FIGHTING FOR BODY ACCEPTANCE

Emerging challenges women face embracing their bodies in the “Ozempic” era

By: Lizzy Calvo

Self Love, © 2024 Lizzy Calvo

My awareness of my body started at a very young age—so early that my memories of that awareness are some of the most prominent from my childhood.

I remember shopping with my two best friends and my mom at Justice, looking for a new outfit for school, already embarrassed by the number printed on the tag inside my rhinestoned pink shirt.

I remember watching Victoria's Secret diet videos in high school to inspire recipes for the minuscule meals I would eat. I remember coming to college and knowing the way I viewed my body was a problem. But even as I tried to heal, that little voice was always lingering in the back of my mind: “You need to be thinner. Shrink. Shrink. Shrink.”

When I started at Syracuse University, it became abundantly clear to me that what had felt like a losing battle of comparison, where I always failed to measure up to the women around me and the ones I saw online, was not a battle only I had been forced to fight. Every single girl I knew was incredibly insecure about their body. Several of my friends had struggled with disordered eating as I had. I wondered what common link had brought all these beautiful, smart and talented women to a place of hyper-self-criticism. 

Last year, I started hearing the word “Ozempic” on my For-You-Page on TikTok. Suddenly, plus-size influencers I had looked up to, like Remi Bader, were half their original size, and comedians were making jokes about it at the Golden Globes. 

Trends in ideal body norms are nothing new. From the “heroin chic” aesthetic of the 2000s to the BBL look that was popular just a few years ago, women's bodies are constantly a topic of conversation in the societal trend cycle. But with the growth of social media and advertising techniques, trends spread like wildfire.

Nearly a quarter of all teenage girls in the U.S. report constant usage of TikTok, 10% more than their male peers. 

As those teens turn into women, societal standards surrounding weight will impact their relationships with their bodies. With the influence of Ozempic and similar GLP-1 drugs creating a growing expectation that weight loss is now easier to achieve and should be done, young women have already begun to feel a new pressure to conform to these standards as they work toward self-acceptance.

Twenty-two-year-old Liv Huffman was excited to spend a day in New York City over Thanksgiving break this fall. But her excitement was short-lived when she exited the subway and was immediately confronted by a 10-story tall billboard for “ro,” a GLP-1 medication similar to Ozempic. She saw a photo of a woman, her shirt lifted as she injected herself with the drug. The words “A weekly shot to lose weight” ran in bold text with “combined with diet and exercise” in small print underneath. Huffman took a photo of the advertisement and moved on with her day. But in the weeks that followed she never forgot that ad, haunted by the message it displayed. 

She may have forgotten it if she wasn’t someone sensitive to the conversation surrounding weight. But Huffman is in recovery for an eating disorder, something she struggles with every single day.

Liv Huffman, photographed by Lizzy Calvo

“At first I saw [taking GLP-1 medications] as this thing that influencers were doing… whatever, I can separate my life from their life, that’s fine,” Huffman said. “But for children, or people who don’t really understand what that means to see [the billboard]? It was gut-wrenching.”

Huffman knew coming into college she was underweight. But her friends were just as thin. And they seemed healthy. Guys gave her plenty of attention at parties. She’d come from a family that had high standards surrounding appearance. They didn’t think she had a problem. So why should she change?

But when her battle with mental illness became impossible to ignore, she finally sought treatment, going into intensive therapy for her eating disorder and taking a gap year away from SU. 

“I think a lot of people think eating disorders are just another excuse to have a ‘mental health problem,’ so radically accepting that it was something I was struggling with was my first step,” Huffman said. 

The National Eating Disorders Association reports that every 52 minutes, someone in the U.S. dies as a result of an eating disorder. An estimated 28.8 million Americans will be impacted by one at some point in their lifetime. 

For Huffman, seeing advertisements for GLP-1 medications that glaringly promoted weight loss incited range. It brought to mind other women who haven’t made the kind of progress toward self-acceptance that she has, and how that messaging could impact them. But for some other women in recovery, discussion of these medications meant having to face the desire for weight loss they have been working to move past. 

Lizzie Khan, another SU senior, has found the growing popularity of GLP-1 drugs frustrating.

“Deep down I would love to just take a magic pill and it all goes away,” Khan said. “But I know from a health perspective it doesn’t go away, and it will come back. Once you stop taking it, it will all come back.”

Lizzie Khan, photographed by Lizzy Calvo

Roughly 50% of patients who take Ozempic or similar medications will regain the weight they lost after being off the drug for two years. Despite growing support for taking these drugs as an antidote for obscenity, in reality, it's a quick and not long-lasting fix to a broader societal pressure to look a certain way. 

Khan said her middle school friend group enforced harsh expectations for appearance in the hopes of maintaining a certain “cool girl” status. She struggled to meet these expectations while going through puberty, finding that the easiest “diet” for her was to eat less and less. Over time, she says she grew out of it. Her senior year of college body is healthier than her teen one, and a bit larger.

But the self-doubt is still there. 

“I look at someone that could be the same size as me and I’m like, ‘Oh my god, she’s so hot.’ But when I look in the mirror, I’m like, ‘Damn girl, you gained 10 pounds. What are you doing,” Khan said. 

Like Khan, SU junior Liz Crandall has spent her college years working toward keeping a healthy attitude about her body image after struggling with it in her younger years.

Crandall started wrestling when she was in 6th grade. In middle school, weight didn’t really affect her self-perception because she was wrestling prepubescent boys, and there wasn’t a significant difference yet between weight classes. Then suddenly she was in high school, and as a 14-year-old girl, because of her weight, she often wrestled 18-to-19-year-old men. When her coaches encouraged her to eat less and exercise more, she eventually developed bulimia. 

As Crandall became more active on Instagram, she felt less content with her overall appearance. When she looked in the mirror, she saw how undereating for wrestling had caused her body to become underdeveloped. She compared herself to girls her age from school and ones she’d never met and only seen online. Why can’t I look like that? she wondered. She was angry at herself for not letting her body have the food it needed to grow.

Now, she says she focuses more on what makes her feel confident, not on the number on the scale or the size of her jeans.

Crandall hasn’t felt a yearning to try any GLP-1 medications. She feels empathy for how they have made it more socially acceptable to comment on people’s bodies. 

“When I see photos where people say, ‘Oh they’re definitely on Ozempic,’ it makes me feel immense sadness for the celebrities they’re talking about. I mean, if I were in their position, and my body and the way I look was so widely talked about, I’d probably take it too,” Crandall said. 

While celebrities and normal women alike struggle with society's expectations and commentary on our bodies, it's impossible to not feel its impact in our everyday lives. 

Have you ever looked in the mirror, thought “I hate my thighs in this skirt,” and decided to change into jeans instead? Have you ever thought twice about whether or not you could have that second cookie because it's “bad” food? Not everyone develops an eating disorder, but the rhetoric around appearance and health that’s ingrained in our minds affects us all. 

As I listened to the stories of women in my life and ones I had just met, I finally began to understand the core of the problem.  Negative body image is different for everyone. High-pressure friend groups, sports, social media, and more had all led to the same place. But there was one key constant: fear. 

Deb Burgard is an eating disorder psychologist who was at the forefront of the body positivity and fat acceptance movement. She explained that negative body thoughts can often come from a fight-or-flight response.

“It's real violence. They are not losing confidence in their body image; they are getting the very clear and real messages that things will not be safe for their body, and that is what drives this stuff,” Burgard said. “The more you are vulnerable to that violence, the more you have to think about, ‘Okay so what's my strategy gonna be?”

Burgard said frameworks like body positivity have been co-opted by the marketing industry in recent years. She says that when someone thinks to themselves “I feel fat today” they’ve been trained to think the solution should be to force themselves to feel more confident. Ozempic offers a different alternative. If you feel fat today, lose weight. But somewhere in the middle is another strategy: body neutrality. 

“I’m actually not the biggest fan of the term body positivity. Because for me, it feels like we should be overly focused in some sense on our bodies and perceiving other people's bodies, and actively taking choices to be positive about them,” Crandall said. “I like the idea of body neutrality because I think that it's so much more important that we take away all preconceived notions about what people's bodies can mean about them morally.”

Body neutrality is a framework focused on self-acceptance not through forced love, but through understanding. It challenges you to not see “good or bad” body images days. But to live your life every day, in whatever body you were born into, and be thankful for what it does for you, regardless of what it looks like, confident or not.  

Along with body neutrality, Burgard recommends building community as a way to de-program ourselves from societal messaging. 

“If you can find your feet under you, or your sort of grounded place of, Yeah,  I’m gonna defend my sense of my body as inherently whole, I’m gonna ally with other people whose inherently whole and inherently worthy bodies are also under attack,” Burgard said. “That collectivity has a lot of power in it.”

While there is no quick fix for body acceptance, finding it is not impossible. For me, although I feel like I’m losing a battle I didn’t choose to fight, the only way through is to wake up every day and keep fighting. And to find other women along the way to fight beside you.