'It’s toxic to call my weight loss a glow up'
TikTok is my go-to app for beauty tutorials, pop culture news, and mindless content. It’s also all too often a place where I encounter messaging around women’s bodies. Anytime I’ve scrolled lately, it doesn’t take long for my algorithm to inundate me with sneaky “transformation” content disguised as “glow ups.”
And TikTok’s current “glow up” fixation is the winter arc—or the notion that instead of New Year’s resolutions, you should set goals around this time of year to emerge from snowy hibernation mode as your “best self.” Except that it’s pretty clear that all our best selves are supposed to be thinner. This alleged self-improvement, often masquerading as self-care, is heavily based on acts like obsessive step counting, dieting, and exercise. Creators discussing the “winter arc” are often hawking their fitness plans, showing off their own before and afters, and then sprinkling a few sleep habits and skincare tips in so it doesn’t seem like what it is—a fun new phrase that gives fatphobia Main Character Energy (complete with its own narrative “arc”).
The winter arc is a great example of how diet culture adapts, skirting triggering language in favour of words that don’t set off the automatic alarm bells we’re all so aware of, thanks to body positive and neutral creators’ advocacy over the years. Take a look at any creator’s GRWM, ’fit check, or vacation dump, and you’ll find open speculation about their size masked with backhanded compliments about “revenge bodies,” “snatched figures,” and, yes, “glow ups.” All code names for one thing: thinness.
As someone whose size and weight often fluctuate, I assume that any praise is well-intentioned, but I find it deeply upsetting. The motivation behind wanting to hype up someone’s body to make them feel good is understandable, but when the media—and strangers on the internet—reserve the term “glow up” to celebrate people’s weight loss transformations, it reinforces the idea their appearance before wasn’t compliment-worthy.
With the rise of drugs like Ozempic, trends like micro shorts and low-rise jeans, less emphasis on body diversity on the runways, and ads for gimmicky products like mouth tape that will snatch your jaw, our culture has once again lost the plot entirely.
We should all know better by now, but it obviously bears repeating: There are a lot of reasons that people’s bodies fluctuate, so let’s reserve the comments, please! (Do you really want to inadvertently compliment someone’s health-related issues, stress responses, menstrual cycles, or bathroom schedules? Yeah… thought not.) But en masse critiques on anyone’s body should have been buried with 2000s diet culture.
When I’d come home from university wearing a smaller size, my parents would ask whether I’d “been working out” or tell me I looked amazing. Did it matter that I had acne, was visibly exhausted, or my skin was dull after spending a winter in Syracuse, New York? No. And if I happened to gain weight that semester… crickets. No one would comment on my appearance. Even if my skin was clear and I was rested and happy—whether I was praised for how I looked always depended on how my jeans fit.
Social media has made it easy to put any opinion out there, whether it’s about a celebrity or some random other person that happened to hit the FYP. We should really question why we all feel so entitled to say things about people’s bodies online when most normal people would never say the same thing to their face. Recent tabloid lists of “celebrity transformations” include Adele, Mindy Kaling, Ariana Grande, and Christina Aguilera—to name a few—and now use the more palatable term “glow up.” It feels like the only real lesson we’ve learned is how to perpetuate diet culture by changing our vocabulary to seem more positive. Meanwhile, we still can’t understand that a woman’s value isn’t determined by her adherence to beauty standards.
I challenge you to openly admire someone’s laugh, generosity, or literally anything other than their winter arc “glow up.” Instead of telling me how good I look in a pair of jeans, notice my sense of personal style or give me props for my job, my personality, or my unmatched wit? Eighteen-year-old me would’ve really appreciated that compliment.
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