I was sat in the Tesco car park last Tuesday with a chicken wrap going cold on the passenger seat and the cherry vape fogging up the windows when it hit me proper. Phone in one hand, scrolling like a zombie after another late shift, and there it was. SkinnyTok. Again. Some girl in a crop top spinning round in her bedroom showing off a waist you could wrap your fingers around, captioned something like “week 8 on the jab, finally feeling like myself.” Comments flooding in. “Goals.” “Where do I get this?” “You look amazing hun.” I actually laughed out loud. Then I wanted to throw the phone out the window.
We buried this shit. Or at least we thought we did. Body positivity had a moment. We shouted about it on every platform going. Love your stretch marks, your soft belly, the bits that jiggle when you walk. It felt like progress for five minutes. Now look. The thin ideal is back with a vengeance and it’s wearing a lab coat this time. GLP-1 jabs. Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, whatever they’re calling the latest one. Celebrities shrinking in real time. Influencers documenting every pound like it’s a personality. And working-class girls like the ones I grew up with in Basildon are getting it first and hardest, same as always.
I remember the last time this happened. Early 2000s. Size zero. Heroin chic leftover. My mum used to mutter about it over Sunday roast, looking at the telly while she carved the chicken. “They all look poorly,” she’d say. Council estate wisdom. We didn’t have the language then but we knew it was wrong. Fast forward and we spent years trying to unlearn it. Then the pandemic hit, everyone put on a bit, and for a second it felt like maybe we could just exist in our actual bodies. No chance. Capitalism doesn’t like that. There’s no money in women being content.
The jabs changed the game. These drugs were meant for type 2 diabetes. Then someone noticed they made you lose weight fast and the floodgates opened. Private clinics popping up everywhere. Online pharmacies shipping them out. TikTok full of before-and-afters that look like two different people. The rich ones fly to Turkey or pay three hundred quid a month without blinking. The rest of us watch from the cheap seats, feeling the old shame creep back in. Because that’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud. This isn’t just about health. It’s about who gets to opt out of the pressure and who gets crushed by it.
Working-class girls feel it in their bones. We always have. When you’re skint, food is comfort and fuel at the same time. A proper roast with Yorkshires and gravy isn’t a treat, it’s how you survive the week. Tesco value range, the yellow stickers at the end of the day, the bits you stretch because rent’s due. Then some posh woman on Instagram posts her “clean eating” haul and you feel like a failure for buying the frozen chips. The jabs make it worse. They’re expensive. NHS waiting lists are a joke if you even qualify. So what happens? Girls start looking at the cheaper options. The unregulated stuff. The “research chemicals” sold in Telegram groups. Or they just starve themselves the old-fashioned way because at least that’s free.
I see it in the group chat. One of the girls from school, still lives near mum, sent a photo last month. She’d dropped two stone. “Feel so much better,” she wrote. I know that look. The tight smile. The way her collarbones were suddenly sharp. She works two jobs. Cleaning and a bit of bar work. No private clinic for her. Just skipping meals and walking everywhere because the bus is a luxury some weeks. That’s not wellness. That’s desperation wearing a new outfit.
The social media bit is vicious. SkinnyTok isn’t even subtle. It’s girls filming themselves in tiny clothes, talking about “food noise” disappearing, how they can finally wear the dress they bought two years ago. The algorithm loves it. Pushes it to every woman who’s ever felt a twinge of dissatisfaction when she walks past a mirror. And we all have. That’s the trap. You can know it’s bollocks and still feel it. I caught myself the other day, sat on the sofa in my usual oversized hoodie, looking down at my legs and thinking maybe I should cut back on the oat-milk flat whites. Then I told myself to shut up. This is how it gets you. Quiet. Personal. Like it’s your own idea.
Body positivity didn’t die because it was wrong. It died because it was inconvenient. Brands jumped on it when it sold t-shirts. Then the money moved. Now it’s all “health at every size” quietly dropped for “sustainable weight loss.” Same old story. Women are allowed to take up space until it stops being profitable. Then the goalposts shift and we’re back to shrinking ourselves to fit.
There’s a class thing here that the glossy articles skip. Middle-class women can afford the jab and the nutritionist and the personal trainer who makes it look effortless. Working-class women get the shame without the support. We get told to “just eat less and move more” by people who’ve never had to choose between heating and a proper meal. We get the side-eye in the doctor’s surgery if we mention feeling tired all the time. “Have you tried losing a bit of weight?” Like that’s the answer to everything. Housing stress, two jobs, looking after your nan, the lot. Just drop a stone love, you’ll feel better.
I think about my mum a lot with this. She’s in her sixties now. Still does the big roast every other Sunday. Still walks to the shops because the car’s on its last legs. She’s got the body of a woman who’s worked hard her whole life. Soft in places, strong in others. Never once apologised for it. When I was a teenager I used to hide the biscuit tin when she came round because I thought that’s what you did. Internalised the lot without even noticing. Now I watch her eat a second helping of mash and I want to cheer. That’s resistance. Quiet, everyday, gravy-covered resistance.
The mental health cost is the bit that keeps me up. Girls as young as sixteen talking about starting the jabs. Comment sections full of “I’m so disgusted with myself.” The comparison never stops. You see one transformation video and suddenly your own body feels like a project that failed. Eating disorders don’t care about your politics. They just wait for the next trend. We spent years saying “your body is not an apology.” Now the algorithm is screaming the opposite and a lot of us are listening even when we know better.
Late-stage capitalism is having a field day. Sell the problem, sell the solution, sell the next problem when the first one stops working. The jabs have side effects. Muscle loss. The weight comes back if you stop. So you stay on them forever, or you yo-yo, or you find the next thing. There’s always a next thing. Another product. Another filter. Another way to feel like you’re not enough.
I don’t have a neat ending for this. I wish I did. Some days I want to scream at every before-and-after post until my voice goes. Other days I just put the phone down, make another coffee, and try to remember that my body got me through a council estate childhood, a move to London, late nights writing threads that pay the rent. It doesn’t owe anyone a thigh gap.
The skinny terror never really left. It just went quiet for a bit while we were busy surviving other things. Now it’s back, louder, medicalised, algorithm-approved. Working-class girls will carry the heaviest bit, same as we always do. We’ll feel the shame first, find the workarounds first, and pick up the pieces when the trend moves on again.
I’m not telling anyone what to do with their own body. That’s the whole point. I’m just saying we should be honest about who’s selling this and who’s getting hurt. And maybe, just maybe, we can refuse to play along this time. Eat the roast. Wear the hoodie. Leave the comments section alone. The world will keep trying to shrink us. We don’t have to help it.