The green vomit emojis have been coming thick and fast this summer, a steady stream of sick flooding my Instagram inbox every time I post a picture or clip that features me existing happily in my body – running a 10k, perhaps, or dancing in the sea in my bikini.
‘Whale!’ messaged a man last week, whose own profile picture hardly showed him to be a human of svelte proportions.
‘You’re disgusting and need to lose at least four stone before I’d even consider you,’ wrote another bloke, whose feed featured endless pictures of him eating fish and chips.
If men aren’t getting in touch to shame me for my body, they’re messaging to tell me what they’d like to do to it. Explicitly.
When I click on the profiles of these blokes, they almost always seem to be middle-class men out on a dog walk, or posing happily on holiday with their children.
What possesses them to behave like this? Do their wives know about their double lives, harassing strangers on the internet?
I’ve been dealing with online oddballs for almost 20 years now. But I’m pretty sure it’s never been as bad as this summer, when not a day has passed by without at least one stranger messaging to tell me what they think of my body.
Sadly, it’s not just men. Women, too, seem to be at it, with an ever-increasing number getting in touch to deliver unsolicited advice about how I might like to lose weight.
Bryony Gordon says: ‘If men aren’t getting in touch to shame me for my body, they’re messaging to tell me what they’d like to do to it. Explicitly’
‘I would be happy to coach you so that you can be leaner,’ wrote one ex-lawyer who had just set up a personal-training business. ‘I’ve changed my life for the better in middle-age and would love to do the same for you.’
Where did she get the idea that I want to get lean and ‘change my life for the better’? It can’t have been from the clip I recently posted of myself jumping up and down in joy, having just completed the London Marathon.
Then there was the person who offered to share a referral code with me, if I fancied going on weight-loss jabs. It would get us both a discount on the price-hiked Mounjaro, she added, as if she was hand-delivering me a treat. ‘Charmed to meet you too,’ I stopped myself from replying.
And if I’m not being told off for being too fat, then I’m being told off for not being fat enough. ‘You appear slimmer than you did earlier this year,’ wrote one follower in a private message.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve abandoned the body positive cause like everyone else and gone on Mounjaro?’ I haven’t, but even if I had, what made this complete stranger think she was entitled to an explanation about the shape of my body?
This week, it is two years since the first prescription was handed out in the UK for so-called fat jabs. Two years of these drugs circulating through society.
Two years of reading endlessly about body transformations, microdosing, and the side-effects of GLP-1s (diarrhoea, heartburn, pancreatitis).
Bryony after completing the London Marathon. She says: ‘I couldn’t give a fig if someone is thin or fat, if they are on Mounjaro or McDonald’s.’ But she hates how weight-loss products have made women feel self-conscious about their bodies again
But the worst side-effect of all – the one nobody seems to have yet written about – is meanness. These drugs have given everyone permission to be unbearably judgmental about other people’s bodies in a way I haven’t seen since the bad old days of the Nineties and Noughties, when I battled bulimia and spent most of the time trying not to faint from hunger.
I grew up believing that to be fat was the worst thing in the world. Then, in my 30s, I gave birth to my daughter and realised the miracle of my body – and that, actually, the worst thing in the world was living a life where I believed that my value as a human was found in the number on the bathroom scales.
I didn’t want my daughter believing the same, so I wholeheartedly embraced the world of body positivity. I ate to nourish, not punish myself. I consumed carbohydrates for the first time in almost two decades.
My body got larger and so did my world. It was a revelation: that I had been keeping myself small in more ways than one. For the first time in my life, I felt at home in my body, instead of at war with it.
I have spent the past 13 or so years working hard to maintain this freedom from diet culture. In 2019, I went through all my social media apps, reporting ads for weight-loss products until they disappeared entirely from my feeds.
But they have started cropping back up again in recent weeks, products that promise to ‘melt fat’ and ‘balance hormones’ to ‘beat the bloat’, all of them offered as a ‘natural alternative’ to Mounjaro and Wegovy.
These drinks and supplements almost seem inoffensive when compared to injecting yourself in the stomach once a week, and they are all the more pernicious for it. I need to say here that I am neither anti nor pro weight-loss injections.
I know of just as many food addicts whose lives have been transformed by these drugs as I do humans with restrictive eating disorders whose lives have been made worse by them.
I couldn’t give a fig if someone is thin or fat, if they are on Mounjaro or McDonald’s. But I do hate how they have made even liberated women like myself feel self-conscious again, as if our every move is being monitored by a world that once more views female bodies as fair game. As public property.
Two years into this new era of diet culture, it’s worth reminding everyone that other people’s bodies are none of our business, and that it’s not OK to discuss humans as if they were pieces of meat on a barbecue.
As the conversation about fat jabs continues to get louder, I hope you will take this moment to remember that your worth is not defined by your weight. That you are so much more than the amount of cellulite on your thighs, or the level of bloat in your belly.
It hurts far more when you lose a friend, Olivia
Rumours abound that Olivia Attwood is having a tricky time with her husband, Bradley Dack, after photos emerged of the Love Island star cuddling up to Pete Wicks on a yacht in Ibiza.
But I’m far more concerned about the disintegration of her friendship with former assistant Ryan Kay, which has apparently turned ‘toxic’.
We girls expect our romantic relationships to be up and down, with our mates always there as constants. When a close friend leaves us, it really does feel like a stab in the heart.
It seems Olivia Attwood’s friendship with former assistant Ryan Kay has turned ‘toxic’
My terrifying two-day Red Bull high
Thank goodness energy drinks are going to be banned for under-16s in England. I was 13 when Red Bull launched in the UK, and I remember the brand handing the drinks out for free at a roadshow my friends and I attended.
We each downed two or three cans of the sickly sweet drink, with no idea of the effect it would have on us.
I think I finally came down from the high about two days later. Three decades on, I’m still too terrified of energy drinks to go anywhere near them.
Is anyone else petrified by the news that the EU has banned some gel nail polishes, after a chemical in them was found to cause infertility?
My baby-making days are well behind me, but as I sit with my fingers burning under a UV lamp every two weeks, I often wonder what the true price of my regular £60 manicure actually is.
I’ll NEVER give up my purse
A survey has found fewer than half of us carry a physical wallet or purse, with an increasing number relying on our phones.
I am definitely in the minority, refusing to go out without my silver purse. It contains nothing more than moths, bank cards and old receipts, given I pay for almost everything with Apple Pay on my phone and watch.
So why do I bother?
Because my purse still feels like a security blanket, ready to save the day when kids hack into the system and bring online banking down. You have been warned.
