How Kate Moss Single-Handedly Ruined My Life

Almost every woman I know is, in some way, at odds with her own body.

Not occasionally or superficially but very much persistently. This piece starts from a question that feels both simple and uncomfortable: when did we learn to turn against ourselves?

Because it definetely wasn’t sudden, it crept in slowly, disguised as growing up, until one day you realized you were no longer simply inside your body, you were observing it, judging it and managing it as if it were something separate from you.

I was a child in the 2000s, and by the time I became aware of myself physically, that separation had already begun; between myself and my body. No one explained it, the culture didn’t exactly (always) speak in rules; it spoke in images, in repetitions so constant they started feeling like facts. The same bodies appeared everywhere, with such insistence that they formed a weird kind of  agreement about what was acceptable, what was desirable and what was allowed to exist. And those bodies not only were extremely thin, they were controlled, composed; they carried an absence that was difficult to name at the time but easy to feel, a distance from need, from appetite, from anything excessive or unpredictable. They didn’t look like they wanted anything, and that lack of visible desire was presented as a form of superiority.

As a child, you obviusly don’t analyze this and you end up completely absorbing it. You begin to understand that there is a correct way to exist, and that existing correctly requires effort, so you start adjusting, almost without noticing. You learn to look at yourself the way you imagine others might. You anticipate judgment before it arrives. You internalize it so completely that it no longer feels external.

Kate Moss summarised it best “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”, simply making explicit what had already been understood and internalised by all the young women and girls living in that era: that pleasure was suspect, that hunger was something to master, that the body was a problem whose solution required denial. What becomes clearer, later, is that this fixation on thinness was never really about beauty, at least not in any generous or expansive sense of the word. Beauty, left to itself, is too unstable, too difficult to standardize. What we were dealing with was something faaaaaar more functional.

Naomi Wolf wrote that “dieting is the most potent political sedative in history,” and the precision of that sentence only becomes apparent when you consider how much time, energy, and attention is required to sustain that kind of self-surveillance. Because a culture that teaches women to constantly monitor their bodies is not simply shaping appearance, it is shaping focus. It is redirecting attention inward, narrowing it, keeping it occupied with details that feel urgent but lead nowhere. Calories, measurements, small daily negotiations that accumulate into something larger: a life partially organized around correction.

This logic was very much written into the stories we watched and the medias we consumed. In films and TV series, the girls who were desired, who were chosen, who seemed to move easily through the world were almost always thin. Their lives were at the center of the narrative: they were the ones who were loved, who were seen, who mattered. Meanwhile, girls in larger bodies (or even just ordinary, unremarkable ones) were pushed to the edges, they were funny, self-deprecating, loyal, they only existed to support the protagonist, to soften the scene, to make others shine, rarely to be desired, almost never to be taken seriously. Without anyone stating it directly, a pattern formed: to be the main character of your own life, you had to look a certain way. And if you didn’t, you learned to accept a different role. adjacent, secondary and definetely replaceable.

To us, it was never just fiction,it filtered into the smallest, most ordinary moments. The way people complimented weight loss as if it were an achievement unrelated to context. The way someone saying “you look so good” often meant “you look thinner.” The way photos were taken, deleted and retaken because the body in it didn’t match the image you had learned to prefer. You started to understand that being seen was conditional, the less there was to see, the more you felt seen.

If you think about it, there is something almost ironic in how this is framed: it presents itself as empowerment, as discipline, as self-care. It suggests that control over the body is a form of strength, that restraint is a sign of seriousness, and in a way, it is almost convincing, it offers a clear structure, a sense of progress, even a kind of purpose. But what it removes is just as significant: time, mental space, the ability to direct attention outward, toward things that are less easily managed and therefore more disruptive. You can see it in hindsight, in a slightly uncomfortable way. How much of your day could be taken up by thinking about food, or not eating it. How certain plans were shaped around what you might wear, and what that would reveal. How often your mood could shift because of something as small as a number, a reflection, a comment that stayed longer than it should have. None of it felt political. It felt personal. And that was exactly the point. Because trust me, it is difficult to question anything when you are preoccupied with yourself in this way. It is difficult to resist, to demand, to refuse, when a part of your mind is constantly engaged in monitoring, adjusting, correcting. The system does not need to impose silence directly. It creates the conditions in which silence becomes more likely. And this is where the idea of thinness reveals its function most clearly, not only as an aesthetic preference but as a form of containment. A smaller body is easier to regulate, but more than that, a person who is invested in becoming smaller is already participating in their own regulation. Not consciously, not deliberately, but effectively.

Even now, when the language has shifted, when thinness has been rebranded as wellness, when restriction appears as balance, when the vocabulary has softened, the structure remains recognizable. The same vigilance is required. The same attention to the body. The same dissatisfaction that keeps you moving, improving, refining, but never quite arriving.

What is unsettling is not just that these patterns persist, but that they still feel, at times, like truth. That even after recognizing their origins, they continue to shape perception, to influence behavior, to define what feels comfortable or excessive.

And the hardest part is realizing how much of your life can pass like this, half-lived, slightly delayed, always waiting for a version of yourself that feels acceptable enough to begin. Waiting to feel comfortable, to feel confident, to feel ready.