have no cultural references whatsoever.
There's always going to be an element of we're going to see the images, we're going to hear the commentary, we're going to feel the pull towards losing a bit of weight or getting some Botox or whatever it is, but you get to choose what parts of that you allow and what you make that mean about you and your personal worth. You get to choose if you play the game, you get to choose how you play the game, and you get to choose where you personally come from on that.
Are you going to chase this, telling yourself essentially that you can't feel good about yourself until you do all of these things, or are you going to look at that and say, well, look, doesn't mean I can't do these things, but I'm going to do it because I bloody well want to. I'm going to do it because it feels good to me. I'm going to do it because I'm already coming from a place where I feel okay about myself.
And there's a few ways that we can start to change that game for ourselves, because like I say, this is not going to happen. With the collective, this is not going to happen with society. It's just going to keep.
It's going to move the goalpost again in a couple of years time. Just watch. But we can, on an individual basis, change the game.
And when enough of us do it, then people start to realize that the game was not worth playing in the first place. So start to ask yourself, what am I not paying attention to when I'm focused on this?
Because it takes a lot of energy to be thinking about our bodies all day, every day, to be thinking about what we can eat, what we can't eat, to be thinking about what we're going to look like on the beach, whether we need to get that tummy control, swimsuit, all of those kind of things. It takes a lot of energy. So what are you not paying attention to when you are focused on that? Also think about leaning into body acceptance.
And this is what I work on with my clients, because I think that for a lot of us, body positivity, which says, love your body regardless, all bodies are beautiful, is an amazing sentiment. But honestly, it's not one that lands with a lot of women because they're then thinking, but I don't love my body.
So telling me that I should just feels like another thing that I'm failing at.
So what acceptance says is you don't have to love your body, but you do get to learn to accept that this is where your body is right now and to make peace with that.
And in my experience from working with clients inside the body you'll love living in, for example, they don't all, all of a sudden have this revelation that they love their bodies after all, and there was nothing wrong with them all along. I'm not gonna sit here and claim that that happens. But what I do see instead is a sense of softening.
And what I mean by that is they're able to look at themselves differently. They're able to be more okay with where they are and who they are. They're able to judge themselves less harshly.
They're able to take away some of the pressure that they've been putting on themselves for a really long time. They're able to step more gently and with more compassion into the changes they want to make.
And they're able to make that journey feel more easeful in a way that they've not been able to achieve before. And that's what body acceptance does for us. It softens.
It doesn't suddenly make us love ourselves 100% with no doubt or worry or days where things don't feel so great, but it does give us so many things that just allow us to soften the way that we approach things, to soften the way that we approach our bodies. And that sense of acceptance is not about resigning yourself to the idea that you are never going to change or you're never allowed to change.
It just becomes a new start point.
It gives you permission to live now, not wait until you're a certain weight or dress size, not make your worth dependent on that certain weight or dress size, or to feel like we have to earn the right to feel good in ourselves. And it gives us permission ultimately to be able to make changes from a very different place.
And for some women, that means that they do actually make peace with their bodies.
They realize their bodies were never the problem at all, but it was what their bodies meant about them or what they thought their bodies meant about them that was the problem. And they stopped needing to lose weight at all. They stop being in that battle.
And instead they start to lean into the things that are gonna make them feel good for other people. It just gives them a more supportive base to make the changes that they desire from.
But they're doing it without the tension, without the resistance that they've been experiencing before. So whatever happens on that journey, you end up in a better place. You end up in a place where you are saying, do you know what? I'm okay as I am now.
And I think that has got to be the upshot of what we're seeing around us all the time, is making decision. Do we allow ourselves to be dragged along by this? Do we allow ourselves to start thinking, well, I could start microdosing?
Do we start to make this mean that we need to do more or work harder? Do we allow this to make it mean that we're not good enough as we are? Or do we choose to step into a different game altogether?
Do we choose to reject that game and to create our own game where we get to accept ourselves as we are, where we give ourself permission to step out of that once and for all and to step into something else? So I'm going to let you think about that now.
Next week, we're going to get a little bit more tactical about this, because we're going to be talking about practical things you can be doing in those moments when you actually are triggered. Because like I said before, we can't opt out of this completely. Diet culture is here. It's not going anywhere, unfortunately.
So however much work you do on yourself, there will always be triggers. I get triggered by stuff.
When you scroll Instagram, when your friend turns up who you've not seen for three months and she's two dress sizes smaller and she's talking about how amazing the Manjaro is that she's been taking. Or when you go and try your usual size at the shop and you can't quite squeeze yourself into it and you start to feel really rubbish about yourself.
So we're going to be talking about that next week because triggers will happen. So how do we deal with that when we do? But for now, I'm going to love you and leave you and I'll see you back here again next time.
Thank you as always, for joining me.
If this is episode has hit home, share it with another woman who needs to hear it and come connect with me on Instagram at Life Edit with Alix for more real talk, mindset shifts and daily inspiration.