The higher the temperature, the more we negotiate with our body.

On the one hand, we like to remind others and ourselves that diversity lives up to its vindication, on the other hand, every summer we find ourselves in the same place, trapped in a vicious circle from which we cannot get out.

The idea that beauty and small size are synonymous is so socially and culturally ingrained that we continue to buy firming creams, go on restrictive diets, read and write articles about it.

Victims and at the same time perpetrators of our own selves

We keep wondering if there’s some elixir that will make us look like Bella Hadid, and we believe that every anti-cellulite treatment, corset or miracle peel will give us a swimsuit-worthy body.

Some more, some less, every positive or negative comment about our curves or the lack of them touches us, leaves traces and determines our behavior and decisions.

How can we free ourselves from these toxic mechanisms? Some have figured it out, but most of us struggle to focus on truths and alternatives.

I never wanted to be medium sized. It was unthinkable for me to accept a different body type than my friends who fit comfortably in a size 38 or 40. And it didn’t matter if it corresponded to reality, because the real battle was in my mind, the idea that an extra inch was an obstacle to being beautiful,” writes Ketth Talon, editor of nssclub.com.

I hated my Mediterranean hips and round face. I’ve always wished I had skinny legs, empty cheeks, no belly and protruding bones. I suffered because I wasn’t as petite as Milla Jovovich, Kate Moss and the other girls on magazine covers. In my eyes as a teenager, in the era of heroin chic, with low-rise pants, tight miniskirts and belly-baring tops, being thin was much more than a license to join the cool kids category. Skinny girls could wear anything».

Talon didn’t believe it when someone told her the indisputable truth that no body is wrong, ugly or unwanted”or at least I never would have thought that such a simple yet revolutionary idea could be applied to my mirror image“, says.

The realization that there is more to a person than the size they wear wasn’t enough to free me from the drive for perfection that society had imposed on me and that, like many others, I had internalized so much that it limited my style options. Body and weight are complicated because they touch on subjective dynamics».

THE Jia Tolentino in her book Trick Mirror, she writes “the psychological parasite of the ideal woman has evolved to survive in an ecosystem that pretends to resist it». Body positivity and feminism “they have not eliminated the tyranny of the ideal woman, but have rather aggravated and complicated it».

What is the truth we are afraid to speak out loud?

A thin body gives people privileges, and most of us have accepted that perfection only exists in a thin body. We would like to change this by making lengthy and often rhetorical reports on the subject, but the roots of this collective illusion are so deep that they resist any attempt to eradicate them.

This is confirmed by a recent Economist article: For populations in advanced countries, and especially for women, there is a strong correlation between income and weight, and several studies have shown that overweight or obese women earn less than their thinner counterparts. their.

In recent fashion shows, brands seem to have ditched them plus-size models from their castings, the Kardashians are getting thinner, the use of Ozempic as a slimming agent is spreading, and even as we praise the body-positivity beauty of celebrities like Ashley Graham and Lizzo on Instagram, diet culture is more alive than ever.