Final week, Miley Cyrus received her first Grammy, and 1000’s of ladies booked their first Pilates class.
After the 31-year-old carried out her hit single Flowers on the 2024 Grammy Awards, social media – and significantly our buddies over on TikTok – have been obsessing over her arms. Particularly, how does she get ‘em so toned? The search time period “Miley Cyrus arms” has exploded over on the app, with health instructors curating specialist exercises comparable to “The Miley Cyrus toned arm exercise”, “The Miley Cyrus arms exercise”, and “POV: Miley Cyrus is your muse for as we speak’s exercise.”
And it isn’t simply on social media; a number of main information retailers have rushed to safe quotes from ‘health consultants’ on learn how to obtain Miley’s actual muscle tone. In case you weren’t already rattled, you could have noticed just a few nutritionists weighing in on the matter, too.
From delivery, we’re socialised to valorise celebrities in any respect prices – even (or particularly) if meaning altering our our bodies to look extra like theirs. Celebrities have all the time performed a significant function in upholding weight-reduction plan tradition: they set the sweetness normal, we kill ourselves attempting to achieve it.
Though weight-reduction plan tradition has been round for hundreds of years, it flourished in the course of the ‘90s and ’00s. It was an easier, pre-Ozempic period the place celebrities had been skinny, and the media – particularly ladies’s magazines – openly created content material about learn how to shed extra pounds, quick. We had been advised that celebrities had been “worryingly skinny” after which given the instruction guide to look similar to them.
What’s weight-reduction plan tradition?
Anti-diet nutritionist Christy Harrison defines weight-reduction plan tradition as a “system of beliefs that worships thinness and equate it to well being and ethical advantage […], promotes weight reduction as a method of accomplishing larger standing […], demonises sure methods of consuming whereas elevating others […], and oppresses individuals who do not match up with its supposed image of ‘well being’.”
Full definition right here.
In 2024, weight-reduction plan tradition is more durable to pin down. Celebrities are nonetheless skinny, however they’re additionally effectively. We do not simply need their our bodies; we would like their (obvious) well being. As a baby, I keep in mind studying a ladies’s journal function about what well-known ladies ate for breakfast; one lady answered one thing alongside the strains of “lukewarm water” because it made her really feel “fuller for longer”. May she have on condition that reply in as we speak’s ‘body-positive’ local weather?
On this period, celebrities are (principally) nonetheless skinny, however we’re inspired to practise neutrality – and even, love – in the case of our personal lumpier frames. It feels significantly disingenuous, given the elevated accessibility of weight-loss medicine like Ozempic, which has certainly contributed to the rise in celebrities dropping but extra weight below the guise of a balanced weight-reduction plan, train, and, above all, wellness.
The frenzied response to Miley Cyrus’ arms isn’t just a throwback to the unapologetic skinny worship of the early aughts. It is what occurs while you’re consumed a cultural weight-reduction plan of ‘Love your self!’ and ‘Doesn’t [insert extremely thin celebrity] look nice?!’ Therefore, we’re being instructed to alter our physique components to appear to be these of disembodied celebrities – and admonished for not loving the sum that every one these components create: ourselves.
In her oft-quoted memoir, Bossypants, Tina Fey summed up the sweetness requirements of late ’00s like so:
“Now each lady is predicted to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a basic button nostril, hairless Asian pores and skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance corridor ass, lengthy Swedish legs, small Japanese ft, the abs of a lesbian health club proprietor, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits.”
At any time when I come throughout this quote (normally on the depths of Tumblr), I am struck by the psychological picture of a collage lady – maybe created from the pages of these magazines on the hairdressers. To create a collage lady – the perfect lady, the sweetness normal – it’s essential to chop up the pictures of different ladies, choosing your favorite components and discarding the scraps.
Is that this how we consider ourselves? As a cut-and-paste model of how stunning we may look in the future? What occurs once we accumulate Miley’s arms? Will we begin engaged on replicating Hailey Bieber’s legs? Worse nonetheless, what occurs once we’re inevitably left with the identical outdated physique that we began with? What will we do with the scraps?
Clearly, there’s nothing inherently unsuitable with copying a celeb’s behaviour to emulate their look – you do you! However in a society the place the majority of celebrities adhere to a Western, fatphobic magnificence normal, it is price interrogating that need and, on the very least, being trustworthy with ourselves about what we actually wish to obtain. Spoiler alert: you will not discover the solutions inside weight-reduction plan tradition.
For extra from Glamour UK’s Lucy Morgan, comply with her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra.
