For months now, there’s been tension inching up my spine. It got so bad I was referred to a physiotherapist, who I presumed would tell me to stop clenching my jaw as I read emails or sitting folded like a pretzel at my desk. What he actually said was infinitely sadder. “Even now, standing in front of me, I can see you’re hunching over and holding your breath,” he said. I’d been caught in my natural posture: trying to make myself smaller. Subconsciously I’d been foregoing oxygen in a bid to hide my soft, rolling stomach from the world.
To be a person with a body and a wifi connection in 2026 is to feel the sickly vertigo of staring into a funhouse mirror. The bodies we see are changing, stretching, shrinking – and so the way we see our own is changing, too. You’ve noticed it: the celebrities shuffling meekly across red carpets at the Met Gala and Cannes with clavicles protruding; visions of a hyper-thinness we once thought of as a sign of ill health and now openly call chic. Many of the people who, just years ago, built a career out of encouraging us to love our bodies are now turning to injectable weight-loss drugs to rescue them from the plus-size department.
Even the recent Sports Illustrated swimsuit show, which has been hailed for showing a variety of shapes in a time when just 2.9% of catwalk models are above a UK size 8, makes me realise we’re so far gone. With the exception of the luminous Achieng Agutu, I did not see a single torso that looked like mine proudly on show on that runway. I feel maddened by shopping, too: scrolling websites that only show clothes on six-foot, rail-thin models who seem contractually obliged to pull up the hems of their tops and prove there are washboard abs underneath – the only accessory worth having, it seems. Sometimes I find my eyes glazing over in these moments, lost in bizarre reveries: Maybe one day I’ll be pregnant and then I’ll finally have a protruding stomach that’s cooed over, not derided. Maybe then I can wear those low-rise jeans.
I have never been a slim person. Since puberty, I’ve had the proving-dough thighs and heavy chest of my Grenadian matriarchs. My weight stays within a 5kg range no matter what I do, and I’m relatively at peace with that. But my belly has always been a different beast. As a teenager, I heard my mother when she told me having some fat around your middle was a biological necessity for women. I could see from simply looking around me that a straight swoop from sternum to navel was the exception, not the rule. Yet I still saved up my pocket money to buy ‘flat tummy tea’ and restrictive shapewear that dug into my growing bones, because the red circles pinpointing celebrities’ body parts on the front of magazines each week spoke louder to me than anything else.
In a world where every part of a woman’s body is a problem to be fixed, it fascinates me how vilified are our stomachs in particular. Even during the body positivity movement – that brief moment in the sun born in the 2010s – the most visible models with fuller bodies still had to conform to idealistic standards in some way. Their shapes were hourglass, their waists nipped in and tummy flesh smooth. Now, even their presence on magazine covers, campaigns and runways has dwindled. Of the 7,817 looks presented across 182 shows during the AW26 fashion shows back in February, 97.6% were worn by size UK 4-8 (US 0-4) models. Just 0.3% of clothing presented was above a UK 18 (US 14).
We are kept preoccupied with self-loathing and the Sisyphean task of ‘losing a few pounds’. Meanwhile, our rights are whittled down to nothing
Then there’s the health debate. I don’t have much time for hollow arguments about a bit of softness being bad for us, because so too is calorie restriction, taking unnecessary drugs for aesthetic purposes and sucking on appetite suppressant lollipops. A thinner body doesn’t always equate to a healthy one.
In the end, it’s about control. The pressure we’re feeling to get thinner now is no coincidence, because beauty standards have always swung the way the political wind blows. The rise of right-wing rhetoric across the West goes hand in hand with wanting to make women smaller, and what better way to do it than convince us our worth is tied to our weight? When the most unattainable body types are upheld as the goal, we are kept preoccupied with self-loathing and the Sisyphean task of ‘losing a few pounds’. Meanwhile, our rights are whittled down to nothing.
Remembering this is when the scales fall from my eyes, and the weighing scales go back in the cupboard. I think about who it actually serves to keep obsessing over my soft belly, and I realise it isn’t me. I think about all the women I know – the ones I admire for their intelligence and wit and kindness – and the fact I’ve never once thought about their bellies. I consider all the things I’ve achieved in this body, and all the things I could do with the time no longer spent trying to shrink it. And just like that, I can breathe a little easier.
