90s and 2000s were a hard time for body image for women. What was the most extreme diet or exercise you did in consequence of that “skinny” propaganda?
90s and 2000s were a hard time for body image for women. What was the most extreme diet or exercise you did in consequence of that “skinny” propaganda?
r/AskWomen
Comments
not eating anything for as long as possible each day for a sizable portion of my teen years
it didn’t go great, thankfully i have not suffered any lasting physical effects
My mom was into the cabbage soup diet, and even pressured me to go on it as a teen. It’s literally just cabbage soup and occasionally like 4oz of chicken every few days.
I think in this case I’m probably lucky that the only thing lower than my self-esteem is my discipline. Any intense dieting or exercise I got swept up in only ever lasted about a day and a half before I gave up.
I developed an eating disorder that nearly killed me.
The soup diet!
Raving anorexia.
Lived off of water and Metabolife
My mom put me on the cabbage soup diet as a teenager, I was always fine with my body and didn’t want to try to do the Paris and Nicole size zero look because I like healthy curves and always have, even back than when that was considered fat. It was really silly. The soup was actually just fine as you know a regular meal. My mom tried it too but only lasted a few days and dropped it. We always clashed on what we found attractive, she had a really hard time accepting I had different preferences than her
Drinking warm salt water to make myself vomit after meals, weight lifted on top of hours of hiking 5 days a week, one small meal a day for a whole year, standing in a hot shower like a sauna.
[removed]
I went on a porridge diet for 3 mths which included;
Breakfast: bowl of porridge with almond milk, chia seeds and coconut flakes. Cup of English breakfast tea
Lunch: bowl of porridge with almond milk and honey with green tea
Dinner: bowl of porridge with water and green tea
Once a week I would have one normal dinner which usually consisted of some meat, potatoes and vegetables
…. My hair and nails stopped growing
Adderall. Way too small portions. My era was of the scene kids, so big hair and tiny bodies were everywhere. MySpace kinda fucked up a lot of girls insecurities. I still have unattainable expectations for my hips. Who knew the ultimate outlet for teens would turn into a cesspool of body shaming.
Oh wait…tik tok is a thing now. The cycle continues.
Become bulimic starting at the ripe old age of 10 ❤️
Atkins & South Beach diets at age 14.
The 80s were arguably worse.
I went from age 8 to 18 that decade and I used to buy “Dexatrim” at the local drugstore to try to control my appetite. I tried every fad diet and crazy exercise combination to become ultra thin. I was only 10 lbs overweight, but in the 80s that was considered obese. I was a size 7-9, considered fat. Can you imagine?
Starving all day, binge eating before bed, guilt, repeat.
And god forbid I eat over 1200 calories. Thanks, Cosmo.
Long term effects: some disordered eating habits and some body dysmorphia. Thankfully nothing severe and I’ve been able to work through it with some help.
You said early 2000’s and the first thing that came to mind was my moms Jenny Craig diet…everything was bland all of the time and we were never full
Tried to cut my stomach off with scissors in the 4th grade because I thought I was fat.
I was a child in the 80s and a teen in the late 90s. At the time I was better able to ignore it. But when living overseas and seeing the media that makes the western ‘heroin chic’ look healthy (and coupled with a truly bad relationship) I stopped eating in my late 20s. I lived on coke zero, broth based soups, and watermelon juice.
I gave myself an eating disorder, had it affirmed by everyone around me, lost a lot of muscle, completely f*cked my metabolism, became malnourished, had my self-confidence thrashed, and lost a lot of the happy, positive person I was.
Years later and I am still struggling to get to a healthy place with food, exercise, and relationships. Well it might not have drastically impacted me at the time, it definitely poisoned how I viewed a great many things.
Slimfast in my fifth grade lunch box. Thanks mom.
I was 13 in the early 2000s and my mom tried to get me to do The Pineapple Diet, Weight Watchers, The Cabbage Soup Diet, some Kelloggs related thing… There were so many.
Cried the first time I weighed in over 100 pounds at the doctors office at the age of 12. I was already 5’5”/5’6” by then.
My mom put me on weight watchers when I was 13. That resulted in me developing an eating disorder that I still struggle with at 27.
No breakfast, ate an apple for lunch, and grilled chicken breast for dinner. Also played tennis and rollerbladed almost everyday. Didn’t eat chocolate for a year! This was in eighth grade. My mom was on weight watchers during this time and I actually went with her to a couple meetings 😭
Binging and purging and also bouts of anorexia.
Aged 42 now and I still have after effects from those days.
I tried the Atkins diet and the master cleanse. I got super into attending spin classes too.
Once I managed not to eat for 8 days but then woke in the night and threw up so much bile my bf forced me to eat toast. Another time I lived off half a tin of minestrone soup a day for about 3 months. I cried a lot with hunger
The Master Cleanse Lemonade Drink that Beyonce promoted. 14 years old. Girl friends did it with me. Mom had no issue with us doing it. Totally insane.
[removed]
I had an eating disorder and it eventually landed me in the hospital at age 14 with low potassium and heart problems. Sat there on a feeding tube and IV fluids/vitamins until I could eat again. They wouldn’t let me out of the hospital until I got to a healthier weight. It felt like a punishment but my mother was literally trying to save my life. Took me 12 years to shake the ED completely. I still dislike the feeling of being “full” after a meal, but I work through it and eat lots of smaller meals throughout the day.
I also have no idea what I weigh, I get on the scale backward at any Dr. appt and ask that they keep it to themselves. There are no scales in my house- I just don’t want to trigger my obsessive numbers brains.
I am a great accountant and I still do a lot of internal mental math around things, just not calories and meals. I don’t participate in any sort of strict diet- I almost got caught up in a Whole 30 once but realized very quickly it was just my brain trying to restrict food in a more acceptable way. Thanks to calorie counting, I keep a sharp financial budget 😊
I’d consider myself 98% recovered, but like I said, the voice is still back there. Fuck skinny culture. Feels good to be healthy and strong.
[removed]
Gum diet. Literally just chewed a piece of sugar free gum if I got hungry.
I had anorexia. I followed a strict diet with 800kcal a day and avoided fat alltogether. I was still scared of fatty foods for years after i recovered. it was only really over when i stopped measuring the oil i put in the pan. What hurts me is when i look back at the pictures I still think my butt/thighs look perfect. i just naturally have more fat there so i had normal model legs, but i was skeletal otherwise.
Remember Beyonce’s water with cayenne pepper, maple syrup, and lemon diet? Yep. Tried that one. I will say, food never tasted so good once I was done with it.
Too many to list when I think about it. I would say going to the “diet doctor” and getting phentermine, (only to actually gain weight while taking it), was the MOST extreme. That body image stuff lasts a long time. Always thought I was a Big Back and now all my kids are larger than me and I don’t see them that way.
Anorexia 😞
i starved myself to the point i even used a heater in the summer. i was a size 4 and thought i was fat.
Not eating and running miles.
Bulimia and anorexia. I did get better but I still have an eating disorder.
Should we really have a thread full of dangerous diets and exercises??
I remember reading a horrible interview of a model who used to travel across Europe via train. She said she’d eat half a grape in one country and wait for the border cross till she ate the other half. That was an insane thing to read even back then.
The cabbage soup diet or Allí haha
Started drinking lukewarm water for beakfast as a teen.
Basically starving myself in high school in the early 2000’s.
I was in HS in the early 2000s. I woke up at 430am, did weight lifting for an hour, ate a rice cake, went to school and ate a small lunch, did an hour and a half of cardio after school, and then ate a small dinner.
I was a 124 pounds standing 5’10”. It was gross.
Metabolife in 1998/99. I lost about 35 pounds in 3 months.
Hydroxycut and baby food.
When I was a teen, my church would hold an optional fast called the Daniel fast. I would participate even though I wasn’t very religious, because a diet with a religious motivation seemed like something I could stick to. For 3 weeks, I could only eat grains, fruits, vegetables, and water.
Crazy to think that I thought this was necessary at 5’8″ and 140 pounds
I was a teenager in the early-mid 90s and my God, the self loathing I felt over my body! I remember when I hit 120 pounds, I was absolutely beside myself. I’m 5’8″, and have a lovely hourglass shape. But all I saw back then was a disgusting fat girl. I still feel bad for teenager me.
I called it the Jenny Crack diet
I smoked crackers and did other drugs to suppress my appetite. It was so effective that in a month I went from a size 8 to barely a size 2.
My friends and I would call it crack skinny.
I lived on cottage cheese and cucumbers for a week because I read somewhere that some actress lost weight that way. On the third day I started dreaming about fried potatoes, and on the fifth day I almost fainted in the subway 😅 I never listened to advice from the glossies again – only food and common sense!
Ate 4 Nilla wafers, then a couple Adderall. Wouldn’t eat all day until night, when I would get a veggie sub from Subway with no cheese or dressing.
Even though I started to hate Adderall, I couldn’t stand the thought of gaining weight by going off it.
Fat burner pills and Marlboro lights! I still thought I was over weight. This was mid/late 90’s. I was far from being anything close to “fat.”
I took Hydroxycut as a teen (!!!) and ate out of measuring cups to monitor my intake. My mom praised me for my determination when I lost 20 pounds 🥴 (though to be fair she at least had no idea I was taking Hydroxycut, she would have wrung my neck if she knew). My mom has been battling an eating disorder for as long as I can remember and has definitely passed disordered eating on to us.
My mom was constantly on the Master Cleanse. At least every other month she had nothing but a cocktail of water, lime, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper for like two weeks straight
Apple juice cleanse. I can’t even say it’s my own personal reasons for getting into it. My mom is the one that pressured me into it. She is naturally very thin. I’m her height but more curvy and I also struggled with my hormones and acne. Something she never experienced. She was determined to make me skinnier and have glowing clear skin. I’m mean she should have taken me to a dr. But Apple juice cleanse it was. I cannot stand Apple juice and it’s been two decades.
Exercised a LOT. Running and weight lifting and high school sports. Figured if I couldn’t tan and had muscular thighs, I’d be as fit as humanly possible. (Standard was blonde, tan, no hips/thighs and large chest. I was none of those things.)
None for body image, but I DID do some pretty extreme exercise for the career I was pursuing. Different sort of goal, though.
E: I was training to join the Navy as a rescue swimmer, so part of my workout was to float a couple miles downstream then swim back to the dock against the current. Just adding to more fully answer. And I’m too skinny anyway – this was to build endurance and muscle.
I mean I was put on Weight Watchers at 9 years old, so that was fun. Having to turn down a cupcake during a class birthday party because I didn’t have enough points for it was a core memory . . . And not a good one.
But yet when I begged my mom to join sports or dance I was told no. And the house was constantly filled with junk food but no fresh fruit or vegetables. I mean yeah, I guess we were poor but it’s so hard looking back at it all now seeing how I was set up for failure.
Drinking water with sugar to gain weight
Starving myself and then when I would eat, I’d make myself throw it up. And I was already skinny as a rail.
It’s so strange, I wasn’t super skinny back then but ok shape. I never felt that pressure back then. Was I oblivious? How was that pressure communicated since we didn’t have social media’s?
I was a total grunge in the 90s, I guess I wasn’t impacted much by fashion and all?
Going to weight watchers with my mom starting at 7.
From 8 until 17 I had done every diet. Special k, weight watchers, Atkins, South Beach, slim fast, binging and purging you name it I’ve done it all.
Every pound lost was a celebration and every pound gained was a failure.
It took me a long time to recover from this diet whirlwind and actually learn how to eat properly.
Bulimia *and restricted eating. I am 36 and still struggle with these issues today. I think I always will.
God, I remember working at a place during my gap year where all my female colleages did the Cura Romana diet for a few months and it was mayhem. (disclaimer, I didn’t participate so idk if those are things that the diet officially tells you to do or if they just went above and beyond)
Like my boss ate nothing but raw celery and then for supper, she’d always be excited for her “feast” which consisted of one can of raw tuna (in water, not oil, obvi) and cottage cheese. She went to a hypnotist in order to get the strength to keep up with the diet (if anyone’s wondering, the hypnotist didn’t refuse her services). I remember her asking me to carry her toddler a few times because she couldn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t just faint
Another big thing was that this diet was so fat-free that you weren’t even supposed to let fat touch your skin, so you weren’t allowed to use lotions or stuff that contained any form of fat. Another colleague was gifted a massage coupon by her husband and told us how she started crying on the massage table when the massagist said “woooow, your skin is just drinking up all that oil! :)”
It really was like living in a strange cult for a while. And a year later, everyone was back to their normal weight.
I was pretty much done with diet culture by then but I only recently had a memory resurface where I argued with my mom because she wanted to make Toast Hawaii for my ninth birthday and I cried because it would make me fat, and it only now occurred to me that that was not normal lol
I was a water polo player and all I ever ate was frozen yogurt and chocolate chip cookies. I still thought I was enormous.
I also gave up white foods for a long time (weird, I know, I associated white with fats).
I ended up swinging the other way and developing BED.
I went on a “diet” in high school where I only eat 1 full meal every other day (I realize now that this was not healthy, and could be classified as an eating disorder).
My mother and grandmother would take me bathing suit shopping and when I wanted to try on bikinis they told me I didn’t have a bikini body and didn’t want me to be embarrassed
Good times 👍 I’m in my 30s now…still healing with body image, but my relationship with food is alot better!
I was 16 and using ephedrine diet pills, eating lean cuisines, and jogging nightly. It still wasn’t enough…I was a size 4 and I still wanted to be smaller.
Nothing. I never assumed that celebrity body types were something I was supposed to aspire to. I was just living in my own world.
My mom used to buy Snackwells. Worst cookie ever.
Eating Special K for dinner. Or a can of green beans. And little else the rest of the day. I lost weight. I did not gain happiness.
[removed]
Didn’t eat breakfast or lunch, ate a salad nearly every day for dinner, played basketball and was a cheerleader, worked out on the weekends. I was 15 and the guidance counselor called my mom because I was about 75 pounds and sickly. Even people my own age brought it up to my mom. My mom just told them I had really good discipline about my health 🥲
I used to mark on my calendar which days I could eat. I had very restrictive eating habits.
Liquid diet (a la Optifast) for a full year. Started slowly reintroducing foods via doctor/nutritionist and gained back 30 pounds in the first month.
We ate Metabolife and other ephedra pills like they were candy.
Seriously, I was waiting tables at Denny’s at the time, and every shift, at least 3 people had a bottle with them and would pass them out to everyone who forgot theirs. I distinctly remember one incident where I had taken more than I should have, took a table’s order, walked to the computer, looked at my notepad, and it was just scribbles. My hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t write.
The rest of what I consumed consisted of soda, “dead” food from the kitchen, and saltine crackers. Sometimes I would forget to eat, because the ephedra made you not hungry.
I mean, it worked, I weighed a buck twenty in my boots, but I was not healthy.
My main diet was cigarettes, weed and coffee.
I didn’t eat anything with more than 3% fat. These were the days when fat was the devil and no one cared about sugar. I ate so many marshmallows.
[removed]
Ma Huang and ephedra, routinely skipping breakfast or lunch. Everyone did, so it was normal. I had a college professor pass out in class. She skipped breakfast because she was running late and probably didn’t eat much for dinner. That made me reconsider what healthy really was.
[removed]
[removed]
My mom monitored every bite. I was a size 0, and got the side-eye any time I took a bite of anything.
The cocaine diet.
My mother paid me to lose weight. I was a size 6 (US).
Girl I’ve had an eating disorder for a decade. I’ve done 500 calorie day diets multiple times
My mom sent me to school as a 13 year old with a carnation instant breakfast and a dream. The South Beach Diet wounded me.
Snacked on celery because my mom told me it had “negative calories.” also was taught to weigh myself every morning so if I gained any weight I could fix it asap. This was when I was a teenager, also known as a time I should have been gaining weight 🙄
I didn’t, mainly because I was such a picky eater.
But… my mother was on a constant diet and both my parents would comment on my shape – ‘thunder thighs’. My dad would call me ‘greedy guts’.
I was 5’7″ and about 8 stone 6lbs.
I look seriously underweight in all photos back then and was a UK size 8-10.
I learned that I was fat, and my body was wrong no matter what size I was.
This didn’t really hit home until I’d put weight on in my late 30’s, then lost a couple of stone.
I needed some new dresses and couldn’t figure out why my old dress sizes were clearly too big, but when I tried on the smaller sizes, which fitted perfectly, I still looked fat and the dresses looked big.
When I took the dresses off, they looked small again on the hanger.
I couldn’t see what I really looked like, and hadn’t been able to for years.
I was really upset about that.
I had the opposite problem. I was VERY skinny. So skinny that I didn’t even register for boys and men (apart from the musician weirdos who had a penchant for bohemian moribund-looking artistes). If I ever received comments, they were mostly full of scorn.
I think mine was mostly lack of interest in food because of associations with my family life (most fights between my parents were around mealtimes). When I started having a greater interest in life in general, my hunger increased. Now I’m always hungry, even though intermittent fasting is helping with that too.
I ate 500 calories a day. Became emaciated and my health started to get very bad. I decided I would never starve or deny myself again.
I was born in the 90s, and vividly remember Jessica Simpson who was a size 6 maybe being called fat. I was a chubbier pre-teen/teen. I did the water only diet that was all over YouTube for about a week and fainted in public.
I was also in middle school during the time dream girls came out, and the infamous diet Beyonce did (the master cleanse) was trending and I did that too.
I ate only steak and tomatoes for like two weeks or something
I was a hardcore long distance runner in high school. I went on the Atkins Diet for a bit until I almost blacked out during a run. Turns out, carbs are your friend.
[removed]
Courtesy of my mother I did:
Cabbage soup diet in 5th grade
Master cleanse diet next
Then slim fast diet
Then Jenny Craig diet
After those four it finally sunk in my head that I was FAT (I was not) and that I wasn’t worth anything unless I got skinny. That lead to constant diet pill abuse, I actually overdosed on them at one point and thought I was gonna die and my mom was mad she had to come home from her fancy dinner with my dad because I was sick. After that I still screwed around with diet pills and started going as long as possible without eating. Then I started throwing up everything I ate.
25 years later and I still have a horrible relationship with food, awful body dysmorphia, and it took me 20 years to finally stop throwing everything up, but I still struggle with the urge to and with feeling any kind of fullness. I have awful GERD as a result and idk what else. Because I was never severely underweight it was brushed off by my family and my doctor even when I begged for help. My mom still asks me for diet tips.
I am pushing 40 and I am very much a work in progress and I wish I had never ever let her voice take root inside my head.
Herbalife. 😩
Anorexia. Food restriction to 1 apple and 1 string cheese per day as a teenager. Walking multiple miles/aerobic exercise per day. Never got below 128 lbs, so I looked “healthy”, but was so sick. I would have horrible cramps in my legs and heart palpitations, see black spots if I was standing too long. It was sad. I’m glad I was in therapy. I think it saved my life.
Cigarettes for dinner.
I never got chocolate milk in elementary school in the late 2000s (2006-2011) because I didn’t want other kids to judge me.
I honestly wasn’t fat but because I was just taller and studier than the other kids I thought I was fat as hell.
Not eating for days at a time but taking hydroxycut also. I stopped because I had woke up in the middle of the night absolutely parched. I remember distinctly going to the kitchen but instead of putting the water in a cup, I put it in a pan to boil. Thankfully my mother walked in as I was half asleep and stopped me just before trying to drink it. I was delusional at that stage.
Wearing plastic clothes to melt fat lol
Skipped breakfast and lunch everyday and joined the track and field team at school.
I did beyonces lemonade diet before going into my junior year of high school.That was the only thing I drank for a bit over a week and I lost 15lbs. Only reason why I stopped was because I almost passed out just walking from the kitchen to my room.
Y’all remember cabbage soup diet? That was weird. You were so happy to get to banana day.
military diet. worked out 2hrs a day (cardio) then 30 mins yoga, and eating 800 cal a day.
lost 20lbs in 13 days at 16yo. i was followed by a bunch of older men, then slipped into my first psychotic episode as a result of being assaulted.
i havent been able to reach that weight since then (im over 200 now) because im scared of the “attention” it will bring. i would rather die of a heart attack than have another person assault me.
It’s all coming back 🙁
Started the whole slim fast, weight watchers, Lean Cuisine, fat free everything cycle with my aunt and grandma when I was like 8 and started developing a little belly. Turns out I have horrible metabolic issues but no one even questioned my actual health. Over the years, I just really internalized that mindset and was always ashamed of being heavy and enjoying food. By the time I was 16, I was introduced to a type of restrictive eating by a friend at school. Her beautiful plan was to take bites and chew our food, but spit everything out so we didn’t get any calories in. When I realized that I couldn’t exactly do that at mealtimes at home, I discovered purging. I’ve always had stomach issues, and it was not difficult to make myself throw up. It also didn’t attract too much attention since I already vomited a lot. After almost a year, I ended up pretty sick and just moved into full on binge eating after that.
I’ve yo yoed up and down since 1996. I am now a healthy weight but my digestive health is worse than ever in my life, primarily because of the undiagnosed metabolic issues in childhood and adolescence. It’s a deep regret and I am working overtime to ensure my kids don’t end up with some fucked up body image because of something that I’ve done.
I drank a half a cup of milk and ate a quarter cup or rice for breakfast. I lost 15 lbs in one month.
When I was a teenager (14 maybe), I remember making my first webpage. It was for Ana. I remember the header said ‘if you’re thirsty, drink water. If you’re hungry, eat ice.”
Thought I was pregnant all the time because I had a chubby belly in elementary school. Before I knew how people got pregnant 🤦♀️. In highschool I calorie restricted to 1,000/day
Anorexia has always been my go-to secret for weight loss. I hated my body well before any propaganda told me to.