Lately, I’ve sensed a shift, an insecurity trailing behind many of the women who walk through my studio doors. It’s a conversation I find myself having with increasing frequency – the one where I’m gently talking clients off the Ozempic ledge. The refrain is strikingly familiar. They speak about what they’re witnessing around them, the sudden transformations, the shrinking waistlines, the whispered speculation of who and how they look the way they do.
There is envy in their voices, but also something heavier: a sadness about how they now feel in their own skin. They tell me that no amount of training, facial tweaks, or careful restriction of foods has made the difference they hoped for. And so the question hangs in the air, half-joking but deeply sincere: what will it take not to board the Ozempic/ Mounjaro train?
Since I started my career in Pilates, I have had the privilege of working with a diverse range of people. Many of them come to me seeking to nurture their bodies and to find support for the discomfort they may experience in daily life. When I started out I worked for a Pilates instructor whose approach was incredibly toxic. She would belt out compliments to the client using words like ‘you look snatched’, ‘so skinny!’, sometimes even asking them in front of the class if they’d lost weight. I lasted 6 months, and from that moment, I vowed that my own language would be the very opposite. Instead, I chose to use words like ‘Strong’’ and avoid commenting on appearance altogether. When clients talk about shedding baby weight, I try to shift the narrative to your body is amazing, you just grew a human being inside it. How cool is that?
I want to protect the atmosphere these women enter into, to keep the studio a place where their bodies are respected and Pilates is a skill they’re here to learn. But outside of these walls, the world can feel far less forgiving. For many women, the cultural noise around body image seems louder than ever, and the idea of body positivity feels increasingly fragile, but there is only so much I can say to shift the narrative. And if I’m honest, I’m not immune to it either. Don’t get me wrong, I am highly aware that I’m writing this from a body that largely fits the mould, but I will admit I am careful with what I eat, I train almost every day, and I am sick of the pressure. I am a millennial after all, we grew up on Bridget Jones diary with one liners like “Weight: 9st 7. Must stop eating immediately.” After hours of teaching in front of the mirror, I still catch myself critiquing my own reflection. The cultural tide we’re all swimming in pulls on us all.
The rapid shrinking waistlines of high-profile women are not just a celebrity story. And it’s no coincidence that so many are losing weight at the same time. The trend signals a return to an old idea: that extreme thinness carries status. It reflects a culture that prizes women who are minimal, manageable, and endlessly malleable.
George Ashwell, founder of Before The Lights Gym in Fitzrovia, offered his perspective on the trend: ‘Medications like Ozempic might lower the number on the scale, but they don’t replace the long-term benefits of strength training, good nutrition and an active lifestyle. We still don’t have strong long-term research on how these drugs affect body composition and health in people who aren’t diabetic and obese.’His observations highlight a broader uncertainty: no one really knows what the effects of widespread use might be ten years from now.
The message around “self-care” feels increasingly distorted. Scroll through social media and you’ll find endless posts detailing ‘what I ate today’ with a teeny weeny person talking at the camera with a plate of spinach and a morsel of fish, framed as wellness and discipline. But does this feel less like care and more like a socially acceptable cover for disordered eating?
Everyone seems to be in a perpetual calorie deficit – keto, intermittent fasting, cutting this, eliminating that. The language is one of optimisation and control, yet the underlying message is the same: Work out more, eat less, be thin. This is packaged as self-care, but I struggle to see how a culture built on restriction and constant self-surveillance can truly support mental wellbeing, let alone longevity.
Last week, my husband sent me two Instagram videos back-to-back, the first was a story on Charli Howard’s IG, where her date confessed that he ‘doesn’t usually go for women of her size’ (she is a size 10, her words not mine) but that he liked her and asked if she would consider going on a run with him for their next date. The second was a clip from Love Is Blind season 10, where Chris ultimately tells his new wife Jessica that his intimacy issues with her stem from the fact that he usually dates women who do ‘CrossFit and shit, and do Pilates every fucking day.’
These impossibly thin prototypes we see everywhere are shaping not just culture, but our own insecurities, feeding into the concerns we already carry about how men perceive us and what they consider to be beautiful. There have been countless times in the past where my single friends would say, ‘when I’m thin maybe then I’ll get a boyfriend’, which leads me to a post Jamila Jamil’s shared on her feed recently that really resonated with me:
‘This is not the time to be frail. Women need to be strong, to fight back, for our ever-diminishing rights and safety. There is a deliberate political reasoning behind wanting women and girls to be frail, hungry, tired and easy to hurt.’
Whilst I want to emphasise the severity of this moment in time, it is also important to recognise that we have been here before. By 2010, the body-positivity movement was in full force. Campaigns like Dove, Nike, ASOS, and Fenty Beauty were demonstrating women of different body shapes, ages, and ethnicities. These campaigns sparked global discussion about beauty standards, helping push body positivity into mainstream advertising. London never looked better and for a moment, the narrative shifted and our world felt much more inclusive.
Food and gathering around the table is an age-old ritual, one that breeds experiences, moments we treasure, conversations that linger long after the plates are cleared, meals we will still be talking about years from now. It is where stories unfold, where laughter stretches into the evening, where time briefly slows down.
For most of us, it is one of life’s deepest pleasures. Some of my happiest memories exist around a table. We are incredibly lucky to experience it, yet more and more people are losing touch from this essential part of living, because they no longer feel the pull of appetite. That is a whole dimension of life quietly disappearing.
Confidence and power don’t live in the mirror. They arrive in the work we do, the conversations that lift us, the people who surround us, in the way that we love and are loved. They run deeper than any shape or reflection. When we obsess over our outward appearance, it limits our connection with our own bodies.
I believe there is nothing more compelling than women who feel confident enough to live fully, to eat in a way that supports them, to think expansively, to speak about the things that truly light them up: the creative embers twinkling, the work that excites them and the lives they are building. Not the small, exhausting narrative of what they think they lack, or the bodies they wish they had instead. That narrative is tired. It’s small. And frankly, it’s boring.
Perhaps it begins with something simple: deliberately speaking well of ourselves. Out loud or quietly in our own minds, and to one another. Even if we don’t fully believe it yet. Words have weight and every shift in culture has to start somewhere.
“She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change.” Naomi Wolf