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EVERESCAPE PROFESSIONAL
The examples that used to show up in commercials for diets were egregious: a woman flapping enormous pants with two hands, a man smiling ab-fully in front of the mirror, a former professional athlete shaking their head in disbelief while recalling the weight they put on after retiring. The binary implied in the images also reduces people to their weight and physical appearance, even though health is determined by far more than weight alone. Weight is hard to take off - and harder to keep off about 80 percent of people who lose weight regain it within a year. “They promote this idea that one type of body is superior to another,” explains Alexis Conason, a psychologist and author of The Diet-Free Revolution, “and that the ‘before’ body is bad or not good enough, and the ‘after’ body is what we should all aspire to.” “Before” and “after” photos imply that “after” is the end, but in reality, this is rarely the case. Three weeks into resolution season, the “before” and “after” photos aren’t filling up my social-media feeds just yet. And despite all the progress we’ve seemingly made in the past 18 years, “before” and “after” photos maintain their strong grip over our idea of what personal change looks like. I’m also in recovery for an eating disorder I developed while trying to look like the men in the pictures. I no longer subscribe to Men’s Health, and I no longer identify as a man - I came out as trans in 2019. The ensuing years have seen the rise of the body-positivity movement and a popular backlash against diet culture. But it was also the year during which experts began questioning the poorly researched concept of “the obesity epidemic,” an idea that had become gospel among public-health officials.
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Fox reality show The Swan, which pitted women against one another to compete for transformative plastic surgery, made its debut that year, as did The Biggest Loser, which shamed fat people into losing dangerous amounts of weight every week. That year, 2004, may have been a low point for diet culture. Despite how obsessively I worked out, I never considered myself hot enough to grace the magazine’s pages the “before” and “after” photos were markers of what I would never become. I longed to be one of those men, and part of me always lamented the arrival of every new issue, knowing I wasn’t featured within. There stood the zhlubby dude from six months earlier next to the absolute hunk he had worked to become. One section in particular stood out, “ Weight-Loss Transformations,” which featured readers’ experiences of getting into shape with help from the magazine’s workout programs, complete with “before” and “after” photos. As part of my plan to keep it off, I subscribed to Men’s Health, hoping it held the secret to staying in shape. The summer I turned 15, I lost a lot of weight. I’ve spent most of my life obsessing over my body. Photo-Illustration: Photo-Illustration: The Cut Photos: Getty Images