Smaller and smaller

When you live in Northern Mexico, you get used to friends and family visiting from the states wanting to swing by a pharmacy while they’re in town. From Viagra to Accutane to Zofran, many drugs are available at significant discounts and without a prescription. Last month, a friend came to visit and we hit three pharmacies looking for different GLP-1s she’d been wanting to try out. We found Mounjaro at a pharmacy in Tijuana and she bought three bottles. Later that day, I asked what it feels like after an injection.

“If you want a shot, I’ll give you one. You can see what it feels like yourself,” she offered, knowing I’d decline.

The truth is, I’m afraid of Ozempic and all of its little GLP-1 cousins. I believe in science - I’m fully vaccinated and grateful for modern medicine - but I’m not one to trust the pharmaceutical industry. When a new drug gets this much attention, my internal alarms start ringing. I worry about the long term impacts of GLP-1s on the health of those taking them purely for aesthetic reasons. But more than anything, I am terrified of the ways that drug-induced thinness is already unravelling our collective sense of self.

When I moved to Los Angeles from Boston in 2016, I was twenty-four years old, 175 pounds and terrified of what California would do to my self esteem. I was moving from the land of die-hard sports fans, Dunkin Donuts, and academia, to the mecca of film, television, and porn. If I struggled to feel beautiful on the east coast, I expected Los Angeles to be infinitely worse, but I had big dreams of rising (or shrinking) to the occasion.

I’ve struggled with disordered eating and body dysmorphia for as long as I can remember, but I landed at Burbank Airport with plans to start fresh, to be healthy, to get thin. Here, under the palm trees and city lights, I’d become one of the green-juice drinking, athleisure wearing, Runyon Canyon hiking, skinny girls I’d seen on Instagram. And in so many ways, I did. I started drinking my veggies, collecting matching workout sets and truly fell in love with moving my body.

Thankfully, I was quickly adopted by a community of gorgeous, full-bodied women who loved the same things. I’m talking devastatingly beautiful plus size models and Instagram baddies. Tall, soft and striking, their lives were filled with green juice, bottle service, free clothes, and doting suitors. When they walked, heads turned. When we got to a club, they floated to the front of the line and watched bouncers fall over themselves to find them a table.

As a 5’6” size 10, I was one of the smallest in this friend group. The way men would have to scrape their jaws off the floor for my friends, just to hit me with a dry “oh…are you with them?” regularly left me feeling like the kid sister who mom made them bring along for the night. And I loved every second. Watching the world unfold for them gave me permission to fall in love with my own hip dips and soft belly in a whole new way.

In these years, I’d catch up with friends on the east coast who would ask if it was hard being in LA surrounded by skinny, beautiful people. I’d shock them when I’d say I’ve actually never felt more confident in my own skin. In Boston and in New Jersey, where I was raised, it felt like there was a single standard of beauty: thin and white. In LA, though, beauty wasn’t about being any size, color, or even rocking a particular style: you just had to be fucking beautiful. My friends from home assumed that LA would give me an even narrower beauty standard to try squeeze into, but what it gave me was a community of women who refused to shrink themselves.

But now it’s 2025 and I feel myself losing sight of that defiant, expansive vision of beauty. The curvy creators I followed religiously in my twenties are posting smaller versions of themselves; their jaws getting sharper in each video. The women I know in real life, the ones who once helped me feel at home in my own soft body, are shrinking too. Not all of them, and not always explicitly, but enough to feel a shift.

And I can’t help but wonder when we all lost the plot.

During the body positivity movement, I started to believe that I was beautiful. I stopped weighing myself because I realized it was a trigger for my binge eating disorder. I learned, for the first time in my life, how to stop seeing a plate of food as a challenge and to stop eating when I feel full. I accepted myself and stopped obsessing over being thin. I embraced exercise as a privilege, not a punishment. I started to focus on intuitive eating that emphasized foods that make me feel good, without labeling any food as “good” or “bad”. Ultimately, I lost 10 lbs and settled into a confident and more toned size 8 than I ever thought I’d be able to maintain.

But then something shifted. I’m not sure what or when, but something changed. Kim Kardashian revealed her newly skeletal frame in that archival Marilyn Monroe gown, Ozempic took the world by storm, trad wives became the new face of the red-pill movement, Lizzo started slimming down, and then, last fall, I got a push notification when my mom added an appointment to our shared family calendar. “Gastric sleeve surgery”. Booked on a whim.

My mom is down almost 75 lbs and is smaller than she’s been since the nineties. Even my grandma is on Ozempic. Or she was. At 81, she really needed to lose those last eight pounds. When she hit 125 lbs her doctor refused to give her another shot … to my relief and her dismay.

Everyone is shrinking around me. I’m watching my elders and my mentors and my friends get smaller and smaller. Their cheeks are caving in and their comment sections are flooding with heart eyes and, somehow, my size 8 frame is feeling bigger and bigger.

To be clear, I know not everyone on a GLP-1 is trying to disappear into thinness. Some people are just trying to move through the world with less pain. To walk into a doctor’s office and be taken seriously. To be treated like a human being by people who see a high BMI as some kind of moral failing. That’s not nothing. That matters.

Maybe Big Pharma got this one right. Maybe my grandma is on to something when she tells me it’s a “miracle drug”. Maybe this is the moment in human history where we all get skinny, stop binge eating, lower our blood pressure, stabilize our moods, and live forever with clean arteries and quiet minds.

Maybe it really is that simple.

And still, I wonder, at what cost?

I recently saw this TikTok by Kendra Austin, a model, writer, and creator I deeply admire. Since losing 80 pounds, she says her comment sections have become colder; less affirming, less kind. She theorizes that as her body got smaller, her content began showing up on what she calls a “thinner and more self-hating” side of the internet; one where bodies like hers are not celebrated.

She’s probably right that TikTok’s algorithm pushed her content to a different crowd as her body changed. But I also wonder: Did her videos have to find a new audience for her comment section to take a turn? Or is the whole internet just a little thinner and more self-hating than we were this time last year?

Just last month, TikTok officially banned the hashtag #skinnytok, a move that seems to acknowledge the resurgence of eating-disorder culture without addressing the larger question of why it came back in the first place. And if it’s gotten so bad that even TikTok is trying to help us course-correct, what does that say about how far we’ve slid?

I’ve started weighing myself again. Not every day, but enough to keep an eye on it. In 2020 I thought my ideal weight was 165, but today 155 sounds a bit better, don’t you think? I find myself delaying my first meal a little longer than I used to, savoring the feeling of hunger in my belly, and with that, I know, the binges are soon to follow. I don’t want to go on Ozempic. I don’t want to want to be skinny. But I desperately want to be perceived as beautiful and it feels like the tides have turned. The earth has shifted and, like it or not, it seems we’re all backsliding into a world where every piece of content exists to convince us that thin and beautiful are synonyms.

Maybe next month, 145 pounds will start sounding better than 155 and I’ll be saying yes to the shot if my friend offers again, but for now, I’m trying to dig my claws in and fight the gravity. I don’t want to slide back to the heroin-chic, Tumblr-era thinspo I’ve only just recovered from. I want better for myself and I want better for us.

The Dirty Divine is a newly conceived, evolving space and I’d love to hear what resonates with you and I’d be so grateful if you shared this piece with someone who might appreciate it.

Thank you for being here.
😘
Kayci