Stretched Thin: When the Search for Skinny Shrinks More Than the Number on the Scale

By Ellen Lundy

As we approach summer each year, the same topic always appears to broach conversation. You’ll be sitting in a café with your friends, or in the queue for the toilet in a nightclub or simply serving an oat flat white in your minimum wage job when you will hear the inevitable brought up; the summer scale. It is brought up as casually in conversation as the weather.  

The summer scale, different to the autumn, winter or spring scale invokes a fear in the population. As though when you stand on the scale on June 1^st, a countdown clock connected to a nuclear bomb appears next to the number on the scale. And if you don’t lose ten pounds by the time the clock runs out when you board your Jet2 flight to Mallorca, then the whole world will cease to exist because you couldn’t shift those extra few pounds. 

So, why do so many of us feel such similar dread at the idea of a six pack-less bikini body? 

Let’s break it down; as a population, we are obsessed with the idea of being thin. Social media and societal norms perpetuate the idea that skinny equates to health.¹ When a person is thin, an assumption is often made that they exercise and eat well. And so, we see skinniness as synonymous with attractiveness, as a perceived ability to take care of one’s health and well-being forces a person to be viewed as someone that rejects a ‘laziness’ culture. 

However, we are trying to do so many things at once. Study, work, exercise, eat healthy, have a social life, make time for friends and family and look social-media perfect at all times. The list goes on and on. And so, we search for shortcuts to getting healthy, partaking in fad diets that have only short-term effects.² And, as we have been conditioned to believe that skinny and healthy are the same, we focus on getting skinny fast to kill two birds with one stone.  

In the months before summer, we often forget this pressure. With everybody dressed in large winter coats, the exact contours of each body become less and less important as the basic human survival instinct to stay warm becomes paramount to any social points earned from an hourglass physique.  

However, as the jaws theme tune underscores the approaching summer months in the minds of many, the media capitalise on the fears of many by reminding them of the reality under the woollen jumper. We are punctured with headlines like ‘get the perfect beach body’ or ‘how to be bikini ready this summer.’ Deflated and depressed, we are left hopeless as the time bomb to summer begins to tick.³  

And so, diet culture⁴ hits its peak; gyms are offering discounted prices, keto and intermittent fasting become trends faster than any TikTok dance and all social events are cancelled for fear of temptation.  

This is a reality for many this summer, with varying strains of this harmful mindset infecting our self-worth.  

But we must remember, diet culture feeds on fear. By demonizing larger bodies and sanctifying smaller ones, your mind becomes addicted to the idea that the smaller you are, the more worthy you become.⁵ 

Worthy of what? A promotion at work, the love of your family and friends, the Instagram comments about how stunning and amazing you are?⁶ None of that has anything to do with a number on a scale.  Women especially are taught to shrink; diet culture is simply a manifestation of this ideology.  You may presume that diet culture is a shortcut to health. But there is no shortcut to health. Living a healthy lifestyle is a balance that takes years to calibrate.  

Diet culture is designed to keep women meek and helpless. It is not the perception of health that makes a woman attractive, but rather the idea that a small woman needs a big, strong man to help her.  

In order to actively reject diet culture, we must change the narrative. When the conversation is next broached at coffee or on a night out or at your minimum-wage job, tell the story of how you rearranged the furniture in your living room by yourself. Or how you carried your groceries up five flights of steps when the lift was broken. Tell the story of how your strength carries you. 

You are beautiful when you are strong. You are powerful when you are you. Focus on what your body can do, rather than what it could look like, to weigh the health of your body and soul. Life is so much more when it’s lived big, don’t let any social media post convince you that smaller is better.  

Bibliography

¹ Charlotte Markey, ‘Cancel Diet Culture – #RiotsNotDiets’, The British Psychological Society, 16 September, 2024, https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/cancel-diet-culture-riotsnotdiets  

² Priya Tew, ‘What is intuitive eating and how does it work?’, BBC Food, February 2025, https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/what_is_intuitive_eating  

³ Equip, ‘5 Ways to Push Back Against Summertime ‘Beach Body’ Pressures’, National Alliance for Eating Disorders, May 19, 2025, https://www.allianceforeatingdisorders.com/beach-body-pressures/ 

⁴ Anita Daryanni, ‘Diet Culture’, UC San Diego Recreation, January 28^th, 2021, https://recreation.ucsd.edu/2021/01/diet-culture-social-media/  

⁵ ‘What is diet culture?’, Within, December 23^rd, 2023, https://withinhealth.com/learn/articles/what-is-diet-culture  

⁶ Tori Barkosky, ’Ways Diet Culture Shows Up In The Summer’, BALANCE, https://balancedtx.com/blog/ways-diet-culture-shows-up-in-the-summer/