New Year, New Eating Disorder

“I hate it because I fall for it every year,” says Meirav Devash, of January’s inescapable four-word cultural theme. Now in her 40s, the Mental editor-at-large started binge eating and hiding food in her room when she was 12, and has been yo-yo dieting ever since. “New Year’s is the perfect time for these ‘new you’ messages because it’s when you, or at least I, generally feel peak disgust at my Halloween candy, Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas cookie, and Hanukkah latke bacchanalia.”

Devash’s thoughts and patterns mimic those of so many others with disordered eating, who get triggered by—and often succumb to—the promise of a “new you.” She’ll start a diet, lose weight, become more obsessive about food restriction and exercise, then burn out and gain back the weight, plus a little bit more. “I feel trapped in a cycle—just playing with the same weight up and down forever. I feel like a failure.” But the fallout of this experience isn’t just a mental one—it nearly killed her.

“The one year I didn’t make a resolution to lose weight was when I’d already lost enough to be a ‘New Year, New You’ story,” she explains. “I had lost 100 pounds and celebrated with a story at the women’s magazine I worked for,” which included a glam “after” picture shot by a famous fashion photographer.

By 2024 standards, the story title, “Disappearing Act,” was unfortunate. “It was an apt headline,” says Devash, “since my life had basically been reduced to personal training sessions and weird diet behaviors, like eating all my meals with chopsticks and obsessively checking how many steps I’d taken each day.” A self-described non-athlete and “more of a yoga person,” Devash (shown below) was lifting weights, swinging kettlebells, and strenuously running stairs to keep the pounds from returning.

She kept it up until, a year later, she was hospitalized with internal bleeding from varices (varicose veins) in her esophagus due to a condition she didn’t know she had, called portal hypertension. “One thing that causes varices to bleed?” she says caustically. “You guessed it: strenuous exercise.”

Is this what they mean by “New Year, New You”? Because it was indeed a new her. Just not a healthier one. And she’s far from the only one who’s suffered a much worse fate than being [insert hushed tone] overweight. People without pre-existing conditions can end up exacerbating them from what’s called “weight cycling”—where your weight regularly fluctuates by large amounts, often brought on by the back and forth of dieting.

“The diet industry perpetually sells the myth that our bodies are lumps of wet clay and that we are only ever a little willpower away from six-pack abs and perpetual bliss,” says Lauren Rosen, LMFT, director of The Center for the Obsessive Mind in California, an outpatient treatment center specializing in eating disorders and anxiety disorders. “And boy does the diet industry capitalize on New Year’s resolutions! All of the messaging around ‘New Year, New You’ makes bodies an easy target. Seeing so many people try to change their bodies and hearing people discuss how they’re going to lose weight can be very triggering for individuals in recovery [from eating disorders].”

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And it sends some people into crisis. According to a first-of-its-kind 2021 study published in Psychosomatic Medicine, nearly 20 percent of people admitted into an eating disorder (ED) treatment facility attributed the onset of their ED to anti-obesity, pro-dieting messaging.

“‘New Year, New You’ exploits body shame and people’s desire for a renewed sense of self, reinforcing a core message that their bodies are not good enough, and that they have not been ‘disciplined’ throughout the year to lose enough weight to achieve society’s standards of thinness and health,” says therapist Shelby Castile, LMFT, founder of The OC Shrinks, a organization of 3,000 mental health professionals in Orange County, California.

Even obesity researchers wince when they hear the phrase. “Weight is tied to morality, character, and attractiveness in society. ‘New Year, New You’ messaging can make people feel negatively toward themselves and result in extreme actions in an effort to change,” says nutritional scientist Emily Dhurandhar, Ph.D., chief scientific officer at Obthera, which provides software and services for “evidence-based, personalized obesity management,” and interim associate editor for the International Journal of Obesity. “Those actions can easily lead to disordered eating patterns without sound guidance. And sometimes, those negative feelings lead down a difficult and unproductive road without any improvement in weight or health.”

And how. According to a study in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, 35 percent of “normal dieters” progress to “pathological dieting”—unhealthy eating behaviors like skipping meals and calorie restriction—and 20 to 25 percent of those individuals eventually develop eating disorders. That means for every dozen of your friends and family who are resolving to drop a few pounds in 2023, four will struggle to step off the diet train and one is likely to eventually develop a new eating disorder. New you, indeed.

How Did New Year Come to Mean New Body?

New Year, New You. It’s quick, punchy, intriguing—the stuff of marketing gold. And, as with real gold in an 1848 California stream, miners have been plentiful. Particularly in January, they include friends, family members, magazines, digital sites, social media posts, and a big ol’ percentage of ads for weight loss plans, fitness programs, and detox cleanses. “It’s sad. It’s harmful. It’s damaging the minds of the younger generation,” says Castille. “Unfortunately, I see it everywhere I turn.”

We all do. It’s hard to remember a time when starting the new year on a diet wasn’t A Thing, but certainly cavepeople didn’t subsist on berries and leaves each January to look svelte in their loincloths. To understand how “New Year, New You” became the month’s unofficial mantra, we must look at the evolution of resolutions themselves.

The first recorded New Year’s resolutions date back to 1672, when—in a January 2 diary entry titled “Resolutions”— Scottish writer Anne Halkett listed vows from biblical verses, such as “I will not offend any more.” On January 1, 1813, a Boston newspaper discussed how people were “beginning the new year with new resolutions and new behaviour” to “wipe away all their former faults.” 

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Somewhere in that century and a half, we humans shifted from communal do-gooding to personal reinvention. “January 1 is a secular date, but every religious tradition has an annual time to reflect on how to better achieve the ideals of our communities,” says medical and psychological anthropologist Eileen Anderson, Ed.D., founding director of the Medicine, Society, and Culture Center at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland. 

Traditionally, these goals were centered around improving society. But over time, culture became more individualistic—and so did the new year goals people set. “It went from, How can I better meet the needs of my community, to How can I maximize myself and become a better me,” Dr. Anderson explains. 

In 1947, America’s main resolutions, per a Gallup poll, still seemed to reflect a bit of both:

1. Improve my disposition, be more understanding, control my temper

2. Improve my character, live a better life

3. Stop smoking, smoke less

Jump to today, and our top three desires exclude not just community, but character too. They focus instead, per Statista polls, on our bodies: exercise more, eat healthier, and lose weight. Each ranks higher than wanting to spend more time with family or friends, save money, or reduce job stress.

This is no coincidence. “Resolutions both reflect and reinforce social changes,” says John C. Norcross, Ph.D., distinguished professor and chair of psychology at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania who has conducted multiple studies on resolutions. “Americans tend to be individualistic and quite puritanical in resolutions. It’s largely what I’m personally going to do and largely framed as what I’m going to deny or force.”

Individual. Puritanical. Deny. Force. In many ways, these four words—much like “New Year, New You”—summarize just how dangerous weight loss resolutions can become.

Honey, I Shrunk the American Woman

We are a nation of dieters: According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 17 percent of Americans are on a “special diet”—which includes categories like low-fiber, high-protein, and gluten-free—at any point in time, up from 14 percent a decade earlier. The top special diet? Weight loss or low-calorie. 

Beyond those on “special diets,” a consistent 60-plus percent of women have wanted to lose weight between 1990 and 2021, per annual Gallup polls. The data lags between the ’60s and the ’90s, but in 1957, that percentage was 20 points lower. (Ironically, over the same period, obesity rates in the U.S. rose from 30.5 to 41.9 percent.)  So what happened?

Diet wasn’t always a dirty word. In ancient Greece, diatita referred to a way of life that included taking care of your physical and mental health. It wasn’t until the 19th century that people began “dieting for aesthetic purposes,” according to a 2016 literature review published in the Journal of Food Research. Along with the telephone, postage stamps, and A Christmas Carol, the Victorian era ushered in both fad diets and the industrial revolution.

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And with that revolution came factory-made clothes—and with them, standardized dress sizes, creating physical comparison in a way that hadn’t previously existed. At the same time, scientists discovered the calorie and other nutritional components, making health quantifiable. And, according to historical gastronomist Sarah Lohman, as concerns rose about the internal-organ-damaging effect of corsets, their fashion caché tumbled—leaving women displeased with their natural waistlines. 

“By the end of the century, Americans had fallen headfirst into this battle against fat,” Lohman said in a lecture at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. “Between 1890 and 1920 specifically, America’s image of the ideal body completely changed from one of healthful plumpness to one where fatness became associated with sloth.” What began to grow, continued the author of Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine, was “a surprisingly strong current of disgust against people who were perceived as obese.”

More specifically, American culture shifted from appreciating larger bodies to equating them with laziness and lack of self-control, misperceptions that studies show still persist today. “For many people,” says Dr. Anderson, “health replaced religion in terms of what’s ‘good’ or ‘bad.’” As health took on an increasingly moral value in society, “health” and “thinness” became, in the minds of many, interchangeable.

The media served as a megaphone for this anti-fat sentiment. Between 1901 and 1925, women’s bust-to-waist ratios in women’s magazines shrunk 60 percent, according to an analysis published in the journal Sex Roles. And as women tried to fit this new “thin” archetype, eating disorders rose starkly. 

From there, weight loss companies and diets proliferated: 1950, the cabbage soup diet; 1961, the founding of Weight Watchers; 1977, Slim Fast; 1983, Jenny Craig; 1992, Atkins; 2003, the South Beach Diet; 2008, the launch of Noom; 2012, the proliferation of juicing; 2014, paleo. And—coming in on the very tail of U.S. News & World Report’s Best Diets of 2022 (meaning, they’re hardly “best” at all), keto, the Duke diet (think: all protein, all the time), and GAPS (an elimination diet focusing on gut health). 

With so many new “fixes” promising a “new you”—and so much money being thrown about to ensure you see those promises, with weight loss and fitness companies spending about four times as much on advertising at the beginning of the year than other times (Noom spent $21 million on Facebook ads alone in January 2022)—it’s no wonder that millions of Americans make (or more accurately, remake) the commitment to lose weight minutes after the ball drops. 

How a Diet Becomes an Eating Disorder

Let’s be clear: All diets aren’t inherently bad. In fact, a 2022 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that “intention to restrict food intake and actual restriction of dietary intake are both safe and effective for weight management and promotion of good physical and mental health in those without significant risks for the development of eating disorders.” 

The study authors even theorize that “weight-loss interventions that promote healthy weight loss but not negative attitudes toward one’s body might result in both weight loss and reductions in eating disorder symptoms and presumably risk of developing eating disorders.” 

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This, of course, remains to be proven—and food restriction in those with EDs come with a cluster of concerning physical effects.

Sarah-Ashley Robbins, M.D., is a family medicine doctor at the Gaudiani Clinic, which gives medical care for people with eating disorders. Among the health problems she commonly sees with anorexia or restrictive eating disorder are osteoporosis (which she regularly diagnoses in teenagers and people in their 20s), low-resting heart rate (the body’s way of preserving energy), chronic coldness, constant tiredness, and frequent gastrointestinal issues. Additionally, people who menstruate can lose their period. 

Most seriously, eating disorders are linked to death, both because the body breaks down and because the person can, too, leading to suicide. According to the Eating Disorder Coalition, one person dies every hour as a direct result from an eating disorder. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. 

The stats are alarming. Per a 2019 study published in BMC Medicine, people with lifetime eating disorders are five to six times more likely to attempt suicide than those without an ED. (The highest rate was found in those with a subtype of anorexia that involves binging and purging.) According to another study, a third to a fourth of people with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa have attempted suicide. And, when compared to others of their same gender and ages, those with anorexia are 18 times more likely to die by suicide; those with bulimia, seven times more likely.

A June 2020 report from Deloitte, AED (Academy for Eating Disorders), and STRIPED (Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders) found that around 20 percent of people who experience anorexia nervosa die by suicide.

Eating disorders, as we know, are caused by a complex mix of genes and environmental factors. Dieting alone doesn’t cause an ED, but it can push people who already have body image or eating issues into worrisome patterns. “Not all people that diet go on to have an eating disorder,” says Natalie Boero, Ph.D., associate professor in the department of sociology at San Jose State University, “but most EDs started with a diet.”

Danielle Catton, a 35-year-old digital content creator in Ontario with a history of disordered eating, can hardly remember a time when she wasn’t on a diet. “I was 11 or 12 on a camping trip and eating only salad because I felt like I had to lose weight,” she says. When that didn’t work, she started the Atkins diet at age 13. 

Her desire to lose weight morphed into an eating disorder by high school, when she had aspirations of being on Canadian Idol and felt she had to be skinny to succeed as a singer. “Every January 1 it was like, Okay, I’m going to do this. I’m going to start this diet and lose weight,” she says. “I’d start excessively exercising and restricting my diet. Everyone else was doing it, too, so it was normalized.”

But dieting wasn’t getting the job done, so she started binging and purging to lose weight, receiving positive attention—including from boys for the first time—which fueled her disordered eating behavior. 

Catton is hardly the only one for whom dieting isn’t effective. A 2020 study published in BMJ looked at more than 21,000 people on 14 “named” diets and found that the Atkins diet—the one Catton tried at age 13— resulted in the highest weight loss, of 12 pounds. But a year later, the weight loss and improvement in cardiovascular risk from all the diets was, essentially, gone. 

In other stats from Berkeley, 65 percent of dieters return to their pre-diet weight within three years, and only 5 percent of people who drop pounds on a restrictive diet (such as those that cut out foods and categories) keep them off. In fact, one of the leading obstacles as to why people don’t stick to diet resolutions, per Statista, is “the changes are very restrictive” and, further down on the list but not insignificant, “The changes are consuming my thoughts.”

“I don’t think we’re trying to do what we say we’re trying to do [in making people healthier],” she goes on. “I think we’re trying to individualize the marginalization of large swathes of society, and there is a multibillion-dollar industry out there profiting from that.”

When Weight Loss Hides in the Shadow of Wellness

When researching her book, Killer Fat: Media, Medicine and Morals in the American Obesity Epidemic, Dr. Boero uncovered what she calls “the masking phenomenon of health.” She believes that, because as a society it’s often considered “vain, shallow, or not feminist” to care about looks, health becomes “a secondary or masking phenomenon” for things like weight loss. 

The codewords are starting to show up everywhere. A YouGov poll, for example, found that of the 37 percent of Americans who made 2023 resolutions, the top one (at 20 percent) is improving physical health. Coming in at #3, #4, and #6: exercising more, eating healthier, losing weight. Isn’t this all pretty much weight loss in disguise?

Dr. Anderson believes, as New Year’s resolutions go, “health” can indeed be a euphemism for “dieting.” If you sort by gender the YouGov poll participants who put physical health at the top of their resolutions, women were more likely to list those weight-related goals: eating healthier (23 percent), exercising more (23 percent), and losing weight (21 percent).

“My hatred of ‘New Year, New You’ messaging around weight and health is that it only reinforces, among literally every human on the planet, that your weight is a result of you not going to the gym more regularly,” says Dr. Christofides.

“In a culture that worships thinness, where we’re told that we can achieve anything and everything that we want as long as we’re in a thin body,” says Katherine Metzelaar, R.D., cofounder and CEO of Brave Space Nutrition, which specializes in helping people struggling with disordered eating. It’s tricky for people to put their true intentions into words, she says. When someone tells her they want to “eat healthier and exercise more,” her immediate questions are: What are the things that are contributing to this desire? What do you hope to feel or experience by doing this? How do you define “healthy eating?”

Diet companies have picked up on this type of sentiment, says Dr. Boero, shifting their marketing to focus on health and wellness. “Even when fundamentally the plan hasn’t changed that much, health is absorbed as a way to pitch it,” she says.

Though sometimes well-intentioned, this can be dangerous for those with a history of disordered eating. “Dieting doesn’t have a capital D anymore. Now it’s, Oh no, we’re a lifestyle program or a wellness culture, which makes it sneaky and especially difficult for people in ED recovery, because it’s harder to spot,” says Metzelaar.

In fact, one reason some of her ED patients don’t visit in January is because they’ve fallen for such marketing. “They’ve engaged in some type of program that promises them it isn’t a diet,” she says. “But they get to a point where said program sends them back into disordered eating cycles.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s because there’s a pretty decent chance you’ve heard at least half a dozen people tell you that they’re cutting out sugar, carbs, or doing Whole30 in the name of health. “There has been this shift to ‘detoxing,’ and removing ‘bad’ things,” says Dr. Anderson. “So now foods have been given moral qualities: Some foods are ‘good’ and some are ‘bad.’” This thinking, she explains, has led to the rise of orthorexia, or an obsession with healthy eating.

It’s something Hannah Belvo, a 29-year-old emergency room technician, can relate to. “Growing up, every January, my dad always set health-related resolutions and he would want my sister and I to do,” she says. “So every year I would think about what goals I could set to change my entire body by the end of the year.” Often, this involved excessively working out and restricting food. 

The behavior continued in college, where Hannah played softball and wanted to be the best athlete she could. “I was working out a lot, which my teammates motivated me to do, and I started losing weight. I wasn’t ever overweight, but I liked the changes I was seeing in my body and it [morphed] into an obsession,” she says. The immense stress of college piled on. “The one thing I could control was my eating, and it slowly started taking over my entire life.”

The type of January weight loss pressure Belvo experienced doesn’t affect only those with a clinical eating disorder diagnosis. “Unfortunately, many people struggle to some degree at some point in their lives with their relationship with food or body image,” says psychologist Rachel Goldman, Ph.D., clinical assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. who focuses on health behavior change, disordered eating, and eating behaviors. 

Whether you have a history of disordered eating or not, “New Year’s resolutions surrounding weight loss send the message that we have to change, and that something isn’t right,” she says. “It’s damaging regardless of someone’s eating behaviors, body image, or self-confidence.”

But why do we keep coming back to dieting when we know it’s not sustainable? Dr. Goldman believes it’s the lure of the quick fix. Dr. Gil agrees, adding that, coupled with powerful advertisements—often including people or celebrities we can relate to—it’s hard to resist.

To be fair, there are plenty of people pushing back on the idea that a thin body is an ideal one and celebrating bodies of all shapes, sizes, and abilities. And yet, despite a decade of body acceptance in the mainstream zeitgeist, rates of eating disorders not only haven’t slowed, they’ve increased. One theory? The larger bodies now being shown as beautiful have a certain look to them, says Dr. Anderson—one that can be just as hard to achieve as a thin silhouette. 

Social media doesn’t get a pass here, either. Recent research from the Wall Street Journal found that TikTok pushes thousands of how-to videos about getting by while eating only 300 calories a day and hiding disordered eating behavior from others.

The Social Media Comparison Trap, Going Strong

In the early aughts, women’s narrow beauty views were often blamed on TV and magazine images. Per a 2004 study, 69 percent of teen girls said that magazine photos of thin women influenced their version of an “ideal” body, and a 2007 study linked increased consumption of articles about weight loss and diets with a higher likelihood of engaging in unhealthy eating behaviors. Yet another study, in a 2005 issue of Body Image, found an increase in body dissatisfaction in many college women after they watched “thin and beautiful” images in mini movie clips.

But if magazines were a megaphone for anti-obesity messages, social media is an IV straight to the brain. There are 1.4 million Instagram posts using #newyearnewyou, 183.9 million TikTok views of the hashtag, and 4.1 billion Tok views of #newyearnewme. “Before, people used to idolize celebrities in magazines and on TV, which led to unhealthy behaviors,” says Dr. Goldman. “But now we’re bombarded even more because of social media. And it’s not just celebrities people are comparing themselves to now, but influencers too.”

One problem with wellness influencers, says Kylie Mojaddidi, a 34-year-old content creator who struggled with bulimia in the past, is that the vast majority are women who are thin. It’s not just her opinion: One 2019 study demonstrated that social media heavily promotes the thin-ideal, which can lead to unhealthy behaviors and body dissatisfaction. 

“People on social media who are sharing what a day of eating looks like for them or showing their clean eating diet meals can lead to self-comparison—it’s human nature to compare,” Dr. Goldman says. And if you think you aren’t as thin, strong, or fill-in-the-blank as the influencer you’re watching eat a forkful of quinoa, it can make you like crap, she says.

The average person spends two and a half hours a day on social media, time that Dr. Goldman firmly believes is connected to disordered eating behavior. Research supports her. One study identified a strong connection between social media use and healthy eating concerns in young adults. 

As you can imagine—and have possibly experienced first-hand—the twisted thinking that thinness-is-virtuousness is far from mentally healthy. “There’s a misconception that so many people have, which is that to lose weight or to be healthy you have to have really strong willpower or be restrictive,” says Dr. Goldman. This all-or-nothing thinking is exactly what can lead to or encourage disordered eating behaviors. 

For example, “someone feels virtuous when they are able to give up sugar,” says Dr. Anderson. This is particularly potent right after the holidays, when many have “indulged”—leading them, by the time January rolls around, to set (you guessed it) “New Year, New You” weight loss goals. 

New Year, New Changes—The Good Kind

Yes, we’re still getting email offers from a certain weight-loss company suggesting easier weight loss has finally given us a reason to be happy. 

But we’re also seeing slivers of hope that, slowly, things may be moving in a more body-accepting, less ED-triggering direction.

In a Forbes Health/OnePoll survey of 1,005 U.S. adults (yes, there are dozens of resolution polls—take your pick), the top New Year’s resolution was not improved diet, improved fitness, or losing weight. It was improved mental health. “The survey findings,” write the editors at Forbes, “suggest a cultural shift in what Americans value when it comes to wellness, pushing back against the idea that health is measured simply by the number on the scale.” 

Likewise, InStyle recently proclaimed: “Less dieting, more therapy.” Even Lands’ End name-checked “New Year, New You,” calling it “a way to make you buy a health club membership,” and instead suggesting you walk around your neighborhood for 20 minutes three times a week for free. 

In December 2022, the New York City office of global PR firm Ketchum held an internal panel on the very topic of “why we need to retire the New Year, New You narrative in food and wellness communications.” Hosted by Jaime Schwartz Cohen, R.D., SVP, director of nutrition at Ketchum, the panel brought together psychologist Dr. Goldman, weight bias researcher Dr. Dhurandher, and two dietitians to teach the Ketchum team, as Schwartz says, how to “responsibly and effectively communicate science so that we can help create change.” 

And last year, People Editor-in-Chief Wendy Naugle announced that the brand’s two-decades-old annual January “Half Their Size” issue would now be called “Beyond the Scale.” She acknowledged that although previous stories relied on lasting lifestyle changes, not fad diets, “sometimes the takeaway was that the number on the scale was what mattered most. No more.”

As Naugle tells Mental, “We all know when you step on the scale, the number can go up and down, sometimes no matter what you do. If you hitch all your goals to that number, it can set you up for failure.” What People’s transformations will focus on now?  What she calls “meaningful wins.”

As an example, Naugle cites Tamara Walcott, a 39-year-old mom who set a world record in weightlifting. Click to the story, and you’ll still see before and after photos and her weight loss in big type. But go beyond the headline, and the vibe is certainly that of holistic triumph.

Pay close attention, and you’ll find that Walcott, minus 140 pounds lost, currently weighs 275. Which begs the question: Would her BMI—knowing all the faults of that outdated measurement tool—put her in an “obese” category, classified as unhealthy when she is, in fact, one of the strongest women in the world, built of pure muscle?

As Dr. Christofides and so many others keep shouting into the void, health isn’t about weight. Or size. It’s the excess adiposity—that unhealthy fat, which shows up in very specific spots—that can cause health problems. Speaking of fat, Walcott herself says she “never called it weight loss—I call it fat loss.”

Today, Mental contributor Devash seems less concerned with what her scale says than those around her do. “How you get treated as a fat person is the worst part of being fat,” she says. “It’s the look that your plane seatmate gives you when your hips touch them because the seats are too small. It’s your friend at brunch looking at your plate of pancakes and saying, You’re not gonna eat all that, are you? It’s my mom harping: It goes right to the hips.”

After a lifetime of disordered eating, Devash is now taking anti-obesity messaging to task. Starting with doctors who, she says, use lose-weight directives as a catchall. “For the past few years I’ve been responding with, Great advice. But until then, what can I do to improve the situation besides weight loss since that will take a while?” she says. “I’m actually going to stop saying that and amp it up to, Great advice. Now what would you tell a thin person?”

She’ll also be trying to stop losing weight just for the sake of it—and finally end her cycle of weight cycling. “To be honest, lifting weights and eating salad is not my lifestyle,” she says. “I think it’s more important for me to focus on getting in better cardio health and getting stronger than to focus on a number.”

It’s a whole new her, albeit not the kind of before-and-after transformation that lands a person an influencer contract. But times, they are a-changing. 

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