Low-rise jeans are in fashion again – and so is the body type expected to pull them off. Thin is back, but unfortunately, I remember it too well from the last time around.

As part of the generation that grew up during the era of ‘heroin chic’, my formative years were spent looking at magazines overflowing with weight-loss tips, derogatory articles about women’s bodies, and pictures of slim models photoshopped to appear ever smaller. Carbs were demonised, Diet Coke glorified, fatness weaponised and thinness idolised. I absorbed it all greedily and its effects were catastrophic, because it made me hate myself.

It breaks my heart to say that, but it’s an admission I can’t escape. As a teenager I was consistently uncomfortable in my body, feeling as if it were a problem needing to be fixed – I was too big, too soft, too much of everything. I wanted so badly to be thin, because I was sure that when I was, I would be happy. That’s what diet culture did to us: convinced us that we were all wrong, if we weren’t just right.

You could argue that it never really went away, and that smaller bodies have continued to be seen as the beauty ideal – but over the last decade we’ve made huge strides in representation. 2014 saw Megan Trainor hit Number 1 with All About That Bass, a then-refreshing ode to a curvier body type. In 2017, Ashley Graham became the first plus-size model on the cover of Vogue, and by 2019, even Calvin Klein had bigger models on their billboards. The Body Positivity Movement, which started as the Fat Liberation Movement and later evolved into the Body Confidence and Self Love movements, changed industries that we thought could never change.

These movements were so gratefully received – a life ring thrown out to those of us thrashing around in diet culture’s choppy waters. I am a testament to their success, because that era set me free. Inspired by happy images I’d never seen before, I stopped spiralising courgette and telling myself it was as good as pasta. I uncrossed my arms away from my stomach on the beach and I learned that in hating myself, I was ruining my life, and by loving myself, or trying to at any rate, I was living it.

I gained weight and with it, found more strength and confidence than I could have imagined. Where I’d meticulously counted calories, I allowed myself food freedom. I started exercising for the love of it, wearing shorts, breathing out and letting go.

And so for those of us who lived through the 1990s and 2000s, and have subsequently done a lot of work to heal the damage that the skinny era did to our self-esteem, the cultural shift unfolding lately is particularly painful. Suddenly, celebrities like the Kardashians, once revered in a complicated way for how their curves shaped the beauty ideal, have all lost huge amounts of weight. With the rise in popularity of drugs like Ozempic, Hollywood as a whole has got noticeably thinner – which inevitably dictates that thinness must once again be our universal goal.

I absorb this news as the two people I have been: the one who was brought up believing that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, that a moment on the lips is a lifetime on the hips, and that to shrink is to succeed – and the one who found peace in buying bigger jeans, joy in saying yes to dessert, and happiness in a body that is perfect in its own way. For me, and perhaps for you, it’s triggering, conflicting and confusing.

But if I could choose a decade to live through again, I’d pick the one we just had every single time. I’d choose learning to love myself enough that I felt worthy of the space I took up, over hating myself in order to take up as little space as possible. I’d choose pushing through my discomfort to see that life didn’t start when I lost weight, over putting my life on hold until I had. I’d choose trying to convince myself that I was enough, over letting myself be convinced that I am not

And while it is not as simple as making a choice between happiness and sadness, or confidence and insecurity, the choice I do still feel empowered to make is where I want to put my energy – because I have misdirected it before, and I have learned from that. I could channel all my attention into calorie counting, restricting, saying no, feeling embarrassed and ashamed, hiding inside and under my clothes, hurting myself, shrinking myself and hating myself in the hope that it would make a difference – or I can try as hard as I can not to do any of that. Best believe I’m going to choose the latter.

In a sea of diet culture, it’s hard to buck the trend, not least because the thin agenda has always targeted women. This is no mistake; it’s the result of billion-dollar industries harvesting insecurities for profits. Fractured, confused and anxious, we’ll spend more. While it’s perhaps harder to remember this now than it has ever been, as the artist Caroline Caldwell said, ‘In a society that profits from your self doubt, loving yourself is a rebellious act.’ Be rebellious, on your own terms.

As long as the female body is seen as a commodity, trends can be attached to it, and this cycle will continue. Thin is in now, but it’ll be out again soon. While we focus our energy on making it to these ever-moving goal posts, our lives happen in the background; summers pass and memories are made, and so much of it is missed while we’re striving to be good enough for a culture that sets us up for failure.

Your body is not a trend, and your life purpose is more than trying to make it one. Against all the noise of the new thin culture, we must remember the progress we’ve made – because our lives depend on it.