The Moving Target: Bodies and the Impossible Standard

The “ideal” body has never been neutral. Throughout history, body standards have been shaped by systems of power—economic, racial, and cultural forces that determine which bodies are valued and which are marginalized. The specifics shift across centuries and cultures, but the underlying mechanism remains the same: the ideal is designed to exclude most people.

This isn’t a coincidence. It’s how systems of control work. When the target is unattainable for most people, everyone stays busy trying to achieve it. The failure feels personal, but the game was rigged from the start. The optimal body is always just out of reach, not by accident, but by design.

A Shifting Standard, A Constant Mechanism

In times and places where food was scarce and physical labor unavoidable, fuller bodies indicated wealth and access. A soft body meant you had enough to eat and weren’t working the fields from sunrise to sunset. The majority of people, struggling to get enough food, couldn’t maintain that. The wealthy displayed their privilege through abundance made visible. But even as these ideals existed, racial hierarchies were already shaping a changing discourse about which bodies were considered acceptable. 

Dr. Sabrina Strings documents how colonialism and the slave trade constructed associations between body size, race, and moral worth. The thin body became linked to whiteness, civilization, and restraint, while fuller bodies were racialized and demonized. These ideas laid the groundwork for what would accelerate with industrialization.

As industrialization spread and food became more accessible to broader populations, the standard inverted. Thinness solidified itself as the marker of status and self-control. To be thin when abundance surrounded you required deliberate restriction and constant vigilance. The flapper silhouette of the 1920s demanded binding breasts and hips, transforming the body into something it wasn’t naturally. Advertisements for weight loss powders and diet pills proliferated, selling these new norms to an expanding market.

The decades that followed brought more shifts. The hourglass curves of the 1950s, the Twiggy era of the 1960s, and its revitalization in the 1990s, and the sculpted muscle definition of recent fitness culture. Each era marketed its own version of the “perfect” shape, often with explicit instructions on how to achieve it through diet, exercise, or increasingly, through cosmetic procedures. But underneath the rotating aesthetics, the mechanism stayed the same: bodies in their natural state were never enough.

Current beauty standards don’t even pretend to be coherent. Social media simultaneously celebrates contradictory ideals, often achieved through cosmetic procedures or digital manipulation. Wellness culture adds another layer, promising that the “right” eating plan or exercise routine will produce a specific body, as if genetics, metabolism, and individual biology don’t exist.

What all of these examples share is exclusion. They exclude the majority of bodies, the ones that exist naturally without extreme intervention. They exclude fat bodies entirely, treating them not as one variation among many but as failures to be corrected. They exclude aging bodies, disabled bodies, bodies marked by illness or injury, and bodies that don’t perform thinness, fitness, or youth. The ideal is always narrow, always specific, and always moving just as people begin to approach it.

The Damage is Real

Chasing an impossible expectation has real consequences. Weight cycling, chronic dieting, and persistent body dissatisfaction are all documented risk factors for developing eating disorders. When the standard is designed to be unattainable, trying to meet it often means overriding hunger, ignoring fullness, exercising past the point of pain, or eliminating foods and food groups in increasingly rigid patterns.

For some people, what begins as an attempt to achieve the cultural ideal becomes a clinical eating disorder. For others, it settles into years of disordered eating that causes physical and psychological harm, even if it never meets diagnostic criteria. And for nearly everyone living in a culture saturated with these messages, it creates a baseline level of shame that feels normal simply because it’s so pervasive.

People in larger bodies face relentless stigma, discrimination in healthcare and employment, and a culture that treats their bodies as inherently wrong and in need of correction. The harm compounds when eating disorders develop in fat people and go unrecognized or untreated because providers assume weight loss is always desirable, even when it’s achieved through dangerous restriction or purging.

Your Body Isn’t the Problem

Humans come in an extraordinary range of shapes, sizes, and compositions. This isn’t a flaw in need of correction. It’s biology. Genetics determines bone structure, fat distribution, metabolism, and how the body responds to food and movement. Health conditions, medications, trauma, age, and life circumstances all shape what a body looks like and how it functions.

Diet culture profits from convincing people that this natural diversity is a personal failure. It insists that with enough effort, anyone can force their body into the current ideal. And when that doesn’t work (because for most people, it can’t), it blames individuals for lacking discipline or commitment rather than acknowledging that the goal itself was designed to be unreachable.

The target keeps moving, not because we keep failing, but because our success would end the game. If everyone achieved the ideal, it would cease to be of worth. Scarcity creates value. Difficulty creates obsession. An ever-shifting standard ensures that nearly everyone remains dissatisfied, which keeps the market for weight loss, fitness programs, cosmetic procedures, and wellness products thriving.

This system doesn’t serve individuals, and it doesn’t serve health. It serves profit and operates by convincing people that their natural state is wrong.

Stepping Away From The Chase

Stepping away from the pursuit of an impossible body doesn’t mean abandoning self-care or health. It means redirecting energy away from trying to meet an arbitrary aesthetic standard and toward things that actually support well-being: consistent nourishment, movement that feels sustainable rather than punishing, sleep, mental health care, relationships, and engagement with life beyond the mirror.

Recovery from an eating disorder often begins with recognizing that the problem was never your body. The problem is a culture that profits from dissatisfaction and perpetuates harm by upholding criteria designed to exclude most people. Recovery involves stepping out of that system, not by achieving the ideal but by refusing to accept its premise.

For people who have spent years or decades trying to change their shape and size, this shift can feel disorienting. If your body isn’t the problem, then what was all that suffering for? The grief that comes with recognizing how much time and energy was lost to an impossible pursuit is real and valid. So is the anger at a culture that demanded it.

But on the other side of that grief is something quieter and more sustainable: the possibility of living in your body as it is, rather than as you’ve been told it should be. Not because you’ve given up, but because you’ve recognized that your physical self was never the thing that needed to change.

The target will keep moving. Your body doesn’t have to chase it.