Does Thin Hollywood Affect You?

Can we live in an outdoor athlete vacuum?

I like to think that I’m pretty happy living under a rock and don’t know a lot about what goes on in Hollywood or celebrity culture. When I was a teenager struggling with my body (understatement), I worshipped celebrities and used them as ‘goals’, assuming that if I did enough sit-ups on my bedroom floor before bed I might wake up looking like them. I’ve long since sworn them off - Adult Me understands that these people are not realistic, and am now regrettably aware that the photos I coveted were heavily photoshopped, too.

But I couldn’t miss the slew of headlines about the Ozempic Red Carpet¹. Horrifying images of well-known female celebrities showing off their protruding clavicles and razor-sharp shoulder blades are being shared far and wide. I’m so glad I’m not a teenager right now (understatement), without the knowledge and maturity to navigate the boom of ultra-thinness in pop culture.

The truth is, I feel silly for writing any of this. We’re all about athletes over here, right? Who cares what pop singers and actresses look like, right?

Oh, okay, I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. (That’s a fantastic movie reference, for those of you still pretending not to be in touch).

None of us live in a vacuum. As much as most of us probably try, by reducing or altogether deleting social apps from our phones, monitoring screen time, never going to theatres and never looking at tabloids. But, even the grittiest, outdoorsiest, athletic-est of us all is part of the human ecosystem. We are all connected. And, in our broken little ecosystem, the elites still sit at the top and dictate the trends. And right now, the headline trend is extreme, depraved, skeletal, terrifying, clinically significant, ultra-thinness.

📣 Caveat Klaxon: obviously everyone has the right to do whatever they want with their body, and bodies come in all shapes and sizes including, sometimes, extremely small and bony. We never criticise and individual’s body!

Pretty much every sane social commenter has written about how scary this trend is², and how rooted in patriarchy it is to shrink women to the point of frailty. It’s not really my place or expertise to go down that side, so I refer you to the internet for further reading. Perhaps the only authentic commentary I can share is how it affects me, as a 37 year old ultra athlete who doesn’t ever go to the cinema or watch the Oscars and has literally no idea who the biggest artist in the world is right now (I’m guessing it’s Taylor Swift?).

There was a really powerful moment, that, thankfully for me, largely coincided with my own ED recovery, where social media was deep into the trend of Body Positivity. Larger people were showing photos and videos of themselves moving, doing sports, eating nourishing food, and living their best lives, and for a brief moment in the stretching scale that is humanity’s timeline, the internet was here for it. ‘Strong is the new skinny!’ was an extremely popular mantra. CrossFit was still really popular and women were trying to get big and robust so they could lift things all by themselves and, eventually, age independently with a solid bone structure. The messaging was that it was okay to have a natural body, that you deserved to be seen and to enjoy your life. And that being healthy was the most important thing.

Recommended reading: The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf. This 1990s book is aging extremely well at the moment.

"A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience." - Naomi Wolf

And then, the backlash. GLP-1s hit the main market, the use of them instantly started getting abused, right-wing politics rose up all over the world, and, bam. Women were told to shrink. The strong, body positive women I had been seeing all over social media were getting trolled, or disappearing from the feeds. Lots of high-profile women lost a lot of weight (it’s okay - see the caveat klaxon above) and, anecdotally, I feel like I saw way fewer women promoting strength on my feeds - although, at least there were a lot more running ultras (extreme cardio hmmmm I wonder why).

I always feel like I’m only just recovered. Just barely over the line that divides unwell from well. It takes only a couple of bad days for me to slip onto the other side of the line, and I’ll catching myself thinking a thought or doing a thing that is from my under-eating era and I have to work really hard to drag myself back to safety, across the thin grey line. Knowing my own wellness is still such a fickle little thing, I’m terrified of anything that sits on the other side of the line. I continually purge my social media accounts of anyone who - knowingly or not - promotes ideas that I know will send me cartwheeling back down to the other side. Lately, (can’t say this enough - but just anecdotally) I feel like I’ve had to purge my feed of quite a lot of runners, cyclists, yogis, and even adventurers whose feeds seemed to start trending towards, well, the main cultural trends. While it’s totally fine for individuals to see changes in their bodies, want to try new fitness regimes or even (ahhh!) go on some form of diet, I, as an individual, am not strong enough to follow them on that journey. I have to hit the unfollow button.

And that’s where I see the dribble-down from the elites of the world, promoting ultra-thinness and frailty in women, finally working its way down to my little corner, a place that is meant to be all about health and strength and defiance and personal power. It scares me to know that women are, once again, being encouraged to be smaller. And it scares me in the specific context of our small corner of culture because I know from very deep experience that pursuing thinness as a goal in itself is not compatible with gaining strength and endurance and competing in ultras. We need solid bones and strong muscles and stable glycogen stores to do the things we do. We can’t do it under-fuelled, believe me, I tried.

Eat the rich.

1. I am not attaching the images to this post because they can be extremely triggering.

2. Huff Post, The Guardian, Culture Vulture Substack, for a very small selection.