I come from a family where everything happens around a table. Birthdays, graduations, New Year's Eve, a random Tuesday: there was always a table, and there was always my grandmother standing over it.

I know how this sounds, but I feel genuinely lucky that in my house nobody ever weaponised weight. My grandmother's version of love was have some more, said the second your plate looked empty and answered for you before you could refuse, another spoonful landing anyway.

If you'd got thin, that phrase never arrived as a compliment. It arrived as alarm. What happened to you, are you feeling okay, did you get sick. Put on a couple of pounds and you got the opposite, now you look healthy, said like she'd been personally vindicated.

None of it ever felt like an attack, because I knew exactly where it came from. She grew up on the other side of a war, in the kind of hunger that makes a full plate feel like proof the worst is over. For her generation a body with a little extra on it wasn't vanity. It was evidence.

None of which made me immune to what came next. I was a girl of the nineties with a television and access to MTV, and no amount of table-love was going to keep Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie off my screen, or America's Next Top Model out of my Sunday nights, Tyra Banks running a tape measure around girls every week like measurement was a talent. The Victoria's Secret runway. Heroin chic, that deliberately wrecked-looking thinness with Kate Moss as its patron saint, straight into the teenage bloodstream.

I did the comparing. I owned the low-rise jeans. My family gave me one set of instructions about bodies, the culture handed me a completely different set, and the culture won the years that mattered most.

So by my mid-thirties, when the runways diversified and the brands got their inclusive campaigns and the internet decided that commenting on a stranger's body was finally a hard no, I let myself relax. I felt something close to relief watching my nine-year-old niece grow up in a world where that sentence had apparently been settled for her.

Ariana Grande releases the video for Petal, seven minutes of a performer being picked apart by a panel of contradictory voices, a fairly direct comment on the beauty standards she has lived inside since she was a teenager. Within a day the conversation had moved past whatever point the video was making and onto her sternum and her rib cage, frame by frame, skeletal from people who have never once used that word about themselves out loud.

Six months earlier, Emma Stone walked into the Royal Festival Hall for the BAFTAs in a black Louis Vuitton halter gown, nominated for Bugonia, and lost to Jessie Buckley. By Monday morning almost nobody was discussing either performance. They were discussing her collarbones. Cadaverous was one of the words that trended. Jameela Jamil went after the whole red carpet for it. Somewhere in the pile-on, a detail that should have stopped it: Stone has been saying in interviews since at least 2014 that she has a hard time keeping weight on, particularly under stress, and that it's largely genetic. The concern arrived anyway, in volume, addressed to a woman who had already answered the question years before anyone thought to ask it publicly.

Different women, different rooms, and the same instinct my grandmother used to have at her table — stripped of the history that made hers forgivable, and multiplied by an audience of millions.

We told ourselves a tidy story about the last ten years. The 2010s gave us body positivity: Rihanna casting every size on the Savage X Fenty runway, stretch marks surviving the occasional Photoshop, brands scrambling to get inclusive into a tagline. It felt, briefly, like the public had agreed to stop grading women out loud. Then the GLP-1 era arrived, the runways thinned back out almost overnight, and the think pieces started asking what happened to body positivity, as if it were a policy that got quietly repealed.

Underneath the argument about manners there's a colder one. Body positivity was never tested against a world where thinness was easy to buy. It became a movement when losing weight still meant years of hard, unglamorous discipline, which meant accepting a bigger body could pass comfortably as a kind of virtue. Loving yourself as you were cost the people applauding you nothing, because changing yourself was still expensive in time and willpower. Then the injections arrived, and thinness stopped being a decade-long negotiation with your own body. It became an appointment. The applause changed key almost immediately. If the thing an entire generation of women were told not to chase is now sitting in a pharmacy fridge, available to anyone with the right coverage, the old permission expires. Nobody rescinded it out loud. It stopped applying, the way a coupon does once it's past its date.

Which means the acceptance was conditional all along. It was a truce that held only as long as the alternative stayed difficult — not so different, in its colder way, from my grandmother's abundance, which was its own truce with scarcity, forged by a generation who knew exactly what an empty table could mean.

This is also the least flattering thing you can say about the campaigns. Inclusivity was bought the way a season is bought: casting brief, hero film, a run of placements, a line in the annual report. Nobody has to announce the end of a campaign. You simply don't renew it, the casting sheet quietly narrows the following year, and the brand that made you feel seen in 2018 has no statement to issue in 2026, because it never made a claim it could be held to. It ran a campaign. Campaigns end.

The movement expanded which bodies were allowed to be looked at approvingly and never touched the looking itself, the public's felt entitlement to have an opinion about a stranger's body, printed underneath her own photograph. So when the trend cycle got hungry again there was no structure underneath the good feeling to resist it with.

Listen to what Grande has actually said, in interview after interview. That she has been doing this in public, a specimen in a petri dish, since she was sixteen or seventeen. That she has heard every version of what's wrong with her, fixed one thing, and been told it was wrong for a new reason. That's a woman describing a constant, not a rough news cycle. The commentary about her didn't start when she got thinner. It swapped its adjective. Concern is shame that learned to say it's worried about you.

Which is the part my grandmother's table quietly proved, though she would never have put it this way, though she would never have put it this way. Fatphobia and its supposed opposite are the same mechanism, aimed in different directions. One says your body is wrong because it takes up too much room. The other, dressed as compassion, says it's wrong because it doesn't take up enough. Both leave the premise standing: that a woman's body is a document the public gets to read aloud, in real time, whatever the verdict. Nobody asked the audience to stop reading. We handed them a kinder-sounding word for it.

This is the part I keep circling back to with my niece. I told myself the no she's growing up with, you don't comment on other people's bodies, was a settled fact, something my generation had finally installed for hers. But she doesn't need an adult in her own kitchen to say the wrong thing. She needs an algorithm, a red carpet photo, a comment section she'll be scrolling through herself in three years. The no I felt so relieved about was never load-bearing. It was a mood the culture was in for a while, the same as the mood my body positivity years lived inside, the same as the one heroin chic replaced and was replaced by in turn. Moods pass. Nobody builds a structure because a mood was pleasant while it lasted.

There are two arguments here and I don't want them to blur. The first is the one about manners: leave strangers' bodies alone, mine included, my grandmother's kitchen included. The diagnosing, the concern, the side-by-sides, all of it is one instinct with better manners.

The second is the one that stays with me after I close the laptop. When an industry promotes an extremely narrow and potentially harmful beauty ideal as the look of the moment and puts that image in front of girls who can't yet tell a fashion cycle from a fact about bodies, that isn't gossip about one woman's red carpet. It's marketing aimed at children for a product nobody is disclosing is dangerous. The nineties left a record of it, and it's a stranger record than the one we usually cite: in British primary care, new bulimia diagnoses among women climbed steeply through the first half of the decade, peaked around 1996, then fell by close to 40% over the following years, with the highest rate of all in girls aged ten to nineteen. Researchers still argue about what that curve measures. It might be a genuine surge. It might be a few years in which girls finally felt able to name something they'd been carrying quietly. Both readings indict the same decade, and both describe girls responding to a culture that had decided, for a while, that unwell was the aesthetic.

My niece doesn't need me refereeing whether a specific woman looks too thin. She needs the adults around her to notice when a whole look being sold to her as beautiful is built on something that can't be sustained, and to say it out loud, the way you'd flag any other product marketed at a nine-year-old with no warning label on it.

So no, my grandmother didn't have the answer either. Her love came wrapped in enough of her own history that it happened not to hurt me, and I was lucky rather than corrected. But there was something in that instinct of hers worth keeping past the parts worth leaving behind. She never once treated my body as evidence of anything except that I'd been fed. If my niece is going to inherit something real from this, something sturdier than a no that a trend cycle can vote out, I'd like it to be that. Not a rule about what nobody's allowed to say about a body. A question, asked so often it stops being about the body at all. Have some more. Not because the plate needs watching. Because the person does.

If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, the National Alliance for Eating Disorders runs a free helpline staffed by licensed clinicians: 1-866-662-1235.