Why the thin ideal is making a comeback this summer and what a ‘summer body’ really means
A member of our team was recently at Pride in Flagstaff, Arizona, and came back with an image neither of us has been able to shake. There, between the stalls and the music, GLP-1 injections were being sold right alongside IV drips for hydration. Two pumps of ‘wellness,’ available on the spot, like sunscreen or a cold drink.
We want to be careful here because we are not anti-GLP-1. Quite the opposite. We have seen these medications transform the health of people who had run out of options, and we wrote an entire book about using them well. But that scene in Flagstaff is worth sitting with, because it captures something happening right across the culture this summer: medications that were developed to treat obesity, a serious medical condition, are quietly sliding into something else entirely: a lifestyle accessory, a quick fix, a fast track to a smaller summer body before the holidays.
The thin ideal is making a pressured comeback
For a few years, it felt as though the conversation was opening up. Body diversity was being celebrated. The idea that a person’s worth has nothing to do with their dress size was slowly becoming mainstream. Then the needle started to swing back.
The pressure to look a certain way is often felt most acutely in summer. Beach season, holiday photos, ‘summer body’ headlines, and swimwear you are suddenly expected to feel comfortable in. Social media fills up with curated, filtered, carefully angled bodies, and the old message creeps back in: thinner is better, thinner is happier, thinner is winning. The arrival of GLP-1s has poured fuel onto this already blazing fire. When thinness is then painted as highly attainable, and when it’s being sold casually next to an IV drip at a festival, the pressure to take it becomes harder to ignore.
We think that’s worth pushing back on, hard, and now is exactly the moment to do it.
A sharper edge: selling thinness to a community already under pressure
There’s a detail in the Flagstaff story that troubles us more the longer we sit with it. It wasn’t only that a weight-loss drug was being sold like a festival treat. It was where. Pride is, at its heart, a celebration of being accepted exactly as you are. For the LGBTQ+ community, which already carries a heavy pressure when it comes to body image, this feels particularly targeted and unsafe.
The research shows exactly how the LGBTQ+ community is more vulnerable to body image pressures. Gay and bisexual men are at considerably higher risk of eating disorders than heterosexual men1, with a stronger drive for thinness, greater body dissatisfaction and more body-related anxiety. And LGBTQ+ adults report more disordered-eating symptoms2, as well as more weight-based discrimination3 that’s closely tied to that disordered eating. What’s more is that this pressure frequently comes from both within and outside of the community as a narrow, hyper-specific ideal of the ‘right’ body, lean and muscular, circulates in parts of the community and the media aimed at it.
It’s important to say that none of this is a flaw in the community. It’s what happens when minority stress, discrimination and an unusually rigid beauty standard stack on top of one another. Which is exactly why setting up a thinness-on-demand stall in the middle of a Pride event feels less like wellness and more like targeting. You don’t sell injections at the one gathering built around belonging without conditions.
To do so is to take a group already disproportionately squeezed by the thin ideal, already more likely to be struggling, quietly, with food and their reflection, and hand them a faster route to change it. That isn’t meeting a need, it’s preying on a vulnerability that the rest of the culture helped create.
Holding two truths at once
Here is the line we keep coming back to with our clients, and you will see it again and again in our blogs, our posts, and most importantly, in our sessions. The path forward isn’t a choice between accepting your body and improving your health. It’s holding both truths at the same time.
Yes, if someone is carrying weight that is genuinely compromising their health, losing some of it might be good for them, and a GLP-1 can be a brilliant tool to help. We will never pretend otherwise. But that is a completely different thing from celebrating thinness for the sake of thinness. You can reject the idea that thin equals worthy and take a medication that helps your blood pressure, joints, energy, and sleep. These ideas do not cancel each other out.
One important caveat, though: if you believe your weight is the problem when the real distress is about how you see yourself, losing weight won’t touch it, and that’s a conversation to have with a professional, not an injection.
Where it goes wrong is when the goal quietly shifts from health to appearance. From ‘I want to be able to play in the park comfortably with my children’ to ‘I want to look like her by July.’ That’s when a medical tool becomes a vehicle for the very thin ideal we should be questioning.
Why “thin equals success” is a story worth refusing
Success was never meant to be measured by how small you become.
One thing that surprises people is that body image doesn’t depend on your size. We have sat across from clients who have lost a great deal of weight and still see their old body in the mirror, who still feel the old shame, who are still unhappy with their body, no matter how small they make it. If thinness were the answer, that wouldn’t happen. The work of feeling at home in your own skin is psychological, not just physical, and no injection does it for you.
There’s a deeper trap, too, the one social media sets perfectly for summer. Scrolling through other people’s holidays, it’s easy to believe that everyone who loses weight emerges with a flawless, proportional body or is having the best time of their life. You don’t see the loose skin, the angles that weren’t chosen, the photos they spent hours mulling over, the lighting, the editing, or the bad days that didn’t make the grid, the effort it took, the part of life that got smaller while the pictures got ‘better.’
A client of ours put it better than we ever could: she realised she had spent years trying to diet her way into someone else’s DNA. You can become a healthier version of yourself. You cannot become someone else, and chasing that is exhausting and endless.
When your sense of worth comes from many places, your kindness, your relationships, your work, your humour, the things you’re good at, the people you love, a bad body-image day won’t throw you into a frenzy. However, when appearance is the whole foundation, you are one swimsuit photo away from collapse. Building a wider base for your self-worth isn’t about ignoring your body. It’s about letting your body be one part of who you are, rather than the whole of it.
Strong and healthy summer body comes in many sizes
This is the part we most want people to take into the summer.
Health is not a body type. It shows up as the energy to get through a long day, lungs that climb the stairs without protest, a good night’s sleep, a steady mood, and blood numbers your GP is happy with. None of those things has a single body shape. People at the same height and weight can look entirely different, simply because of their genetics. Those strong thighs that won’t slim down might be the same ones that carried your grandmother through a lifetime of hard work. Form is not the point. Function is.
So instead of asking your body to look like a curated summer body this season, you might ask what it can do: carry you into the sea, dance at the party, walk the coast path, lift the people you love. That’s a summer body worth celebrating at any size.
What to do with your summer body
None of this means forcing yourself to declare love for your reflection. Trying to leap from body hate straight to body love usually backfires. When you don’t believe the words, the gap just makes you feel worse. We aim for something kinder and sturdier: neutrality. You feed your body, rest it and move it because it deserves that baseline of respect, regardless of how you feel about it on any given day. Appreciation is welcome when it turns up on its own. It’s never compulsory.
A few small things genuinely help when the pressure ramps up:
- Curate your feed. Unfollow the accounts that leave you measuring yourself against an edited photo. Be especially wary of dramatic transformation content, as it’s designed to trigger comparisons.
- Do the opposite of what the critical voice says. If it tells you not to go to the beach, not to wear the swimsuit, not to be in the photo because of how you look – go, wear it, be present. Each time, you gather evidence that the fear was bigger than the reality, and you get your summer back.
- Dress the summer body you have now. Keep clothes that fit you today. Clothes should support you, not punish you for not being a different size.
- Notice the comparison trap and name it. ‘I’m comparing my real, unedited body to someone’s best angle.’ That sentence alone takes a lot of the sting out.
- Measure the right things. Energy, sleep, mood, happiness – not just the number on a scale.
The real summer body
The Flagstaff drip stand is a neat symbol of where the culture is heading: health repackaged as something you buy quickly to look a certain way before a deadline. We’d rather offer the opposite. Use these medications if you and your doctor decide they’re right for your health, and then refuse, firmly, the story that says the goal was ever to be thin.
Your worth was never up for negotiation on a beach. Strong and healthy come in many sizes, and the summer body you already have is the one that gets to enjoy the summer.
Dr Max Pemberton and Dr Courtney Raspin are the authors of The Weight Loss Prescription. This article is for general information and isn’t a substitute for personalised medical advice – always speak to your own doctor about whether GLP-1 medication is right for you.
If you’re struggling with food, eating or how you feel about your body this summer, you don’t have to manage it alone. In the UK, Beat runs a free, confidential helpline and online support (beateatingdisorders.org.uk). Your GP is also a good first port of call, or you can contact us to have a conversation about how we can help.
References
- Feldman MB, Meyer IH. Eating disorders in diverse lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations. International Journal of Eating Disorders. 2007;40(3):218-226.
- Parker LL, Harriger JA. Eating disorders and disordered eating behaviors in the LGBT population: a review of the literature. Journal of Eating Disorders. 2020;8:51.
- Gordon AR, Egan KA, Wang ML, et al. Weight-based discrimination and disordered eating behaviors in a cohort of U.S. sexual minority young adults. International Journal of Eating Disorders. 2023;56(10):1983-1990.
