So what can we do? Continue to have conversations like this. Call out diet culture wherever it appears in your life: you’re not only helping yourself but you’re helping people around you by making it less normalised. Refuse to engage in talk with colleagues about diet and weight, for example, and don’t respond to your friend who calls herself fat with: ‘No you’re not; you’re beautiful.’ Fat and beautiful are not mutually exclusive.

Continue to build our armour against diet culture: while we can’t control many external sources, we can monitor self-talk and choose, to an extent, what to consume. This may mean an audit of your social media followings to identify body image triggers or gently asking people close to you to honour your boundaries.

Build a toolbox: decades of conditioning can’t be undone overnight, so you are very likely to continue to feel pressure to be thin. However, identifying these pressures and understanding that these are just that – a result of conditioning – is a crucial step to eventually being able to tune them out. Seek out what makes you feel better about your body – people, Instagram accounts, exercise, affirmations or body image resources, as just a few examples – and keep these close: this is your toolbox.

“Why we need to keep being loud about body image in 2023”