The Return of the “Good Girl” Body

I’ve been thinking a lot about how diet culture didn’t disappear; it just learned how to blend in. What used to sound like “being good” or “watching your weight” now gets repackaged as “optimizing,” “clean eating,” “hormone balancing,” or “longevity.” The words changed; the pressure didn’t.

And lately, that pressure feels louder than ever. There’s this whole dialogue happening online about how women in Hollywood just keep shrinking — the same unmistakable trend, everywhere you look. And, of course, young girls are seeing it, which makes it hard not to feel like we’re inching back toward those early-2000s beauty standards we all swore we’d outgrown.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are just trying to get through the day while being fed a nonstop scroll of “wellness.” One minute you’re minding your business, and the next you’re mentally tracking glucose, fasting until noon, avoiding seed oils, lifting heavy, healing your gut, sleeping eight hours, keeping cortisol low, hitting 10,000 steps, and drinking a $14 green juice that tastes like regret. And somehow we’re also expected to have opinions about medications none of us had even heard of three years ago.

The wildest part? It’s sold as empowerment.

But honestly, there are days when “wellness” feels less like caring for myself and more like trying to get an A+ in womanhood. Like there’s this quiet, judgmental narrator grading me on a rubric I never agreed to. And I see the same pressure in my friends — smart, steady, wildly capable women — who can handle real-life crises but still feel compelled to manage a forehead line at 35.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if wellness actually meant feeling at home in our bodies. Not fixing them. Not managing them like projects. Just being in them.

Girls aren’t born worrying about macros or inflammation or whether their breakfast “supports blood sugar.” They learn it. Which means maybe we can learn something different, too.