Content note: this article contains references to weight loss and eating disorders that readers may find upsetting.

Quietly and by stealth, while we’ve been getting on with the exhausting business of trying to like ourselves, diet culture has had a rebrand. It’s practically ‘feminist’ to get thinner now according to the weight-loss merchants, did you know that? For a hefty fee, you too can join the sisterhood of the ever-shrinking pants.

Let me explain. Recently, I’ve been bombarded with adverts from a ‘telehealth clinic and community celebrating and supporting women’. They’re styled in soft pastels and abstract illustrations of women’s bodies frolicking freely. The language is fittingly millennial, too. “We’re done with the shame,” reads one. “We believe in empowering women to take control.” Great! Clicking through, I’m pushed to sign up for weekly injections of Mounjaro, a version of the GLP-1 drug that also goes by the brand names Wegovy and Ozempic. Primarily a treatment for type 2 diabetes as it helps the body produce more insulin, since last year it’s been marketed in the US and Australia as an appetite suppressant. Share prices have ballooned, and the celebrities and CEOs who can afford to get their hands on it without any questions asked have shrunk. And now, us women in the UK are also being ‘empowered’ to self-inject weight loss medication from just £189 a month. They’ll even send you a set of scales and a tape measure along with your needle disposal bin!

When it comes to diet culture, society’s mandate that our worth is defined by the size of our bodies, we talk a lot about The Bad Old Days. We roll our eyes at the 80s fad diets that convinced thousands to exist on cabbage soup, the 90s pursuit of ‘heroin chic’ hip bones and the 2000s bloodlust for bullying women on magazine covers. It’s in this hellscape that Stylist was fired 15 years ago, when women were crying out for a media brand that didn’t constantly try to hammer us into a new shape with the blunt tool of shame. Thanks to this magazine and many other pockets of resistance, things got better in incremental ways, from greater diversity of bodies in pop culture to a shift away from the language of weight towards wellness, health and happiness. Or at least, that’s what it looked like.

“The toxic diet culture we grew up with hasn’t died out – it’s just had a rebrand”