Should we talk about your body?
It seems like all around me, bodies are shrinking. As an eating disorder therapist and person with lived experience, I am reflecting on whether to comment or not comment on the changing bodies around me.
In a classic case, I gained weight my freshman year of college, and people noticed. For some reason, this really rattled me, and I began to lose weight. Again, people noticed. I was told I looked amazing, I was told not to lose anymore weight, and some people told me they were concerned. I also received praise for my discipline. And, if I didn’t have discipline, I considered it a deep moral failing. I started to identify with this “healthy” moniker. It became a shield for me. This was something I could not only be good at, but also be the best at. Whatever it was, it healed my low self-esteem - temporarily.
Eventually the confidence, attention, and most importantly, identity it gave me started to become more and more strenuous to maintain. A breaking point for me was I ate above my allotted calories one day, and I had not worked out “enough.” I felt so much shame and fear from going outside the bounds of what I deemed acceptable. The fear of gaining not just weight, but losing the identity that had given me so much confidence. I had an aha moment: I somehow had the self-awareness to realize my insanity. I began to recover, not immediately after, but a seed had been planted that what I was doing was not sustainable.
I was lucky. My disordered eating and relationship with food started to deteriorate in 2018 and by 2020, I wanted to heal. Being genuinely healthy also happened to match the rhetoric at the time. Body positivity and intuitive eating was very easy to find information about, and it wasn’t cool to restrict. Both the wide-spread information on healing your relationship with food and normalizing having your health 100% made recovering easier.
Fast forward to 2026, the pendulum has swung and skinny is so back. Not only are celebrities losing weight like crazy, but I am seeing people in real life lose weight I did not know existed and receive so much praise for it. In my own work, I have had multiple patients cite this current culture as one that makes recovery feel almost impossible. It is as though their worst eating disorder voice is being confirmed en masse, and the healthy voice has to fight back so much harder.
When everyone’s bodies are shrinking both in media and real life, how can we not talk about it? It feels like an impossible ask to follow the golden rule and to not comment on women’s bodies. I fear not talking about it will either condone or normalize it, and yet I know talking about the body can feed the eating disorder by giving it more attention or more shame. This leads us to a stand still.
Women should know that this is not normal, expected, or healthy. AND, those who might exhibit rapid weight loss or extreme thinness are probably struggling. A hallmark symptom of eating disorders is not believing you are sick enough alongside body dysmorphia, which distorts how sick you think you look. Most of the people I treat, won’t hear a stranger’s concern and recover. Insight and motivation has to be intrinsic - this can be enough loved ones expressing genuine concern and/or their own aha moment.
So, this brings us back to the impossible ask - to not talk about women’s bodies. It is unclear to me whether this discussion is helpful or harmful to those exhibiting signs of restriction in the public eye. I can’t pretend to understand the scrutiny or impact of that. But, I do know ignoring the cultural shift or pretending it’s normal will definitely cause and has already caused harm to those who might be struggling in our real lives. For that reason, I believe this is something we need to talk about.
