GLP-1s Have Brought Back One Toxic Habit. Why Can’t We Quit It?

I recently attended the concert of a pop artist I adore ( not the one in the news). As my friends and I left the venue, we raved about her elaborate performance, her costumes and sets, and her vulnerability on stage. Then, after a beat, one of us cut the silence with an obligatory grimace: “But did you notice she’s gotten so skinny now?”

I’d noticed her thinness like I might vaguely recognize white noise playing in the background. Because I’d never considered her to be anything but thin, it took me aback to consider my friend’s question. Our conversation was largely a dead end; we chalked it up to the physical exertion required from touring artists and took our respective trains home. But when I was finally alone that night, within the confines of my own phone screen, I began my research.

I started with her most recent Instagram posts. I zoomed in on photos of her in strappy tank tops and bralettes. I considered her defined abs, bare legs, and the outline of her ribs in a bikini. I noted her clavicle, which seemed particularly sharp. And then I scrolled back, and back, and back. I ended up five years back. And then I saw it: Her face was fuller. Was her current look the result of the sad reality that our faces hollow out as we age ? No, her legs once seemed more muscular too. I tapped on photos of her in gowns on red carpets, in swimsuits on a yacht, and in bodysuits on sets, the pictures flashing across my screen. She’d always been thin, I concluded, but yes, she was thinner now. She’d gone from being an attainable skinny to the kind of skinny reserved for a rare echelon of women.

Thus concluded another instance of what I have come to think of as thinvestigation. No, I had not managed to determine how she’d done it, whether it was what she ate, physical exercise, a semaglutide, a depressive episode, an undiagnosed eating disorder, the passage of time, or a mix. But I’d figured out this one piece of it, the part that was available to me: She was thinner now. To be clear, I didn’t feel better for doing it. What was there to do now with all this utterly useless information? Mostly I just felt the shame of ending up years deep in a stranger’s Instagram page. But such is the nature of thinvestigation.

Until the last year, my friends and I had never before casually talked about someone else’s body like we do regularly now—not even a pop star. So the fact that it keeps coming up for us is, for me, a warning siren. There were a few years, at the height of the body positivity movement, when we allowed ourselves to dream that the all-consuming diet-culture talk we had been raised on was behind us. Now that seems like an impossibility. Our social media profiles allow us to compare and contrast versions of ourselves and each other with ease. And in this moment of rapid change for weight loss, when being bigger is suddenly more stigmatized, because, the argument goes, if you really wanted to , you could get on a GLP-1 and change your life, it’s easier than ever to dissect someone else’s figure.

Maybe that’s the reason thinvestigation seems so acceptable these days.