Body Positivity & Diet Culture in the World of the Winter Arc
Trigger Warning: This article mentions weight loss & gain, disordered eating, and relationships with food.
Every single person who’s as chronically online as the next girl, gay, or they/them has seen the TikToks talking about The Winter Arc.
The idea is that you “disappear” for a few months and lock into fitness, exercise, and eating well. On the surface, it sounds pretty harmless—good, even.
Before the Winter Arc, we saw the rise of 75 Hard and its more forgiving sister, 75 Soft. We’re also societally in our weight-loss drug era (or rather, diabetes medication era) with pop culture being obsessed with women’s bodies, constantly speculating Ozempic use or more illicit drug use.
Fillers are being taken out, BBLs are being reduced, and the standards for bodies—what we believe they should and shouldn’t look like are changing quicker than a blink of an eye.
I want us to take a moment to acknowledge something: this isn’t normal. What is normal is for all of this to feel overwhelming.
Even the most body-neutral AKA IDGAF-about-my-body-people are questioning: Should I change my diet? Take this medication? Get plastic surgery?
But for those of us who have battled endlessly with our bodies, our concept of health, and what is and isn’t enough to justify the shape of the vessel that we live our lives in, it can seem particularly daunting. Body positivity, body neutrality—what do we consider thin or too thin? What do we see as a “fit” person? If a person is fat and works out in a gym, does it make them more valid than a fat person without a gym membership or one that isn’t particularly active? How much should we conflate body size with health? WTF even is the BMI?
The rules keep changing, particularly for those of us in our 20s, and while it can seem easier to say, “Just do what works for you,” I know from personal experience that this can often feel impossible.
Let me give you a little bit of background on me and how I came into the world of the Winter Arc. When I was 11 or 12, I remember deciding enough is enough. I became obsessed with the idea of losing weight. I was big on Tumblr, spent my time looking over Undressed Skeleton’s page, saving thinspo and fitspo pics and posts, and learning what I needed to be healthy. I didn’t want to develop an eating disorder; in fact, it didn’t even occur to me that I could. That was a thing that thin, white girls did. I knew I wanted to do things the “right” and “healthy” way.
My older sister and I when I was about 11 years old.
I ordered the Beachbody INSANITY DVD set off of eBay with the credit card and encouragement of my parents. I worked out harder than ever before. I ate smaller portions, switched to wheat and brown rice, ate Greek yogurt and grapefruits, made green smoothies, and only drank water. You get it. I was locked in.
Something I remember more than anything is that everyone was so, so proud of me. I had family who, like most of society, had decided that being fat was the worst thing someone could be (other than being queer, I guess—wait until they hear about queer fat people!)
Everyone encouraged my commitment to change what they saw as my biggest flaw. I remember my brother getting me these little red dumbbells for Christmas, and I saw it as evidence of who I was: I was a girl who had conquered fatness, once and for all. I was never going back.
Christmas in 2015
As time went on, it was becoming increasingly apparent that something that everyone saw as dedication was quickly morphing into an obsession. All I thought about was food and working out. I had intense body dysmorphia (a term I didn’t even know until high school) where what I saw in the mirror was always bigger than it should have. I wasn’t toned enough, I still had too much body fat—what was I doing wrong? I just needed to work harder.
So I did. I ran three miles and then did an hour of pilates videos. I trained abs multiple times a week. But it still wasn’t enough. I still didn’t think my body was good enough. It was during the moments of crying over having to eat white bread instead of wheat, or not being able to track how many calories I had at a potluck, that the sheen of being a “health icon” started to wear off.
Something I’ve since unpacked in therapy is my penchant for equating “healthy” with “good.” It sounds simple, but that revelation led me to start to see all the other ways I equated my ability to be loved, successful, and accepted with what is outwardly seen as “healthy habits”.
In high school, I became a vegan after watching several vegan documentaries with my mother and sister. I was armed with all the reasons why a whole food, plant-based diet was good: better for the planet, for animals, and for my health. Deep down, I knew I wanted to continue to find ways to make food work for what I wanted my body to look like: stronger, slimmer, better. My mother’s reasoning was transparent: she was doing it to try and lose weight.
Me at 14 years old
Throughout high school and college, as my body changed and grew, my mom would constantly interrogate my vegan diet: Are you eating too many meat replacements? Are you eating enough vegetables? I would dread going home to visit because of the constant questions and comments about my body from my parents and siblings, professing concern over the way my body was going in the opposite way it should be: growing instead of shrinking.
(Note: My parents love me, and this was the way they showed concern for me. Boundaries are extremely important, and I had to build brick by brick with my parents, including boundaries around comments about the size of my body. That, however, is another post for another day).
Me at 20 years old
By the end of college, I had gained weight but was still standard to mid-sized by most standards. It wasn’t until I moved from Florida to Minnesota with my husband (boyfriend at the time) that I really began gaining weight.
I wasn’t working out as much, I was so focused on my graduate program, busy, and tired. For a while, I didn’t see these as just reasons, they were excuses. The self-hatred I developed during that time, in response to a human transitionary period, was more harmful than I can put into words. I would go through bouts of being active, taking classes at my university with friends, and trying to walk as much as I could, but my body just held on to the weight.
I finally discussed with a therapist why I just couldn’t get back to that place that I was at and how weak it made me feel. She helped me realize that I might have developed disordered eating patterns and had been overexercising too. I came to understandthat I was internalizing a lot of conflicting messages about health and worthiness, and in turn, being mean to myself when I didn’t think I was “locked in” enough.
You know how you have that friend who lost a bunch of weight and can’t seem to stop talking about how people don’t ‘want it enough’? What does it look like to interrogate that thought? Because, honestly, I didn’t want it ‘enough.’ I wanted meaningful friendships more. I wanted to study public health and make a name for myself in my field. And I’m finally realizing that’s okay—that it isn’t a moral sin to prioritize other things over forcing my body to conform to an ever-changing standard of beauty and perfection.
Me in 2021, at the beginning of my graduate program
Here are some things to consider:
Fitness and health content is rarely neutral. They often carry elements of diet culture that are so innocuous we don’t realize we’re digesting them as truths until they are a core belief.
What does it look like to accept our bodies and do activities that make us feel good, irrespective of their impact on weight loss, fat loss, muscle gains, or any physical outcomes? Does that feel possible for you?
What unspoken rules have we given ourselves about what makes a body “acceptable” or “allowed” to look the way it does? I love body-positive fitness influencers and influencers with a bigger body, but you can almost guarantee that if they don’t have a big butt, do intense workouts, or excel in some extraordinary way, internet trolls will attack them for their fatness. Have you internalized that?
Wanting to lock in on fitness is not bad. Wanting to lose weight is not bad. What is BAD is failing to acknowledge that the social environment and online landscape heavily shape our “why” for these goals. If we’re not careful, they can harm us in ways we don’t realize, just as they did for me and so many other young people.
I am 100 pounds heavier than I was before moving to Minnesota. That feels crazy to say. I think that is the first time I’ve truly acknowledged that fact.
And yet, I am so much healthier. I have a regular therapist. I am on antidepressants. I have incredible support systems and I just got married and felt gorgeous and beautiful. I had a honeymoon where I climbed countless steps to see the breathtaking views ziplining!
I still struggle with the obsessiveness. I think back to the days of overexercising and miss the dedication I had. Now, I’m trying to rediscover that sense of routine and dedication but in a way that preserves all the mental progress I’ve made over the past few years.
I’m easing back in. I am taking fitness classes again. I rejoined my gym and took a super fun cycling class. I want to move my body again because I love it and everything it can do—not because I hate it.
It’s so important to take care of yourself and know exactly what that means for you. You are worthy exactly as you are. Your body is just one small part of who you are, and my only hope is that you celebrate all the other parts, too.
I am finding my way, and I hope you are, too.
If you think that you might be struggling with disordered eating or body image issues, please visit the National Eating Disorders Association. If you feel you are in a mental health crisis, please call or text 988.
