#*body image

[brostateexam]

Opinion | Your Clothes Were Never Meant to Fit You

The fashion industry was never built to cater to women’s bodies. But there’s a simple solution: Just make it, toots.

For a moment recently, it seemed that big brands and box stores were finally deigning to cater to women like me. The zeitgeist had evolved past the heroin-chic trend of the 1990s and the low-rise jeans of the 2000s. “Body positivity” became a buzzword. In 2018, Loft and Madewell introduced plus sizes to their offerings, and in 2021, Old Navy introduced a “Bodequality” campaign to stock sizes 0 through 28 in stores. Ralph Lauren trumpeted its hiring of a size 12 model (just a few years after getting in trouble for Photoshopping a model into impossible thinness), and Sports Illustrated, to great fanfare, started routinely including curvier women in its annual swimsuit issue. Celebrities celebrated Lizzo. Ashley Graham was everywhere. Plus size was having a moment — and it felt to me as though the hard work of disentangling morality and health from the shape of our bodies was finally, maybe, paying off.

Then, just as quickly, the moment passed. Old Navy walked back its initiative. Loft removed its plus-size offerings. Clothing companies returned to once again courting a thin minority. The haunting return of Y2K-style fashion coincided with the rise of drugs like Ozempic, used for its off-label weight-loss side effects. This spring, New York Fashion Week featured 31 plus-size models — which may sound like a lot, until you consider that about 3,000 models appeared over the week and the number of plus-size models was down from 49 the season before. No sooner had bigger bodies been invited to the party than we were being ushered out the back door again.

That might feel dispiriting. But there’s an antidote to the whims of a fickle, fatphobic fashion industry. I know exactly where I can find a perfect dress that fits me well and makes me feel great.

As my grandmother said, I just make it, toots.

[brostateexam]

When I was a teenager, I had a therapist who was convinced that I was bipolar. She thought I had a (rare?) variant where my affect is unipolar regardless of if I'm manic, hypomanic, neutral/mixed, depressed, or deeply depressed, but that I did nonetheless experience all the symptoms that are consistent with bipolar disorder.

98% of the time, I think this is trash. I didn't respond to atypical antipsychotics. They just straight up did nothing. I was later diagnosed with PTSD, and did respond to treatment for that. My symptoms of depression and anxiety improved a lot, and improved a lot more post weight loss surgery because I no longer felt like everyone hated me for how I looked (which -- regardless of if that was true, it was how I felt and it felt awful)

2% of the time, though, I wonder if she had a point.

I can't sleep more than a few hours at a stretch. I'm writing a novel and practicing Chinese. I'm irritable and focused on accomplishing goals to the exclusion of little else. I'm feeling outgoing and kinda like I want to take some risks.

This will pass in four to twelve weeks. It always does. Then this diagnosis will go back to not making sense.

Today, though. I wonder.

[brostateexam]

Lululemon Tried to Become a Tech Company. It Didn’t Work Out | The Walrus

With the spectacular failure of its futuristic workout device, the apparel giant proved that some business stretches go too far

“What’s up, what’s up, what’s up!” the cheery holographic figure called. Pop music started blasting in the background. “Team 100, I’m Gerren Liles, and this is your fifteen-minute training class focused on your arms and your abs.”

Liles is a real human—a fitness trainer in New York City with 108,000 Instagram followers. He’s also one of the many trainers on Mirror, Lululemon’s futuristic at-home workout device.

Mirror offers both pre-recorded classes and live sessions, and its users see themselves reflected beside their instructor and copy their moves: they walk out to plank position; they do a series of push-ups; they grunt out bicep curls. A counter tracks calories burned and heart rate. In its live classes—and there are about twenty each day—the other attendees appear at the bottom, Mirror’s built-in camera streaming a parade of video avatars. Instructors can watch the attendees and give feedback—“Tap your ankles, Donna Anne,” Liles shouts out during one set of crunches. For those less excited about push-ups, there are other cheerful instructors teaching yoga, Pilates, boxing, dance, barre, and tai chi. Mirror has been billed as the future of exercise: all the personal guidance of a professional instructor in your own home.

[brostateexam]

This week is the one year anniversary of getting weight loss surgery.

My biggest takeaway is I wish I'd done it sooner.

The biggest effects:

My brain has stopped screaming at me twenty-four seven about how I look.

People are nicer to me. Like, a lot nicer.

Environments are designed for bodies like mine.

All of these are interrelated, but like as a good example: I'm up for a promotion now, potentially, if things work out. Would I be up for that promotion if I still weighed 125 lbs more? Best not to think about that! People smile at me in stores. People give me free stuff. People's eyes linger on me in a non-scornful way.

I knew this would happen. Everyone who's had weight loss surgery talks about it. People are just nicer to you when you aren't fat. A lot nicer. They think you're smarter and funnier and more capable. It's depressing, but not surprising.

Even if I could have liked myself at the higher weight -- I tried, for years, and I just couldn't but that's its own post for another day perhaps -- other people don't like me at the higher weight. It's sobering and fucked up and sad but it's true. I'm not a better person now that I've had surgery but everyone treats me like I am.

The only other major thing that I just cannot get used to is that everything is designed for me. I go to stores and there's clothes in my size -- and not in a special section, either, just everywhere. Chairs are made to fit me, and seats in movie theaters are comfortable, and I don't have to wedge myself into restaurant booths. People no longer give me The Eye if the bus or the elevator is crowded.

My body isn't how I imagined it would be. It's not better than I imagined it or worse, just different. I'm still not certain what exactly I look like. I know my stats but I don't know what that all adds up to. Almost one year out, though, and I'm very happy I did this. It's not for everyone, but it's for me.

[brostateexam]

The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls

The preponderance of the evidence suggests that social media is causing real damage to adolescents.

Social media gets blamed for many of America’s ills, including the polarization of our politics and the erosion of truth itself. But proving that harms have occurred to all of society is hard. Far easier to show is the damage to a specific class of people: adolescent girls, whose rates of depression, anxiety, and self-injury surged in the early 2010s, as social-media platforms proliferated and expanded. Much more than for boys, adolescence typically heightens girls’ self-consciousness about their changing body and amplifies insecurities about where they fit in their social network. Social media—particularly Instagram, which displaces other forms of interaction among teens, puts the size of their friend group on public display, and subjects their physical appearance to the hard metrics of likes and comment counts—takes the worst parts of middle school and glossy women’s magazines and intensifies them. (x)

[brostateexam]

The Millennial Vernacular of Fatphobia

The vernacular of deprivation, control, and aspirational containment that pervaded the pop culture of the ‘90s and 2000s.

Twenty eight years ago, I was sitting on the dusty rose carpeting of my childhood bedroom, staring at the cover of the latest issue Seventeen. This particular issue isn’t available on eBay, and only certain articles from inside have been digitized, so I can’t tell you the exact wording of the Editor’s Note, but others have a similar memory of its contents: look at this non-model on the cover, which I interpreted as look at this non-ideal body on the cover.

If this body was non-ideal, I remember thinking, then what was mine? I had just turned twelve years old, and was about to finish sixth grade. I was starting junior high in the Fall. Somehow both bodysuits and massive, baggy flannels were popular. My body, like a lot of other girls at that age, was beginning to rearrange itself. I felt so alienated from it, so unmoored from any sort of solid sense of self.

[brostateexam]

Life After Food?

A diabetes miracle drug has become an off-label appetite suppressant, changing the definition of being thin and what it takes to get there.

It turns out she’s down about ten pounds and happy about it. “Somebody once told me I had a size-zero personality, and they assumed that I was thinner than I was,” she tells me. “We don’t talk about it, but everybody knows it. Thin is power.”

Allison isn’t alone in seeming to be suddenly, unaccountably slimmer of late. She admitted to me — with the provision that I not use her real name — the reason, one that is increasingly common if still not quite openly discussed. For the past month, she’s been jabbing herself every week with Ozempic, the heavily advertised (“Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic,” to the tune, none too subtly, of the ’70s classic-rock hit “Magic”) diabetes miracle drug, which works by mimicking a naturally occurring hormone, GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide one), to manage hunger and slow stomach emptying.

For diabetics, it lowers blood-sugar levels. It also subdues the imp of appetite. The pounds fly off. That’s why Allison, who is not diabetic, prediabetic, or even overweight, is on it. Doctors have wide latitude to prescribe drugs off label for anyone they think may medically benefit, and many patients have found doctors — or, failing that, nurse practitioners or medi-spas — ready to certify that they would. Or some, like Allison, find it through a peddler not particular about a prescription or in the web’s dark morass.

To get hers, Allison calls up a Los Angeles–based provider she has never seen or met, sends over $625, and is shipped a monthly supply. What she calls Ozempic is not the brand-name product pre-packaged in a sky-blue injector pen by Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical company that makes and markets the drug. She receives generic semaglutide, the active ingredient in the medication, and has to mix and prepare it for injection herself, which — since semaglutide is under patent by Novo Nordisk until 2032 in the U.S. — suggests her meds are likely coming from a compounding pharmacy or a vendor selling research-grade ingredients. The lower price is also a tell: Ozempic retails for about $900 a month if your insurance doesn’t cover it.