Have women really stopped wanting to be thin?

The naive assumption culture makes

The truth is, I don’t know when it happened. Maybe somewhere between Lindy West’s book Shrill hitting book stores and a size 24 Tess Holiday landing on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine. All I know is that over the course of a few short years, big became beautiful, diet was a dirty word and I was left feeling like the most old fashioned woman on earth.

I was in my late 30s when this all happened. And on yet another diet. This had been my life for as far back as I can remember- an eternal cycle of exercise binges, starvation, excessive eating and then, depression when the scales didn’t budge. I have spent almost two-thirds of my life on some sort of eating regime (low-carb, zero-sugar, eating nothing but Ryvita and those plastic cheese slices that look like reconstituted Barbie) and as such have yo-yoed between a size 8 and a size 14/16. 

Over the course of my 43 years I have taken laxatives, tried jamming toothbrushes down the back of my throat, swallowed cotton wool balls doused in orange juice and ordered ‘diet pills’ from Ebay that came in a doll’s head and gave me heart palpitations for days on end. I have a busted knee from years of over-exercising  and have often wondered if my inability to get pregnant was down to stalled periods between the ages of 13 to 17, most likely caused by self-imposed starvation. I wish it wasn’t this way. I wish there were kinder footnotes to my life. But like many women my age I have spent the longest period of my life wanting to be one thing. And that thing is to be thin.  When I was younger I wanted to be thin more than I wanted to be clever. I wanted to be thin more than I wanted to be a success. I wanted to be thin more than I wanted to be loved or be happy or well, you get the idea.