Ariana Grande deserves privacy and respect - but our attitudes to weight loss bring up feelings I'd rather forget

As is too often the case with teen stardom, Grande has been subject to an unhealthy public obsession with her body for her entire adult life - but the world's obsession with thinness is certainly not confined to her.

Plenty of starlets have received that confusing mix of scorn and admiration for their protruding shoulder bones and visible ribs, and Grande is just the latest - so as she joins the ranks of those much scorned starlets, is it any wonder the conversation around weight loss continues to be so fractured and hostile? We’ve denied scientists the conversational reins around wellness, and handed them to celebrities instead. We’ve conflated their wealth with our health, so beauty and status have become associated with extreme thinness - and it leaves the most vulnerable among us in the lurch.

As a reasonably healthy woman in her late twenties, I’ve now settled into my body’s natural constitution; not overweight, but nowhere near the weight loss ideals dictated by red carpets and social media. I exercise, eat a healthy diet, and I’ve never been stronger or healthier as a result - but I’m still pervasively aware of the entirely normal amount of fat which sits in my cheeks, arms and tummy.

With thanks to the advent of “on this day” social media memories, I’m also regularly confronted with pictures of myself at nineteen years old: a girl who is unhealthily thin thanks to her poor diet and lifestyle choices. I remember exactly how unhappy and depleted that girl was - yet, and I know it's perverse, I still envy her, because she more closely fits the image of status than I do now. I still compulsively make poor decisions based on that envy. I’ve been known to skip meals ahead of social or professional events, in a vain attempt to optimise my own happiness - and it doesn’t exactly serve me. Rather than emitting a slender je ne sais quoi, I inevitably become a dour, brain fog-ridden mess who is more likely to ward off social connection than invite it. These are standards I would never hold anyone else to - yet, I still fall into the same trap every time.

Wealth and status indicators shaping beauty standards is obviously not a new concept. A Renaissance beauty, for example, would have been lauded for her soft, apple-shaped tummy, because it represented a leisurely life with an abundance of food; but today’s standards have been flipped on their head. Ideals of leisure and status are now set by Instagram feeds and red carpets, filled with people who make their living from looking thin in photographs.

These are the same people whose status can fund access to the expensive medical tools and supervision necessary to maintain equilibrium during rapid weight loss - tools which are, at best, expensive and largely self-monitored for the common person. So the rest of us (particularly those much younger social media users who’ve grown up processing this imagery) are left to self-medicate, relying on dangerous downsizing fads in lieu of proper medical supervision or education. At best, we skip meals and digest unsourced reels about calorie deficits and fasting - at worst, we purge, we starve, and we put irreparable strain on our unsupervised bodies.

If we want to help ourselves, we can’t let media heavyweights keep telling us that diet culture is the only legitimate way to accrue status and happiness. I need to be able to imagine myself successfully networking as I currently look - not as some confected hybrid of myself with my unhealthy teenage body. I need to do myself a favour and try to decouple thinness from my idealised picture of myself.

And I’ll start by turning off that bloody “on this day” memory feature from my social media accounts.

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Rose Morelli is a producer and journalist for LBC.

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