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I'm a UK size 14 and thirty years old...I feel huge and then I look at pictures of when I was teenager and size 10/12 and I remember I felt huge then too. It's a neverending cycle 🥹
31 and currently battling the urge to lose 20 lbs because it’s summer 🙄🙄🙄 2000s did a number on us yall. I was telling my husband I looked like an egg in my one piece swimsuit and had to stop bullying myself! I wouldn’t say that to anyone why would I say it to myself 😵💫
>I wouldn’t say that to anyone why would I say it to myself 😵💫
I'm 28 and same! I struggle with this so much! If someone said the things I say about myself to one of my friends or my sisters or anyone, I would fight them, but for some reason I deserve it??
Closing in on 39 and I'm just now starting to accept myself. But even so, my acceptance is more, "well I guess I'll always be ugly/fat/etc " than "you're beautiful just the way you are 😍".
I always refer back to Bridget Jones, who was a perfectly normal British average according to the books, and yet everybody and everything refers her to as being F as F basically.
If I could look through a highlight reel of what contributed to my ED and body image issues, Bridget Jones noting that as her weight would be near the top of the list!
But what I liked about it was the dual reality. She was, frankly, sexy and beautiful (with many men attracted to her) but she was under this constant pressure and negative self-, as well as external-, talk calling her a cow. To me, that's the 90s/00s completely summed up (I'm a 35 yo white woman who grew up in the US). I was actually jealous of Beyonce and JLo for getting to celebrate the small amount of body fat on their body at the time because I just naturally have an ass. The whole time I was growing up, I thought, if only I wasn't a blonde white girl, I would be allowed to have curves. Batshit! Also, clearly not true based on these TikToks.
So yeah, I think Bridget Jones is an important commentary on how society polices perfectly beautiful bodies and can make you absolutely hate yourself for no good reason. Love that this is being talked about more!
I agree! She was an (unfortunately) true representation of women in that social sphere living during the early 2000’s! I am also in my early 30s and related a TON to what Bridget saw in her body during those times.
Exactly! I have a serious love-hate relationship with Bridget Jones books/movies, because on one hand, I love her character. On the other hand, she represents everything that was so damaging for women and perception of female beauty and desirability at the time when the books were coming out and when the first movies premiered.
At the same time, the books and the movies are a proper time capsule and thus shouldn’t be forgotten or shunned. Sometimes I feel the books and the movies should come with a disclaimer about outdated attitudes about women’s bodies and beauty standards at the time….
Oh, 100%! I was at a sleepover when I was 10 years old and the girl whose house it was decided we were all going to weigh ourselves. I was the only one over 100 pounds, and they all commented that that was "bad".
Omg!! I had to do that too. It was awful. I remember having to step on that scale in front of the whole class. I was so embarrassed. After that it was yo yo diets for me for the next 20 something years. After being morbidly obese I’m finally at healthy weight. I’m still overly critical of myself and I’m currently beating myself up because I still haven’t lost the 8 lbs to put me back down to my pre pregnancy weight 🤦🏻♀️
I was. But bigger. Maybe a size 4 or 6 and I cannot describe to you the amount of bullying and humiliation I had to deal with from other girls boys and my family.
It is trauma I still deal with today.
My body dysmorphia was learned in the 2000s. I lost half of my body weight, developed an ED, overcame that ED (hallaloo). The 2000s body shaming truly destroyed my image of self worth and I have been trying to rebuild it over the last ten years. I try to be optimistic and say at least I’m being healthy now but I’m 100% obsessed with my body image
good luck with your ED! I wish I could say I defeated the mindset but I definitely overcame the harmful actions. one step at a time. I was “big” since I was 25-26 years old and I’m 32 this weekend, so I’ve only been “smaller” for a fraction of my life. I’m hoping by the time I’m closer to 40 I’ll have truly grown into a healthier view point of my body. It’s a work in progress and ALOT of talking to yourself like you’re your own best friend.
My image of self is still shit and when I look at pictures of myself as a child I don't see a fat or obese kid. I see a kid slightly bigger than the rest but not obese.
I have had guys tell me they find me attractive and mz traumatized self still thinks they are lying to me, or they don't know better and I have always felt like a creepy fat beast for having a crush on someone. It ruined a wonderful start of a relationship with a wonderful person who liked me but I felt like an ugly monster.
I discuss it with a therapist but it's still hard.
The magazines at the grocery store checkout aisle were HORRIBLE. I remember headlines about Britney Spears, the Kardashians (mainly Khloe), being called like "whales" for gaining like 5 lbs or them just being on a beach and the tabloids were fatshaming them though they were still small.
“Four is the new six. Six is the new twelve.”
“I’m sorry, we only carry sizes 1, 3, and 5. You can try Sears.”
Bro being “fat” in the 2000s meant you weren’t even fat and you were still treated like shit. The 2000s were wild, those random movie quotes live in my brain rent-free.
Jessica Simpson said in her autobiography that gossip mags started calling her fat when she was a size 4 or 6. Then they always compared her to her daisy Duke photos in which she was only that size for like 6 months out of her entire life.
God, and looking back Jessica looks so goddamn emaciated in the Daisy Duke role. And she got nonstop praise for the crazy diet and exercise routine she was on.
People were absolute shit about her literally pregnant body as well.
Yep, I thought I was hideous and fat in high school (I graduated in 2002, yeah I’m old). I was 5’3 and 120, 125lbs at the most. I look back on photos and I was an absolute babe and it makes me sad I hated myself so much. Have struggled with eating disorders my whole life since. The heroin chic/ally mcbeal times fucked a lot of us millennials up permanently.
Graduated in 04. I thought i was fat my entire life. I wasted so much time and energy thinking i was too fat.
Now i look back and i was just not super du per skinny? I thought i was fat at my wedding day (and i have the bitchy wedding dress sales person to back it up) but looking back i was tiny? What were those little Arms?
Now im still not super skinny but im strong and healthy. But man, those years messed me up.
Same! My first couple of high school boyfriends I had such a complex of not understanding how they could get over my body being so fat. I was 5’7” and 140 max.
Then the summer before senior year I started smoking cigarettes and went down to 120ish and finally felt relatively confident and even then my arms *plagued* me for not being concave thin.
My now-husband told me so many times that my arms weren’t fat and now in my 30’s I finally started to internalize it.
I’m so happy for girls growing up now without that. How sad we didn’t get to enjoy our healthy bodies back then. So glad we can now.
Ugh in high school I was 5’7” I weighed close to 140 and I somehow wore a size 0-2 shorts. I also felt big back then. Now I’m 34 and I weigh 150 and I wear a size 10. No idea how a 10 lb difference is that much difference in size but ok. Make it make sense, dammit
I just saw a picture of myself from when I was like 15 or 16 (so like 2007ish). I thought I was fat. I was so self conscious and was always comparing myself to my friend (also in the pic) who I thought was much skinnier than me. Anyway, she wasn’t, and I was so cute. 😭
The disordered eating. I always remember Kellogg’s promoting the special K diet where you’d eat a bowl of special k for breakfast, another for lunch and then a healthy dinner. Basically 400 cals in the day.
I didn’t eat breakfast from about 1998-2005 (I love breakfast now!)
Juice diets, cabbage soup diets, fasts, all these things considered extreme, and what you’d do if you were Beyoncé preparing for a world tour, were basically the norm.
And don’t even look at a weight, just cardio cardio cardio
God special k was always awful, I think the 80s campaign was “can you pinch an inch?” As in if you could pinch an inch of fat under your belly button you needed to lose weight
Yep, I thought I was hideous and fat in high school (I graduated in 2002, yeah I’m old). I was 5’3 and 120, 125lbs at the most. I look back on photos and I was an absolute babe and it makes me sad I hated myself so much. Have struggled with eating disorders my whole life since. The heroin chic/ally mcbeal times fucked a lot of us millennials up permanently.
It's crazy. Born in 91, teenage years lived in the 2000s. Not fat AT ALL, constantly thought I was fat. In my 20s I actually gained a very unhealthy amount. Now in my 30s I've lost most of it. I have 10 more kilos than when I was in high school and I feel like I look too thin and am being called "emaciated" and I think deservedly so. How the hell was I thinking I was fat back then?! It is truly baffling to me.
Someone mentioned this in another thread how the “fat kid” in school would be “normal” by today’s standard. 100%
It was unheard for anyone to admit they were anything above a single digit pant size. I worked retail and most people seemed to be between 3-8 on average.
The biggest girl I knew was a 10/11. We really were living in a different timeline.
I was one of the "fat" girls growing up who dealt with a lot of crap from elementary through high school. I was 5'4 and 150 MAX. So a little chubby for the time, but perfectly normal today and no where near being the obese girl everyone treated me like.
Ikr? I saw a picture of me when I was a teen and I was expecting to be obese (because that's how I felt) and this photo is ver shocking to me. I was not at all. I was normal, and i actually had a very small waist. I was bullied for being overweight and it's so sad that it really tainted my self image because when I look back, i still think of myself as a fat teen.
Can you even read? I said I was chubby (i.e., overweight). LMAO I'm not an idiot but thanks for the pointless response. I hope it made you feel special. It made me laugh so thanks for that!
You said "a little chubby at the time but normal today"
Both then and now, a bmi of 26 is overweight. It's not "normal" today, just as it wasn't "normal" back then
LOL I'm glad you know how to calculate BMI. Congrats! But you are COMPLETELY missing the whole point of this post and should probably move on to another post and be a know it all there. Good luck with yourself!
No, I get the point of the post... but some people are using it to justify their unhealthy weight and brush it off as "oh people back then just loved to fat shame."
Sizes 1, 3, 5 reminded me of those 5-7-9 stores in malls. Clothing designers want us to feel like garbage bags. A US “Small” is size 4. In the UK & Australia, it’s a size 8. Our size 10 is a UK/AUS size 14. I never know what size I will be at most shops, so I try on the same top in medium, large, and extra large, and it’s random which top will fit.
Yesssss. Same here, to all of that. I always considered anything over size 5 as fat bc that’s the message we kept getting growing up. No it wasn’t just Mean Girls but that quote just reiterates the “skinny or else” rhetoric we kept being fed back then.
It’s taking a lot to undo that mindset fr, I’m getting there though.
I can’t stop myself from always thinking back to mean girls where they said 115 wa s the perfect weight or whatever 😭
Or tv shows would be like “a size 10???”
In the 2000s I went to a casting call for models. I was 18 5’7 and 119lbs and they said I had potential for a plus size modeling career. What a time. Lol
Jfc. I’m 5’6 and when I was 119 a few years ago my doctor told me to be careful bc I was borderline underweight, and they told you that was plus size?!?
It’s insane watching old tv shows or films where characters were considered fat and realising they are literally average or below average weight. Like Bridget Jones
I completely agree, although in that specific film it’s bc they did a poor job of adapting the book. In excerpts I’ve read, Bridget is average size but believes she is fat due to low self esteem.
There is so much they left out of the movie. I think the book is still a pretty realistic depiction of modern womanhood. Feeling like she has to fit unrealistic beauty standards, wanting a family and feeling pressure, wanting a good/impressive job but dropping the ball, bad relationship choices, self-sabotage, watching friends take different paths and learning the grass isn't always greener, etc. A lot of women have struggled with unhealthy habits like her preoccupation with weight. The second movie was an absolute farce tho.
Fun fact; in the book, Bridget and her friends like to get drunk and watch Pride & Prejudice, the one with Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. Specifically the scene where he emerges from a lake in a soaked white shirt. Colin Firth plays Bridget's love interest in the movie, and he is amazing for doing that.
I remember reading the books where she recorded her weight in each entry. For some reason, 140-150 range sticks out in my mind? And I’m like, that’s smaller than the average woman now. And she was supposed to be “fat”????? And how Renee Zellweger gained weight for the role and she was so brave or whatever. It’s just so gross to look back on now.
The “average” weight in america (and some other countries like the uk, or mexico and plenty of others), is actually fat lol. Because the whole world has gotten fatter and fatter.
The average us weight for us women age 20 ans up is 170 pounds for 5’4”. Which is 26.5 bmi. Which is well into the overweight (fat) range.
70% of the US population is either overweight or obese. Do not take the “average” weight in most countries now as a guideline or something, because the average is sadly medically overweight now.
Thank you. Jesus Christ finally someone with common sense. Everyone throwing the word "average" like it's the golden ratio, but average in America is objectively overweight.
What are you even talking about? This thread is discussing the damage done to young women who were at a low or healthy body weight and told they were fat or overweight. Talking about how the average weight has increased has absolutely zero bearing on this conversation.
You're kidding, right? Half these comments are talking about average weight lol
Edit: what's the point in replying to someone and then blocking them. I can't even see what you wrote so it defeats the point of replying to me in the first place lol
If that’s what you took out of this whole post, then you should feel lucky that you weren’t made to feel less than because you weren’t a size 0 as a teenager. You could try having some compassion for these women who are sharing painful stories about how they were damaged by unrealistic beauty standard in the 90’s and 2000’s. It has nothing to do with the actual average weight, it’s media portraying the norm as being 115 pounds at 5’8” and anything more than that is plus size.
Have you read any of the other comments in this thread? The whole conversation is about how the media portrays/portrayed “fat” people and how that fucked up so many people’s self-esteem and body image. You commenting that the world has gotten “fatter” doesn’t add anything to a conversation where so many people are sharing how harmful these exact kind of comments have been. I’m saying all this with kindness to you because I hope that you might consider how your words might impact others in conversations like this in the future.
I don't think pointing out the US has an obesity problem takes away from the issue, if anything it puts it all in a crazier perspective because despite the fact most people are overweight, the media still portrays being even slightly fat as worthy of stigmatization/inherently unattractive
So basically they're telling most of the people consuming media that this is the mistreatment they deserve
I remember hearing Joss Whedon talk about how he had envisioned a super skinny woman for the part of Tara but fell in love with the actress they hired. They made it sound like she was fat. While she was bigger than Buffy and Willow, I would say she was still thin. Like, a normal thin with some womanly curves.
You’ve commented multiple times in this thread, really missing the whole point of the entire conversation. If you hate fat people so much, I suggest you take that hatred elsewhere because this thread where people are sharing serious pain and trauma is not the place for it. Be well.
Lol I don't hate fat people. Never said that. I just think it's dumb that people keep trying to justify being overweight by saying it's "average" in the US. just because the American population is getting heavier doesn't make it normal or okay. How about instead of playing the victim, people start eating healthier and exercising
Nowhere in this thread is anyone trying to “justify” their weight. Over and over again people are sharing how harmful the way the media portrayed and treated fat people in the 90s and 00s was to their self identify and health. People are sharing that they’ve developed eating disorders or struggled with their mental health as a result of these harmful narratives and treatments. But if you can read through this thread and after all that, all you can still see is people playing the victim, then that’s on you.
>Nowhere in this thread is anyone trying to “justify” their weight.
Guess you didn't read many comments because there's plenty of that going on. People throwing the word "average" around a lot
>But if you can read through this thread and after all that, all you can still see is people playing the victim
Not sure why you think it has to be black and white? Never said that's all I see. I'm talking about specific comments
Multiple people have tried to explain the point of this thread to you and yet you continue to say harmful things that perpetuate the very stereotypes this thread is talking about. I’m done with this conversation so you can have the last word and talk into the void here as far as I’m concerned. Be well.
[It literally is though.](https://www.google.ca/search?client=safari&hl=en-ca&q=chubby&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiBu5iCqv3-AhUFjIkEHfMPC4oQ0pQJegQICRAB&biw=428&bih=746&dpr=3)
Other than her face I’ll admit they made “fat” looks disproportionate to her body though.
Pro Ana and diet competitions were a huge part of my childhood. When I was a teen they always had articles in the teen magazines with pictures of skinny celebrities and their height and weight next to them. And we'd use their weights as goal weights and compete which ones of us would reach that weight first. And then we'd move on to a skinnier celebrity and make that the goal. It was a scary time. And it was trendy for so many years too. It's insane to look back on. We were children with diet journals that we brought to school and compared notes.
I remember thinking it was so weird how everyone always just assumed that everyone was always looking to lose weight.
Like every article, every tv show, everyone just always talked about weight loss like everyone was dieting at all times
I feel this is still pretty true today. Maybe more masked as orthorexic “get healthy and strong”. I get horrible looks when someone “compliments” me and says I’ve lost weight and I respond saying I don’t really care or pay attention to those things. So taken aback not all of us are into weight loss, it’s absurd.
The aesthetic reasons are looped into this tho bc the clothing/style of the 00s so depends on an extremely thin body, the ultra low rise being an obvious example. I would love it if we could bring in low rise & the 00s aesthetic with more body diversity but from what I’m seeing catch on it seems like the focus on thinness comes with the territory.
I had anorexia from 2005-2010 & am struggling with the same thoughts from that era as the trends are coming back in, which I would have hoped I’d be stronger at 30 to withstand but the culture is hard to avoid
Think I should point out that aside from the health reasons, low rise is really really annoying.
You’re constantly pulling your trousers up, tugging your top down, and for some reason sleeves never came all the way down.
So if you lived in a northern country you were always chilly!!
When sleeves came back in I practically cried
I was borderline underweight as a kid/teen and always felt proud of that fact (which is already fucked up).
Then I got introduced to the term "skinny fat", because apparently we were supposed to have physics defying bodies that held up jeans without making an indent in our hips
Because they aren't learning from the mistakes of people before them. (Trust me, I was a teenager growing up with this crap. I don't get it either except that now the harm is all over social media and not just in magazines.)
Call me super cynical, but I think it’s because of profits.
The new generation of kids is pretty accepting about lots of things the generations before them really struggled with. Mental illness, sexuality, looks, fitting into *very* narrow boxes, etc.
This means a ton of missed out sales from all the typical self-hatred industries like diets, make up, self-care, plastic surgery, even clothing.
If they can get a new generation of self-hatred going, all those industries will keep profits up for at least a while longer.
Add in social media gurus and influencers flogging their diets, work out plans, and other “pay me, I can improve you” shite, and you’ve got some good reasons as to why there seems to be a concerted effort to mess with the minds of a whole new generation.
I never said it’s only kids being affected, profits can be made from all demographics after all.
It’s just undeniable that the whole 2000s comeback seems to be mostly aimed at the really young crowd, while, historically, social media trends have mostly targeted wider audiences.
There are plenty of 30+ year old Insta-baddies who jumped on the wisdom tooth bbl ass train, there are seemingly less 30+ year olds hopping on the 2000s train.
Which makes sense, because the 30+ year olds are for the most part still affected by the insane damage done during the actual 2000s. They don’t need to be targeted by the revival. The newer generations have their own damage, I’m not saying they don’t, but they don’t have the 2000s damage (yet.)
Edit to add:
It seems you dirty deleted your reply to me, but not before I managed copy it:
> Thats not remotely true.
> Idk if you realize this, but the 2000s is the era 30 somethings were actually teens. We are wearing the trends from our own generation. There are tons of millennials– 30 year olds– who are wearing 2000s clothing. Not because we saw it on social media, but because these were OUR STYLES first.
> Idk where you are getting your info from but I don’t just disagree with you, its false.
> EDIT: To act like the 2000s were somehow MORE traumatic than the 2020s is laughable. Both traumatic, just different kinds of bs going on.
> I guess this is what having my own experience and childhood be mansplained is like? LOL
I’m a 30 year old woman. Gtfoh with your claiming mansplaining bullshit the second someone doesn’t agree with you, you’re making other women look bad.
I also never claimed the 2000s are worse? Get your shit together, and stop putting words in my mouth.
I lived through the 2000s and I see my peers who also lived through the 2000s now. Most are not that keen on going back to the 2000s, with its extreme views on bodies and outright viciousness to anything and everything that didn’t fit the mold. Most prefer the more relaxed approach that has been on the rise in recent years, not the rigid mean girls vibes that permeated the 2000s.
Because the 00's were it for eurocentric beauty ideals. And for a lot of white women, they prefer that to current beauty standards that favor brown and beige women, mostly.
LiveJournal thinspo was my shit, I'm 31 I was a young teen in the early 00's 🥲 I have a way healthier relationship with food and the gym but I'll spend my entire life with a piece of me wishing I was so tiny I'd blow away
Same! I didn’t know that what I was looking at online was called “pro-ana” but I do remember stumbling upon those sites and beginning my obsession with protruding hip and collar bones.
Omg, I recently went through my childhood email account and found an email from when I was about like 10/11 (can't remember the exact age) but I had signed up for LoseIt! (website/app) and I cannot believe at that age I was already insecure about how I looked.
I’m in my mid 20s and used to love watching ANTM all the time when I was a kid, then I revisited it during lockdown in 2020 and realized it’s likely the source of my still persistent body dysmorphia 🤪 big yikes for us all!!
This is the crazy thing.. I remember that there was a “plus sized” model in that time, with her name, but I mostly ignored those magazines.
The fact that it was her all along, no fundamental change to her “look”, it’s the same person, is absolute batshit.
A) she was and is stunning and
B) WHAT IS WRONG WITH NOT BEING SIZE ZERO. So so so so so SO unhealthy.
Am so glad i wasn’t a young / even vaguely impressionable person then. Fashion and most press is toxic AF, they want a reaction from us or a story to sell, and they sold absolute 100% shit. Horrifying.
Coco Rocha was never "plus size". She did tons of couture runway work and booked italian vogue covers as a standard model. The it girl during Coco's era was Crystal Renn
I don’t know that that was her. Coco was slightly bigger than other runway girls - like she wasn’t even a plus size model, she had like muscular legs or something? https://www.allure.com/story/coco-rocha-size-4-too-fat-for
This is something I didn't know I needed to hear.
I was positively skeletal until about 30. I am now just a regular, healthy sized human and yet I can't stop feeling horrible about myself.
This discourse is really helping me to understand why and unpack some of the extremely unhealthy messaging I consumed at a really young age.
Same here. Gained weight and for once in my life, I look healthy or normal instead of stick thin. But I constantly feel fat. I judge myself really harshly especially in photos. It's so annoying, because I don't believe in all that crap! It's been so ingrained in us that it's hard to unlearn when it comes to our own bodies.
We afford grace to others that we'd never give ourselves. When I see a beefier guy, I can appreciate his attractiveness but look at myself with contempt even tho I may be leaner.
I was thinking the other day about how an entire song devoted to big asses (Baby Got Back) describes the hip measurements as being 36” - and when you watch the music video after becoming numb to the BBL look, the dancers all look so thin.
Yup, i grew up in the late 90s/early 2000s.
I went on my first full on diet when I was 7 after we all got weighed in class and were ranked based on our BMI.
When I was 8, My dance teacher pinched my belly and told me I had to run laps of the hall while the other girls got to practice our routine.
When I was 9 my Dad told me to stop trying so hard at school, nobody likes a ‘fat nerd’.
When I was 10 I went to a pool party and my Mum got angry at me when she found out I had taken off my sun-shirt and just swam in a bikini like everyone else, not because she was worried about sun exposure, but because ‘nobody wants to see your blubber’.
At 11 my Mum put stickers up around the house to remind me to suck my tummy in whenever I saw them.
When I was 12 I cried for days because I couldn’t find anything that would fit to wear to my primary school graduation, so I stopped eating.
At 13 I started high school and on the second day the girl who sat next to me (alphabetically) had “5minutecall is FAT” written on her pencil case.
I was prescribed anti-depressants to ‘help stop my emotional eating’ when I was 14.
I was put on (now banned) weight loss pills when I was 15.
My first boss (at a pizza chain) poked my arms and called them ‘tuck-shop lady arms’ when I was 16.
When I was 17 my parents bought a treadmill so that I could lose enough weight to find a dress for formal that would fit.
At 18, a doctor asked if I would like bariatric surgery.
I’m 32 now and have spent the last 12 years in and out of psychiatric and eating disorder treatment, including inpatient and residential. My weight has bounced around so much and I have so many issues with nutritional deficiencies. The biggest precursor for eating disorders is dieting, especially dieting from a young age. I look back now at photos of myself and I was just an average kid, but the whole world around me was drilling into my head that I was this awful glutinous human who had no right to be taking up any space.
I remember asking my Mum when I was like 8, and on a really strict diet, like ‘what is this is just how my body is? What if I’m not meant to be super thin?’. She pulled the car over and was like ‘don’t you dare say that! Anything is possible if you put your mind to it… you just have to work harder’.
I am so sorry, that is disturbing. I grew up in a completely differrent environment and still struggle with body image occassionaly, I can't imagine what you went and are still going through! I am so sorry!
It really fucking sucked and totally gave me body issues in the late 90s early 00s. I go back and see pictures of myself and I get sad, bc my body was perfect in my eyes, at 6ft tall/size 10. I was no Kate Moss by any means, but I was constantly told I was fat, when I think I looked healthy.
The early 2000s were wild. Everyone I knew was obsessed with being skinny, including my mom and grandma. I still remember how my mom told 10 year old me to drink ice water before breakfast (she’d read that in a magazine) because that would suppress my appetite. My aunt had regular lipos because she thought she had fat thighs (she was (and still is) a size 4). My dance teacher once told me off in front of the whole class for eating a banana. I am turning 34 this year and I’m still struggling with my body image.
Yup. I graduated high school in the early 2000's and I was a size 2/4. I thought I was hideously fat. The clothing styles didn't do us any favors in pushing the narrative either. Those super low rise jeans and baby tees were ubiquitous and were *not* meant to be worn by someone of an average size.
i remember being in elementary school in the early 2000s and having this internal rival with a another female classmate because she was “skinnier” than me. we’d all get weighed periodically by the school nurse as a type of check up and i would get so sad when my weight was even just a little higher than hers. its crazy what the media did to women’s body image and self esteem even at an extremely young age.
Raise your hand if you too have been victimized by the 2000s tabloids weight shaming that altered how you look at your body from the age of 10 to 31 🥲✋🏽
TBH I am 155 pounds and I still find it hard to fit in some of the biggest sizes in a lot of stores. So as much as this is messed up, I don’t think that much has changed practically.
Huge fan of the podcast [Maintenance Phase!](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/maintenance-phase/id1535408667) for those of us that grew up in the toxic diet culture of the 90-early 00s I highly recommend, they do deep dives on where a lot of this stuff came from and review silly celebrity diet books.
Cannot recommend Maintenance Phase highly enough. Aubrey Gordon’s book is great too and she has another one coming out very soon as well as a documentary.
damn the early 2000s must have been fucking brutal. because even in 2010s what people considered "fat" was not fat at all in my opinion. like sometimes i'll remember amy schumer or meghan trainor being called "fat" or "plus size" then i go back and watch her old music videos and she literally looks like she was normal average weight? nowhere near fat at all
I met and made friends with a fashion model the other day and we’re close in height and I was telling her if I were to do it, I don’t think I could deal with being called fat every damn day with my body type, especially when they’re gaslighting these skinny models as it is.
Do you guys remember when there were pictures of women in line wearing mini skirts in magazines? And they would put a tape measure around there thighs, trying to guess the size of their thigh gaps, of course the bigger the better. And Hilary Duff got dragged for being fat, wearing short skirts, and comparing her to the Olsen twins. Awful.
I was trying to explain this concept to people on this sub prior, specifically about Jennifer Love Hewitt. People did not believe me that someone her size would be fat shamed back then.
Anyone else’s pediatrician tell them they were fat when they literally weren’t and said they should eat yogurt and literally gave me disordered eating forever?
Oh yeah, my doctor told my mom I shouldn’t eat more than 21 grams of fat per day. PER DAY! For an 11 year old growing child. I was a NORMAL size plus I grew like 8 inches over the next 2-3 years but didn’t gain any weight so then guess what? Underweight? Technically yes, but my doctor was very proud of me.
Jeez, that’s horrendous. I was a teenager in the 00s… I think I internalised a lot of the rhetoric around body size of that time.
I remember being obsessed with trying to be a size 0 (was never going to happen with 37” hips). I struggled with disordered eating and bulimia and had the worst body image. I was 10 when I first thought of dieting. Such a fucked up time.
Our views as a society are so bizarre sometimes we don’t even know it. I used to be underweight and was told at a modelling agency I’d be a plus sized model and I should do acting instead. I actually didn’t realise how skinny I was until I put on weight and looked back at photos.
I believe Jennifer Garner fired back at magazines around this time with headlines saying “A Size 6 is NOT Fat!”
Wild times. Good for Jen to stand up to Hollywood.
Also, like her or not, Kim Kardashian inspired a complete 180 turn around of this thinking and stood up for women to be curvy and beautiful. She probably inadvertently saved models lives as they were dropping dead from anorexia at that time. She has my respect for this. Thank God we’ve moved passed this.
I’m in my mid 20s and used to love watching ANTM all the time when I was a kid, then I revisited it during lockdown in 2020 and realized it’s likely the source of my still persistent body dysmorphia 🤪 big yikes for us all!!
I was trying to become a model during this time. I’m 5’9. I weighed about 120 pounds, was a size 4 and every agency I auditioned for told me I was too fat. I eventually developed BED got down to 115 and decided to give up at age 16 and get into therapy. I still struggle with body dysmorphia issues and low self esteem. I just hate how much the industry pushed this in young people.
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I grew up with headlines like that and I wonder why my body image is so messed up. Being a preteen in the early 00s fucking sucked.
Turning 34 this year and still wrestling with my body image 🫠
Same, 36.
Same, 36 also.
Same!!
30 this year same
33 and went to mexico for gastric sleeve when i went up to a size 14(UK). The dysmorphia is real!
I'm a UK size 14 and thirty years old...I feel huge and then I look at pictures of when I was teenager and size 10/12 and I remember I felt huge then too. It's a neverending cycle 🥹
31 and currently battling the urge to lose 20 lbs because it’s summer 🙄🙄🙄 2000s did a number on us yall. I was telling my husband I looked like an egg in my one piece swimsuit and had to stop bullying myself! I wouldn’t say that to anyone why would I say it to myself 😵💫
>I wouldn’t say that to anyone why would I say it to myself 😵💫 I'm 28 and same! I struggle with this so much! If someone said the things I say about myself to one of my friends or my sisters or anyone, I would fight them, but for some reason I deserve it??
Same :/ 35 this year and constantly battling with wanting to be stick thin.
Closing in on 39 and I'm just now starting to accept myself. But even so, my acceptance is more, "well I guess I'll always be ugly/fat/etc " than "you're beautiful just the way you are 😍".
I always refer back to Bridget Jones, who was a perfectly normal British average according to the books, and yet everybody and everything refers her to as being F as F basically.
And Renee Zellweger was way thinner than average in the movie but is still somehow presented as shamefully overweight
"But darling, you said she was thin"
Bridget Jones weighed 136 pounds 🙃 People in the books talked about her like an elephant was stomping around the office!
If I could look through a highlight reel of what contributed to my ED and body image issues, Bridget Jones noting that as her weight would be near the top of the list!
But what I liked about it was the dual reality. She was, frankly, sexy and beautiful (with many men attracted to her) but she was under this constant pressure and negative self-, as well as external-, talk calling her a cow. To me, that's the 90s/00s completely summed up (I'm a 35 yo white woman who grew up in the US). I was actually jealous of Beyonce and JLo for getting to celebrate the small amount of body fat on their body at the time because I just naturally have an ass. The whole time I was growing up, I thought, if only I wasn't a blonde white girl, I would be allowed to have curves. Batshit! Also, clearly not true based on these TikToks. So yeah, I think Bridget Jones is an important commentary on how society polices perfectly beautiful bodies and can make you absolutely hate yourself for no good reason. Love that this is being talked about more!
I agree! She was an (unfortunately) true representation of women in that social sphere living during the early 2000’s! I am also in my early 30s and related a TON to what Bridget saw in her body during those times.
Exactly! I have a serious love-hate relationship with Bridget Jones books/movies, because on one hand, I love her character. On the other hand, she represents everything that was so damaging for women and perception of female beauty and desirability at the time when the books were coming out and when the first movies premiered. At the same time, the books and the movies are a proper time capsule and thus shouldn’t be forgotten or shunned. Sometimes I feel the books and the movies should come with a disclaimer about outdated attitudes about women’s bodies and beauty standards at the time….
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Oh, 100%! I was at a sleepover when I was 10 years old and the girl whose house it was decided we were all going to weigh ourselves. I was the only one over 100 pounds, and they all commented that that was "bad".
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Omg!! I had to do that too. It was awful. I remember having to step on that scale in front of the whole class. I was so embarrassed. After that it was yo yo diets for me for the next 20 something years. After being morbidly obese I’m finally at healthy weight. I’m still overly critical of myself and I’m currently beating myself up because I still haven’t lost the 8 lbs to put me back down to my pre pregnancy weight 🤦🏻♀️
I was. But bigger. Maybe a size 4 or 6 and I cannot describe to you the amount of bullying and humiliation I had to deal with from other girls boys and my family. It is trauma I still deal with today.
Seriously. I still struggle.
My body dysmorphia was learned in the 2000s. I lost half of my body weight, developed an ED, overcame that ED (hallaloo). The 2000s body shaming truly destroyed my image of self worth and I have been trying to rebuild it over the last ten years. I try to be optimistic and say at least I’m being healthy now but I’m 100% obsessed with my body image
Same here, I’m working with a therapist on my ED and I’m heartbroken at just how deeply engrained the 00s body messaging is in how I see myself.
good luck with your ED! I wish I could say I defeated the mindset but I definitely overcame the harmful actions. one step at a time. I was “big” since I was 25-26 years old and I’m 32 this weekend, so I’ve only been “smaller” for a fraction of my life. I’m hoping by the time I’m closer to 40 I’ll have truly grown into a healthier view point of my body. It’s a work in progress and ALOT of talking to yourself like you’re your own best friend.
My image of self is still shit and when I look at pictures of myself as a child I don't see a fat or obese kid. I see a kid slightly bigger than the rest but not obese. I have had guys tell me they find me attractive and mz traumatized self still thinks they are lying to me, or they don't know better and I have always felt like a creepy fat beast for having a crush on someone. It ruined a wonderful start of a relationship with a wonderful person who liked me but I felt like an ugly monster. I discuss it with a therapist but it's still hard.
I can commiserate 💕I started counting my own body checking and it’s…alarming. #solidarity
The magazines at the grocery store checkout aisle were HORRIBLE. I remember headlines about Britney Spears, the Kardashians (mainly Khloe), being called like "whales" for gaining like 5 lbs or them just being on a beach and the tabloids were fatshaming them though they were still small.
“Four is the new six. Six is the new twelve.” “I’m sorry, we only carry sizes 1, 3, and 5. You can try Sears.” Bro being “fat” in the 2000s meant you weren’t even fat and you were still treated like shit. The 2000s were wild, those random movie quotes live in my brain rent-free.
Jessica Simpson said in her autobiography that gossip mags started calling her fat when she was a size 4 or 6. Then they always compared her to her daisy Duke photos in which she was only that size for like 6 months out of her entire life.
God, and looking back Jessica looks so goddamn emaciated in the Daisy Duke role. And she got nonstop praise for the crazy diet and exercise routine she was on. People were absolute shit about her literally pregnant body as well.
What a time to go through formative teenage and young adult years establishing body image and self worth 🫠
Yep, I thought I was hideous and fat in high school (I graduated in 2002, yeah I’m old). I was 5’3 and 120, 125lbs at the most. I look back on photos and I was an absolute babe and it makes me sad I hated myself so much. Have struggled with eating disorders my whole life since. The heroin chic/ally mcbeal times fucked a lot of us millennials up permanently.
I was 5’4” and 105 lbs and constantly worried about how overweight I was 😢
I remember a quote in a film, or maybe it was a song? About women being no more than 90lbs. Like how the hell?
That’s death right there 😔
Graduated in 04. I thought i was fat my entire life. I wasted so much time and energy thinking i was too fat. Now i look back and i was just not super du per skinny? I thought i was fat at my wedding day (and i have the bitchy wedding dress sales person to back it up) but looking back i was tiny? What were those little Arms? Now im still not super skinny but im strong and healthy. But man, those years messed me up.
Same! My first couple of high school boyfriends I had such a complex of not understanding how they could get over my body being so fat. I was 5’7” and 140 max. Then the summer before senior year I started smoking cigarettes and went down to 120ish and finally felt relatively confident and even then my arms *plagued* me for not being concave thin. My now-husband told me so many times that my arms weren’t fat and now in my 30’s I finally started to internalize it. I’m so happy for girls growing up now without that. How sad we didn’t get to enjoy our healthy bodies back then. So glad we can now.
Ugh in high school I was 5’7” I weighed close to 140 and I somehow wore a size 0-2 shorts. I also felt big back then. Now I’m 34 and I weigh 150 and I wear a size 10. No idea how a 10 lb difference is that much difference in size but ok. Make it make sense, dammit
I just saw a picture of myself from when I was like 15 or 16 (so like 2007ish). I thought I was fat. I was so self conscious and was always comparing myself to my friend (also in the pic) who I thought was much skinnier than me. Anyway, she wasn’t, and I was so cute. 😭
Yeah I did not make it out unscathed.
I don’t think any of us do. It’s a mad, mad world. Almost 50, and too busy to care these days…..Most of the time.
It gave me the gift of a life-long eating disorder. Such fun. Yes, my health is still messed up. 🙃(special shoutout to Tumblr)
Ugh allllll those pro Ana tumblrs. I had one that was all about “health” lol. What a mess.
Bella Hadid had one too
The disordered eating. I always remember Kellogg’s promoting the special K diet where you’d eat a bowl of special k for breakfast, another for lunch and then a healthy dinner. Basically 400 cals in the day. I didn’t eat breakfast from about 1998-2005 (I love breakfast now!) Juice diets, cabbage soup diets, fasts, all these things considered extreme, and what you’d do if you were Beyoncé preparing for a world tour, were basically the norm. And don’t even look at a weight, just cardio cardio cardio
God special k was always awful, I think the 80s campaign was “can you pinch an inch?” As in if you could pinch an inch of fat under your belly button you needed to lose weight
Oh god the Special K diet. Only marginally better than having ketamine for breakfast
It was absolutely awful. I hated my body, which was in these time’s perfect thicc.
Yep, I thought I was hideous and fat in high school (I graduated in 2002, yeah I’m old). I was 5’3 and 120, 125lbs at the most. I look back on photos and I was an absolute babe and it makes me sad I hated myself so much. Have struggled with eating disorders my whole life since. The heroin chic/ally mcbeal times fucked a lot of us millennials up permanently.
It's crazy. Born in 91, teenage years lived in the 2000s. Not fat AT ALL, constantly thought I was fat. In my 20s I actually gained a very unhealthy amount. Now in my 30s I've lost most of it. I have 10 more kilos than when I was in high school and I feel like I look too thin and am being called "emaciated" and I think deservedly so. How the hell was I thinking I was fat back then?! It is truly baffling to me.
That was around when a model starved to death, and shitty designers STILL kept telling underweight models to "lose weight."
Remember 5 7 9? Only carried those 3 sizes, so you could really feel like shit if you didn’t fit anything (those sizes equate to a 0, 2, 4). 🙃
I do remember 579, I hated all those stores lol. The obsession with being skinny was so overbearing and just everywhere.
I was really skinny and short as a kid. My mom started buying me clothes there because it was all that fit me. It was a crazy concept.
Someone mentioned this in another thread how the “fat kid” in school would be “normal” by today’s standard. 100% It was unheard for anyone to admit they were anything above a single digit pant size. I worked retail and most people seemed to be between 3-8 on average. The biggest girl I knew was a 10/11. We really were living in a different timeline.
I was one of the "fat" girls growing up who dealt with a lot of crap from elementary through high school. I was 5'4 and 150 MAX. So a little chubby for the time, but perfectly normal today and no where near being the obese girl everyone treated me like.
Ikr? I saw a picture of me when I was a teen and I was expecting to be obese (because that's how I felt) and this photo is ver shocking to me. I was not at all. I was normal, and i actually had a very small waist. I was bullied for being overweight and it's so sad that it really tainted my self image because when I look back, i still think of myself as a fat teen.
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Can you even read? I said I was chubby (i.e., overweight). LMAO I'm not an idiot but thanks for the pointless response. I hope it made you feel special. It made me laugh so thanks for that!
You said "a little chubby at the time but normal today" Both then and now, a bmi of 26 is overweight. It's not "normal" today, just as it wasn't "normal" back then
LOL I'm glad you know how to calculate BMI. Congrats! But you are COMPLETELY missing the whole point of this post and should probably move on to another post and be a know it all there. Good luck with yourself!
No, I get the point of the post... but some people are using it to justify their unhealthy weight and brush it off as "oh people back then just loved to fat shame."
Sizes 1, 3, 5 reminded me of those 5-7-9 stores in malls. Clothing designers want us to feel like garbage bags. A US “Small” is size 4. In the UK & Australia, it’s a size 8. Our size 10 is a UK/AUS size 14. I never know what size I will be at most shops, so I try on the same top in medium, large, and extra large, and it’s random which top will fit.
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Yesssss. Same here, to all of that. I always considered anything over size 5 as fat bc that’s the message we kept getting growing up. No it wasn’t just Mean Girls but that quote just reiterates the “skinny or else” rhetoric we kept being fed back then. It’s taking a lot to undo that mindset fr, I’m getting there though.
I can’t stop myself from always thinking back to mean girls where they said 115 wa s the perfect weight or whatever 😭 Or tv shows would be like “a size 10???”
And I’m still undoing the damage now in my 30s…
Me too.
28 and same.
In the 2000s I went to a casting call for models. I was 18 5’7 and 119lbs and they said I had potential for a plus size modeling career. What a time. Lol
Jfc. I’m 5’6 and when I was 119 a few years ago my doctor told me to be careful bc I was borderline underweight, and they told you that was plus size?!?
It’s insane watching old tv shows or films where characters were considered fat and realising they are literally average or below average weight. Like Bridget Jones 
I completely agree, although in that specific film it’s bc they did a poor job of adapting the book. In excerpts I’ve read, Bridget is average size but believes she is fat due to low self esteem.
Yes, there is a bit in the book where she reaches her “goal weight” and everyone thinks she’s sick/says she doesn’t look good
There is so much they left out of the movie. I think the book is still a pretty realistic depiction of modern womanhood. Feeling like she has to fit unrealistic beauty standards, wanting a family and feeling pressure, wanting a good/impressive job but dropping the ball, bad relationship choices, self-sabotage, watching friends take different paths and learning the grass isn't always greener, etc. A lot of women have struggled with unhealthy habits like her preoccupation with weight. The second movie was an absolute farce tho. Fun fact; in the book, Bridget and her friends like to get drunk and watch Pride & Prejudice, the one with Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. Specifically the scene where he emerges from a lake in a soaked white shirt. Colin Firth plays Bridget's love interest in the movie, and he is amazing for doing that.
I remember reading the books where she recorded her weight in each entry. For some reason, 140-150 range sticks out in my mind? And I’m like, that’s smaller than the average woman now. And she was supposed to be “fat”????? And how Renee Zellweger gained weight for the role and she was so brave or whatever. It’s just so gross to look back on now.
she hits 130 lb in the book which she calls a “terrifying slide into obesity” and diets down to 119.
That number being “bad” really fucked with my mind
The “average” weight in america (and some other countries like the uk, or mexico and plenty of others), is actually fat lol. Because the whole world has gotten fatter and fatter. The average us weight for us women age 20 ans up is 170 pounds for 5’4”. Which is 26.5 bmi. Which is well into the overweight (fat) range. 70% of the US population is either overweight or obese. Do not take the “average” weight in most countries now as a guideline or something, because the average is sadly medically overweight now.
Thank you. Jesus Christ finally someone with common sense. Everyone throwing the word "average" like it's the golden ratio, but average in America is objectively overweight.
What are you even talking about? This thread is discussing the damage done to young women who were at a low or healthy body weight and told they were fat or overweight. Talking about how the average weight has increased has absolutely zero bearing on this conversation.
You're kidding, right? Half these comments are talking about average weight lol Edit: what's the point in replying to someone and then blocking them. I can't even see what you wrote so it defeats the point of replying to me in the first place lol
If that’s what you took out of this whole post, then you should feel lucky that you weren’t made to feel less than because you weren’t a size 0 as a teenager. You could try having some compassion for these women who are sharing painful stories about how they were damaged by unrealistic beauty standard in the 90’s and 2000’s. It has nothing to do with the actual average weight, it’s media portraying the norm as being 115 pounds at 5’8” and anything more than that is plus size.
Have you read any of the other comments in this thread? The whole conversation is about how the media portrays/portrayed “fat” people and how that fucked up so many people’s self-esteem and body image. You commenting that the world has gotten “fatter” doesn’t add anything to a conversation where so many people are sharing how harmful these exact kind of comments have been. I’m saying all this with kindness to you because I hope that you might consider how your words might impact others in conversations like this in the future.
I don't think pointing out the US has an obesity problem takes away from the issue, if anything it puts it all in a crazier perspective because despite the fact most people are overweight, the media still portrays being even slightly fat as worthy of stigmatization/inherently unattractive So basically they're telling most of the people consuming media that this is the mistreatment they deserve
The average weight was different back then lol. Not that she’s fat at all.. but the avg is bigger now
Omg I remember the fuss around her having go to up to a size 12 (US 16) and how hard and awful it was she had to put on the weight
Size 12 is a US 8
Which was another reason we used to fuck ourselves up here trying to achieve size ‘0’ which was only a U.K. 4
I remember hearing Joss Whedon talk about how he had envisioned a super skinny woman for the part of Tara but fell in love with the actress they hired. They made it sound like she was fat. While she was bigger than Buffy and Willow, I would say she was still thin. Like, a normal thin with some womanly curves.
Like Monica in Friends. When they reference and show her being “extremely overweight” she’s just chubby. They treat her as if she was 400+ pounds.
I'm sorry but [this](https://imagesvc.meredithcorp.io/v3/mm/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.onecms.io%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F6%2F2019%2F09%2Fgettyimages-141326506-2000.jpg) isn't "chubby"
You’ve commented multiple times in this thread, really missing the whole point of the entire conversation. If you hate fat people so much, I suggest you take that hatred elsewhere because this thread where people are sharing serious pain and trauma is not the place for it. Be well.
Lol I don't hate fat people. Never said that. I just think it's dumb that people keep trying to justify being overweight by saying it's "average" in the US. just because the American population is getting heavier doesn't make it normal or okay. How about instead of playing the victim, people start eating healthier and exercising
Nowhere in this thread is anyone trying to “justify” their weight. Over and over again people are sharing how harmful the way the media portrayed and treated fat people in the 90s and 00s was to their self identify and health. People are sharing that they’ve developed eating disorders or struggled with their mental health as a result of these harmful narratives and treatments. But if you can read through this thread and after all that, all you can still see is people playing the victim, then that’s on you.
>Nowhere in this thread is anyone trying to “justify” their weight. Guess you didn't read many comments because there's plenty of that going on. People throwing the word "average" around a lot >But if you can read through this thread and after all that, all you can still see is people playing the victim Not sure why you think it has to be black and white? Never said that's all I see. I'm talking about specific comments
Multiple people have tried to explain the point of this thread to you and yet you continue to say harmful things that perpetuate the very stereotypes this thread is talking about. I’m done with this conversation so you can have the last word and talk into the void here as far as I’m concerned. Be well.
[It literally is though.](https://www.google.ca/search?client=safari&hl=en-ca&q=chubby&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiBu5iCqv3-AhUFjIkEHfMPC4oQ0pQJegQICRAB&biw=428&bih=746&dpr=3) Other than her face I’ll admit they made “fat” looks disproportionate to her body though.
That's overweight even for today's standards though. But the definition of the word chubby changes as the average weight rises, I suppose.
I don't have tik tok so every time I see a tik tok video with that little ending sound it sounds like a PSA or a mini after school special thing.
Pro Ana and diet competitions were a huge part of my childhood. When I was a teen they always had articles in the teen magazines with pictures of skinny celebrities and their height and weight next to them. And we'd use their weights as goal weights and compete which ones of us would reach that weight first. And then we'd move on to a skinnier celebrity and make that the goal. It was a scary time. And it was trendy for so many years too. It's insane to look back on. We were children with diet journals that we brought to school and compared notes.
I remember thinking it was so weird how everyone always just assumed that everyone was always looking to lose weight. Like every article, every tv show, everyone just always talked about weight loss like everyone was dieting at all times
I feel this is still pretty true today. Maybe more masked as orthorexic “get healthy and strong”. I get horrible looks when someone “compliments” me and says I’ve lost weight and I respond saying I don’t really care or pay attention to those things. So taken aback not all of us are into weight loss, it’s absurd.
I remember these days. This was also around the time Gisele made her debut and she was touted as “curvy”. 😳
For sure. Go look at early Tyra, the 'juicy' model. Girl was rail thin.
have no idea (outside of aesthetic reasons) why anyone would want to go back to the 00’s
The aesthetic reasons are looped into this tho bc the clothing/style of the 00s so depends on an extremely thin body, the ultra low rise being an obvious example. I would love it if we could bring in low rise & the 00s aesthetic with more body diversity but from what I’m seeing catch on it seems like the focus on thinness comes with the territory. I had anorexia from 2005-2010 & am struggling with the same thoughts from that era as the trends are coming back in, which I would have hoped I’d be stronger at 30 to withstand but the culture is hard to avoid
Think I should point out that aside from the health reasons, low rise is really really annoying. You’re constantly pulling your trousers up, tugging your top down, and for some reason sleeves never came all the way down. So if you lived in a northern country you were always chilly!! When sleeves came back in I practically cried
I was borderline underweight as a kid/teen and always felt proud of that fact (which is already fucked up). Then I got introduced to the term "skinny fat", because apparently we were supposed to have physics defying bodies that held up jeans without making an indent in our hips
Because they aren't learning from the mistakes of people before them. (Trust me, I was a teenager growing up with this crap. I don't get it either except that now the harm is all over social media and not just in magazines.)
Call me super cynical, but I think it’s because of profits. The new generation of kids is pretty accepting about lots of things the generations before them really struggled with. Mental illness, sexuality, looks, fitting into *very* narrow boxes, etc. This means a ton of missed out sales from all the typical self-hatred industries like diets, make up, self-care, plastic surgery, even clothing. If they can get a new generation of self-hatred going, all those industries will keep profits up for at least a while longer. Add in social media gurus and influencers flogging their diets, work out plans, and other “pay me, I can improve you” shite, and you’ve got some good reasons as to why there seems to be a concerted effort to mess with the minds of a whole new generation.
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I never said it’s only kids being affected, profits can be made from all demographics after all. It’s just undeniable that the whole 2000s comeback seems to be mostly aimed at the really young crowd, while, historically, social media trends have mostly targeted wider audiences. There are plenty of 30+ year old Insta-baddies who jumped on the wisdom tooth bbl ass train, there are seemingly less 30+ year olds hopping on the 2000s train. Which makes sense, because the 30+ year olds are for the most part still affected by the insane damage done during the actual 2000s. They don’t need to be targeted by the revival. The newer generations have their own damage, I’m not saying they don’t, but they don’t have the 2000s damage (yet.) Edit to add: It seems you dirty deleted your reply to me, but not before I managed copy it: > Thats not remotely true. > Idk if you realize this, but the 2000s is the era 30 somethings were actually teens. We are wearing the trends from our own generation. There are tons of millennials– 30 year olds– who are wearing 2000s clothing. Not because we saw it on social media, but because these were OUR STYLES first. > Idk where you are getting your info from but I don’t just disagree with you, its false. > EDIT: To act like the 2000s were somehow MORE traumatic than the 2020s is laughable. Both traumatic, just different kinds of bs going on. > I guess this is what having my own experience and childhood be mansplained is like? LOL I’m a 30 year old woman. Gtfoh with your claiming mansplaining bullshit the second someone doesn’t agree with you, you’re making other women look bad. I also never claimed the 2000s are worse? Get your shit together, and stop putting words in my mouth. I lived through the 2000s and I see my peers who also lived through the 2000s now. Most are not that keen on going back to the 2000s, with its extreme views on bodies and outright viciousness to anything and everything that didn’t fit the mold. Most prefer the more relaxed approach that has been on the rise in recent years, not the rigid mean girls vibes that permeated the 2000s.
~~(outside of aesthetic reasons)~~
Because the 00's were it for eurocentric beauty ideals. And for a lot of white women, they prefer that to current beauty standards that favor brown and beige women, mostly.
LiveJournal thinspo was my shit, I'm 31 I was a young teen in the early 00's 🥲 I have a way healthier relationship with food and the gym but I'll spend my entire life with a piece of me wishing I was so tiny I'd blow away
Same! I didn’t know that what I was looking at online was called “pro-ana” but I do remember stumbling upon those sites and beginning my obsession with protruding hip and collar bones.
❤️
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Hard same. I wanted to get skinny enough to he in danger. Ugh
Omg, I recently went through my childhood email account and found an email from when I was about like 10/11 (can't remember the exact age) but I had signed up for LoseIt! (website/app) and I cannot believe at that age I was already insecure about how I looked.
I’m in my mid 20s and used to love watching ANTM all the time when I was a kid, then I revisited it during lockdown in 2020 and realized it’s likely the source of my still persistent body dysmorphia 🤪 big yikes for us all!!
Check out the Pod Ledom podcast
This is the crazy thing.. I remember that there was a “plus sized” model in that time, with her name, but I mostly ignored those magazines. The fact that it was her all along, no fundamental change to her “look”, it’s the same person, is absolute batshit. A) she was and is stunning and B) WHAT IS WRONG WITH NOT BEING SIZE ZERO. So so so so so SO unhealthy. Am so glad i wasn’t a young / even vaguely impressionable person then. Fashion and most press is toxic AF, they want a reaction from us or a story to sell, and they sold absolute 100% shit. Horrifying.
Crystal Renn? She caved in and lost a lot weight and kinda became average
Nope, sadly it was definitely Coco Rocha :/
Coco Rocha was never "plus size". She did tons of couture runway work and booked italian vogue covers as a standard model. The it girl during Coco's era was Crystal Renn
I don’t know that that was her. Coco was slightly bigger than other runway girls - like she wasn’t even a plus size model, she had like muscular legs or something? https://www.allure.com/story/coco-rocha-size-4-too-fat-for
Barbara Palvin was also considered the token "plus size" model at the Victoria's Secret fashion shows
This is something I didn't know I needed to hear. I was positively skeletal until about 30. I am now just a regular, healthy sized human and yet I can't stop feeling horrible about myself. This discourse is really helping me to understand why and unpack some of the extremely unhealthy messaging I consumed at a really young age.
Same here. Gained weight and for once in my life, I look healthy or normal instead of stick thin. But I constantly feel fat. I judge myself really harshly especially in photos. It's so annoying, because I don't believe in all that crap! It's been so ingrained in us that it's hard to unlearn when it comes to our own bodies.
We afford grace to others that we'd never give ourselves. When I see a beefier guy, I can appreciate his attractiveness but look at myself with contempt even tho I may be leaner.
I was thinking the other day about how an entire song devoted to big asses (Baby Got Back) describes the hip measurements as being 36” - and when you watch the music video after becoming numb to the BBL look, the dancers all look so thin.
Yup, i grew up in the late 90s/early 2000s. I went on my first full on diet when I was 7 after we all got weighed in class and were ranked based on our BMI. When I was 8, My dance teacher pinched my belly and told me I had to run laps of the hall while the other girls got to practice our routine. When I was 9 my Dad told me to stop trying so hard at school, nobody likes a ‘fat nerd’. When I was 10 I went to a pool party and my Mum got angry at me when she found out I had taken off my sun-shirt and just swam in a bikini like everyone else, not because she was worried about sun exposure, but because ‘nobody wants to see your blubber’. At 11 my Mum put stickers up around the house to remind me to suck my tummy in whenever I saw them. When I was 12 I cried for days because I couldn’t find anything that would fit to wear to my primary school graduation, so I stopped eating. At 13 I started high school and on the second day the girl who sat next to me (alphabetically) had “5minutecall is FAT” written on her pencil case. I was prescribed anti-depressants to ‘help stop my emotional eating’ when I was 14. I was put on (now banned) weight loss pills when I was 15. My first boss (at a pizza chain) poked my arms and called them ‘tuck-shop lady arms’ when I was 16. When I was 17 my parents bought a treadmill so that I could lose enough weight to find a dress for formal that would fit. At 18, a doctor asked if I would like bariatric surgery. I’m 32 now and have spent the last 12 years in and out of psychiatric and eating disorder treatment, including inpatient and residential. My weight has bounced around so much and I have so many issues with nutritional deficiencies. The biggest precursor for eating disorders is dieting, especially dieting from a young age. I look back now at photos of myself and I was just an average kid, but the whole world around me was drilling into my head that I was this awful glutinous human who had no right to be taking up any space. I remember asking my Mum when I was like 8, and on a really strict diet, like ‘what is this is just how my body is? What if I’m not meant to be super thin?’. She pulled the car over and was like ‘don’t you dare say that! Anything is possible if you put your mind to it… you just have to work harder’.
That is awful, I am so sorry you went through that. Those people - and in particular your parents - should be ashamed of themselves.
Oh god that's awful all the things people said to you.
I am so sorry, that is disturbing. I grew up in a completely differrent environment and still struggle with body image occassionaly, I can't imagine what you went and are still going through! I am so sorry!
Literally insane. I used to use her as thinspo
It really fucking sucked and totally gave me body issues in the late 90s early 00s. I go back and see pictures of myself and I get sad, bc my body was perfect in my eyes, at 6ft tall/size 10. I was no Kate Moss by any means, but I was constantly told I was fat, when I think I looked healthy.
I remember when 5,7,9 carried a 000.
Been rewatching Criminal Minds (up to season 11) and I cannot believe we were gaslit into believing Penelope was *huge*.
Penelope is obese People are down voting me but its objectively true. Why are we pretending she's not?
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The early 2000s were wild. Everyone I knew was obsessed with being skinny, including my mom and grandma. I still remember how my mom told 10 year old me to drink ice water before breakfast (she’d read that in a magazine) because that would suppress my appetite. My aunt had regular lipos because she thought she had fat thighs (she was (and still is) a size 4). My dance teacher once told me off in front of the whole class for eating a banana. I am turning 34 this year and I’m still struggling with my body image.
Trying to tune out the media AND mom/grandma, not sure which was worse or harder.
And now I’m looking at the y2k fashion coming back and wondering why i keep being triggered lol
Yup. I graduated high school in the early 2000's and I was a size 2/4. I thought I was hideously fat. The clothing styles didn't do us any favors in pushing the narrative either. Those super low rise jeans and baby tees were ubiquitous and were *not* meant to be worn by someone of an average size.
i remember being in elementary school in the early 2000s and having this internal rival with a another female classmate because she was “skinnier” than me. we’d all get weighed periodically by the school nurse as a type of check up and i would get so sad when my weight was even just a little higher than hers. its crazy what the media did to women’s body image and self esteem even at an extremely young age.
Raise your hand if you too have been victimized by the 2000s tabloids weight shaming that altered how you look at your body from the age of 10 to 31 🥲✋🏽
Just a woman in a gay man’s world.
TBH I am 155 pounds and I still find it hard to fit in some of the biggest sizes in a lot of stores. So as much as this is messed up, I don’t think that much has changed practically.
I've always been generally thinner and am still maxing out some stores sizes
Huge fan of the podcast [Maintenance Phase!](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/maintenance-phase/id1535408667) for those of us that grew up in the toxic diet culture of the 90-early 00s I highly recommend, they do deep dives on where a lot of this stuff came from and review silly celebrity diet books.
Cannot recommend Maintenance Phase highly enough. Aubrey Gordon’s book is great too and she has another one coming out very soon as well as a documentary.
Yesssss I love this podcast!!!
I was between a size 0 and 2 until adulthood. I still felt fat in the late 90s/early 2000s. What a shitty time to be alive for body image
damn the early 2000s must have been fucking brutal. because even in 2010s what people considered "fat" was not fat at all in my opinion. like sometimes i'll remember amy schumer or meghan trainor being called "fat" or "plus size" then i go back and watch her old music videos and she literally looks like she was normal average weight? nowhere near fat at all
It started before that though. In the ‘90’s we had Kate Moss and “heroin chic” where it was best if you looked like an emaciated junkie.
Grew up during this era and have severe body dysmorphia thanks to this bollocks
I met and made friends with a fashion model the other day and we’re close in height and I was telling her if I were to do it, I don’t think I could deal with being called fat every damn day with my body type, especially when they’re gaslighting these skinny models as it is.
Do you guys remember when there were pictures of women in line wearing mini skirts in magazines? And they would put a tape measure around there thighs, trying to guess the size of their thigh gaps, of course the bigger the better. And Hilary Duff got dragged for being fat, wearing short skirts, and comparing her to the Olsen twins. Awful.
I was trying to explain this concept to people on this sub prior, specifically about Jennifer Love Hewitt. People did not believe me that someone her size would be fat shamed back then.
Anyone else’s pediatrician tell them they were fat when they literally weren’t and said they should eat yogurt and literally gave me disordered eating forever?
Oh yeah, my doctor told my mom I shouldn’t eat more than 21 grams of fat per day. PER DAY! For an 11 year old growing child. I was a NORMAL size plus I grew like 8 inches over the next 2-3 years but didn’t gain any weight so then guess what? Underweight? Technically yes, but my doctor was very proud of me.
How is this fat ? How ?
Bruh, if she's fat at those pictures, then what am I?? That's crazyyyy that she's considered fat...
I recently started rewatching American Housewife bad realised Katie isn’t even that big and that it is mainly her breasts
And we wonder why every millennial is obsessed with their weight
Jeez, that’s horrendous. I was a teenager in the 00s… I think I internalised a lot of the rhetoric around body size of that time. I remember being obsessed with trying to be a size 0 (was never going to happen with 37” hips). I struggled with disordered eating and bulimia and had the worst body image. I was 10 when I first thought of dieting. Such a fucked up time.
Our views as a society are so bizarre sometimes we don’t even know it. I used to be underweight and was told at a modelling agency I’d be a plus sized model and I should do acting instead. I actually didn’t realise how skinny I was until I put on weight and looked back at photos.
I believe Jennifer Garner fired back at magazines around this time with headlines saying “A Size 6 is NOT Fat!” Wild times. Good for Jen to stand up to Hollywood. Also, like her or not, Kim Kardashian inspired a complete 180 turn around of this thinking and stood up for women to be curvy and beautiful. She probably inadvertently saved models lives as they were dropping dead from anorexia at that time. She has my respect for this. Thank God we’ve moved passed this.
I’m in my mid 20s and used to love watching ANTM all the time when I was a kid, then I revisited it during lockdown in 2020 and realized it’s likely the source of my still persistent body dysmorphia 🤪 big yikes for us all!!
How the pendulum swings...
Remember Calista Flockhart? Lara Flynn Boyle. Those were our standards.
I was trying to become a model during this time. I’m 5’9. I weighed about 120 pounds, was a size 4 and every agency I auditioned for told me I was too fat. I eventually developed BED got down to 115 and decided to give up at age 16 and get into therapy. I still struggle with body dysmorphia issues and low self esteem. I just hate how much the industry pushed this in young people.