Skinny’s Back. Did We Learn Nothing?

Twenty years after women started questioning the cost of extreme thinness, we're watching bodies shrink again. New drugs, new algorithms, same old obsession.

A little while ago, I found myself standing in front of the mirror at Pilates, doing something I thought I had become much better at not doing.

Judging.

Not dramatically. Not with some great wave of self-hatred. Just quietly noticing the small softness across my lower stomach and wishing, for a second, that it wasn't there.

It probably wouldn't have stayed with me if I hadn't opened TikTok later that day.

There they were again. Women in Pilates studios and on my For You page, wearing tiny shorts and matching sets, their bodies presented in the polished, elongated way social media so often rewards. Scroll. Another one. Scroll. Another.

Somewhere between the studio mirror and my phone screen, the little bit of softness over my uterus had started to feel like something I wasn't supposed to have.

And that's the strange thing about body standards. I don't think they always arrive as someone explicitly telling us we're too big. Sometimes they arrive quietly, through repetition. You see the same body often enough and eventually it stops looking like a body and starts looking like the body.

I study nutrition. I spend an almost ridiculous amount of time thinking, reading and writing about the female body. I know that what appears on my TikTok feed isn't a representative sample of women.

None of that makes me completely immune to looking in the mirror and wondering whether I should be smaller.

Maybe that's why I haven't been able to stop thinking about the response to last week's Across The Month.

We briefly asked whether, as ultra-thin bodies begin appearing everywhere again, we're at risk of swapping our cycles for skinny. It was a small piece of a much bigger conversation, but the attention it received made me think it deserved more than a few Instagram slides.

Then I started flicking through women's magazines from twenty years ago.

I expected the obvious relics of the early 2000s: questionable fashion, celebrity gossip, perfume ads and the particular chaos that was women's media at the time.

Instead, buried inside issues of Cleo and Cosmopolitan from 2006, I found a warning.

“The super-skinny backlash.”

An entire feature devoted to a fashion industry facing criticism over models becoming dangerously thin.

There were stories of models reportedly starving themselves to get work. Debate over whether underweight models should be banned from runways. Questions about whether designers, agencies, magazines or consumers were responsible for a culture becoming increasingly obsessed with shrinking women's bodies.

Elsewhere in the same era, Cleo was debating that very “super-skinny backlash”, while another feature promised to prove that there was “no such thing as the perfect body.”

It felt surprisingly contemporary.

I kept checking the date.

2006.

Twenty years ago, women's magazines were already asking whether skinny had gone too far.

Which leaves us with a fairly uncomfortable question.

How did we end up back here?

2007 called. It wants its body standards back.

For anyone too young to remember the early 2000s firsthand, the body ideal of the era can almost feel like a caricature now.

Low-rise jeans sat on impossibly flat stomachs. Tabloids documented celebrity weight gain and loss as though it were breaking news. Women's magazines promised ways to drop kilos, flatten stomachs and shrink dress sizes. Size zero became both an aspiration and a controversy.

By the middle of the decade, even the industry responsible for promoting much of this imagery was beginning to question whether things had gone too far.

The pages of Cleo and Cosmopolitan from 2006 capture that contradiction almost perfectly.

There were features questioning dangerously thin models and debating whether the fashion industry had a responsibility to intervene.

Then there were pages measuring women's bodies, dissecting celebrity appearances and presenting an endless stream of ways a female body could apparently be improved.

One page warned women about impossible beauty standards.

Another helped create them.

Maybe that's worth remembering when we look back nostalgically at women's media from this era.

The early 2000s magazines were fun and colourful and chaotic, but they were also part of a culture that could simultaneously recognise the damage being done to women and continue selling the ideal responsible for it.

We knew there was a problem.

And then, slowly, something shifted.

For a minute, thin wasn't the only option.

The 2010s didn't abolish beauty standards.

They gave us different ones.

Curves became culturally desirable. Fitness culture introduced the language of strength. Social media allowed women who had historically been excluded from mainstream fashion and magazines to build audiences of their own.

Then body positivity entered the mainstream.

Its commercialised version was imperfect, and sometimes the language changed faster than the underlying attitudes did. But something meaningful had happened.

More bodies appeared in advertising. Stretch marks and cellulite were occasionally allowed to exist without being airbrushed away. “Bikini body” started sounding dated. Openly dissecting a woman's weight became less socially acceptable.

For perhaps the first time in decades, the acceptable definition of a desirable female body seemed to be getting broader rather than narrower.

Diet culture hadn't disappeared.

Thinness hadn't disappeared.

But thin wasn't necessarily the only option anymore.

And then the body started shrinking again.

The body ideal: twenty years in motion

2006: SIZE ZERO

Runway thinness dominates while concerns about extremely underweight models begin spilling into mainstream conversation.

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Early 2010s: CURVES ENTER THE CHAT

The dominant silhouette changes. Thinness remains desirable, but a curvier figure increasingly enters popular culture.

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Mid-to-late 2010s: BODY POSITIVITY GOES MAINSTREAM

More bodies appear in advertising and online. “Strong not skinny”, body acceptance and anti-diet messaging begin challenging traditional weight-loss culture.

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Early 2020s: THE PENDULUM STARTS SWINGING

Low-rise fashion returns. Celebrity bodies appear to shrink. Conversations about the return of “heroin chic” emerge. Thinness starts creeping back into the cultural imagination.

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2020s: THE GLP-1 ERA

A new generation of highly effective medications transforms obesity treatment while simultaneously becoming embedded in mainstream conversations about weight, celebrities and beauty.

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2026

Did the standard change, or just the way we sell it?

Then the body started shrinking again.

There wasn't one morning when everybody woke up and decided skinny was back.

Beauty standards rarely announce themselves like that.

They arrive quietly.

The clothes change.

The bodies modelling them change.

The celebrities on our screens change.

The algorithm notices what we stop to look at and serves us more of it.

Eventually, the unusual becomes familiar. Then familiar becomes normal. And normal becomes something we start measuring ourselves against.

It is difficult to isolate one reason for the renewed cultural fixation on thinness because there probably isn't one.

Fashion is cyclical. The Y2K revival brought back silhouettes originally designed around the bodies idealised during that era. Social media allows a single aesthetic to be repeated thousands of times in a way a monthly magazine never could. Celebrity transformations become content. Wellness culture can give restriction a more socially acceptable vocabulary.

And then something genuinely new arrived.

A class of medications capable of changing weight management in a way the diet industry had never previously been able to offer.

This time, there's an injection.

Ozempic has almost become cultural shorthand for weight loss.

But the reality of GLP-1-based medications is considerably more nuanced than the celebrity headlines surrounding them.

Medications including semaglutide and tirzepatide can affect appetite and satiety signalling, helping people feel fuller and consume less food. Depending on the specific medication, they are used in the treatment of conditions including type 2 diabetes and chronic weight management in eligible patients.

For many people, these medications aren't cosmetic shortcuts.

They're medicine.

Clinical trials have demonstrated substantial average weight loss with some of these treatments and, for appropriately selected patients, that can come alongside meaningful improvements in health.

Reducing the entire GLP-1 conversation to celebrities wanting to fit into smaller dresses therefore misses something important.

But so does pretending these medications entered a cultural vacuum.

They arrived in a society that has spent decades teaching women that becoming smaller is an achievement.

And suddenly, the ability to dramatically suppress appetite and lose significant amounts of weight became more medically achievable than it had ever been before.

The medications aren't the beauty standard.

But they exist inside it.

And perhaps that's what makes this moment so complicated.

What happens when a genuine medical breakthrough meets a cultural obsession we've never completely let go of?

Your cycle doesn't care what's trending.

Your hypothalamus has never opened TikTok.

It doesn't know whether low-rise jeans are fashionable again. It doesn't know what size the women on your For You page are. It certainly doesn't know what body shape we've collectively decided looks best in a Pilates set this year.

It knows something much more basic.

Is there enough energy available to keep this body functioning?

Our bodies require energy simply to exist.

Then we ask for more.

We walk. Think. Work. Study. Exercise. Recover. Maintain body temperature. Build and repair tissue.

And, for a menstruating body, maintain reproductive function.

When energy intake becomes consistently inadequate relative to the energy being used, the body can begin adapting to that shortage.

One system that can be affected is the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axis: the communication network between the brain and ovaries involved in regulating the menstrual cycle.

With sufficiently low energy availability, signalling from the hypothalamus can be disrupted. The hormonal cascade involved in follicular development and ovulation can change.

Ovulation may become disrupted.

Cycles can become irregular.

Periods can disappear altogether.

This phenomenon isn't exclusive to somebody who “looks too skinny”. It can occur when the mismatch between energy intake and expenditure becomes significant enough for that individual body.

Which means the important question isn't simply:

How thin are you?

It's:

What is it costing your body to get there?

Your period isn't the problem. It's the messenger.

There was a time when losing a period could almost be treated as an unfortunate but relatively insignificant side effect of dieting or intensive exercise.

No period? Convenient.

One less thing to worry about.

Except menstrual function doesn't exist in isolation.

When menstruation is disrupted because the body doesn't have adequate energy available, the missing bleed isn't necessarily the biggest concern.

Changes in reproductive hormones can have consequences beyond reproduction, including for bone health. In sport, this broader relationship between inadequate energy availability and impaired physiological function is captured by the concept of Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, or RED-S.

Your menstrual cycle isn't a flawless health test. Having a regular period doesn't guarantee perfect health, and an irregular cycle can have many causes unrelated to nutrition or weight loss.

But when a previously predictable cycle starts changing alongside significant restriction, weight loss or increased exercise, it deserves attention.

A missing period isn't evidence that you've finally perfected your diet or training routine.

It can be the body signalling that something it needs is no longer available.

And suddenly that little pouch of fat I was staring at in the Pilates mirror feels slightly different.

Not because I have to love it every second.

But because I don't want wanting it gone to become more important than listening to the body underneath it.

Weight loss isn't the villain.

This is where I think conversations about women's bodies often lose the plot.

We swing from one extreme to another.

For decades women were told to shrink themselves.

Then, in trying to undo some of that damage, even admitting you wanted to lose weight could begin to feel morally questionable.

Neither leaves much room for reality.

Women are allowed to have aesthetic preferences about their bodies.

Some women want to lose weight.

Some people can lose weight while remaining adequately nourished, energetic and hormonally healthy.

For others, weight reduction can have legitimate health benefits. And for appropriately selected patients, medications that support weight management can be an important part of healthcare.

Weight loss itself isn't automatically harmful to the menstrual cycle.

A calorie deficit doesn't automatically stop ovulation.

A thin woman isn't automatically unhealthy.

A woman in a larger body isn't automatically healthy or unhealthy either.

The question is what happens when the pursuit becomes aggressive enough that the body no longer has sufficient resources for everything we're asking it to do.

Personally, that's the contradiction I keep coming back to.

I can look at my stomach and think I'd like it to be slightly leaner.

And I can also know that I never want achieving that to become more important than my cycle, my energy, my strength or actually feeling well.

Those thoughts are allowed to coexist.

Maybe a healthier conversation about weight doesn't require women to pretend they have absolutely no aesthetic preferences.

Maybe it requires us to stop treating those preferences as instructions our bodies must obey at any cost.

So, can you lose weight without losing your period?

For many women, yes.

There isn't a single calorie intake, body-fat percentage or number on the scale below which every woman's menstrual cycle suddenly stops.

Bodies aren't that predictable.

What matters is the overall environment we're creating.

How large is the energy deficit?

How quickly is weight being lost?

How much exercise is being performed?

Is there adequate carbohydrate available to support activity?

Enough protein to help preserve lean tissue?

Enough dietary fat?

Enough vitamins and minerals?

Enough recovery?

Enough sleep?

And perhaps most importantly: what is your body telling you while you're doing it?

If periods become increasingly irregular or disappear, energy levels collapse, performance deteriorates, food starts dominating your thoughts or the pursuit of weight loss requires increasingly extreme behaviour, those aren't inconveniences to push through in the name of discipline.

They're information.

There is a difference between intentionally changing your body and fighting it.

Maybe we've been here before.

There's something surreal about reading women's magazines printed in 2006 and realising the women inside them were already having this conversation.

They were asking whether models had become too thin.

Whether fashion was responsible.

Whether the media was responsible.

Whether women themselves were responsible.

Whether there should be limits.

Twenty years later, the terminology has changed.

Size zero became heroin chic became Pilates bodies became whatever comes next.

Diet pills became wellness became GLP-1 discourse.

Magazine covers became algorithms.

But the underlying question remains remarkably familiar:

How small should a woman be?

Maybe that's the question we've been getting wrong.

Because bodies aren't fashion.

They don't refresh with the trend cycle.

They carry bones and brains and ovaries and muscles and hearts. They have jobs to perform long after a particular silhouette disappears from our feeds.

And twenty years from now, somebody might look back at our media the way we're looking at Cleo and Cosmopolitan today.

They might see “Ozempic body”.

They might see celebrity weight-loss speculation.

They might see thousands of videos teaching women how to flatten, shrink and sculpt every supposedly undesirable part of themselves.

And they might wonder how a generation that knew so much about the damage of impossible body standards ended up recreating them anyway.

Maybe the strangest thing about looking through those 2006 pages isn't realising how different everything was.

It's realising how little some things changed.

The products change.

The language changes.

The ideal gets a rebrand.

But women's bodies remain something culture believes it is entitled to resize.

Maybe this time, instead of waiting for the backlash, we could notice what is happening while we're still living through it.

And maybe wanting to change our bodies doesn't have to mean abandoning them in the process.

Love,

Ava.