Is it ever OK to have flab? It’s a question that haunts Alex Light, 38-year-old influencer, best-selling author and an original trailblazer of the body positive movement as she looks at a world in which thin is heavily back in.

Call them what you like, but the arrival of the GLP-1 fat jabs has all but killed the campaign she and others fronted for what now seems like the briefest of windows from about 2019 until about 2022.

Back then model Tess Holliday, a proud size 26, appeared on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine. In 2020, some 86 plus-size models appeared on catwalks during the main fashion weeks – a tiny fraction of the total number of models who walked, but still, progress.

At 22 stone, pop star Lizzo was the poster girl and Light was sharing empowering content on social media, debunking the belief among girls and women that ‘you’ll be happier when you’re thinner’. It was a lucrative message back then winning Light tens of thousands of pounds in sponsorship deals, even her own swimwear line.

When her first book, the bestselling You Are Not A Before Picture, came out in the summer of 2022, Light bravely turned off all filters on her own Instagram feed exposing the way filters and camera angles deceive the viewer. It was a bold move that won the approval of hundreds of thousands more followers for her.

For a moment, Lizzo, Light and others like them were winning what the body positivity movement undoubtedly saw as a battle for women’s hearts and minds.

And then, in late 2022, along came GLP-1s.

Look at catwalks today. Across this year’s New York, London, Milan and Paris fashion weeks, only 0.4 per cent of looks were UK size 18 and above, down from nearly eight times that back in 2022. And the stats for so-called ‘midsizers’ – UK size 10-16 – aren’t much better, at 2.4 per cent of runway girls, meaning that a shocking 97 per cent of models used were a skeletal UK size 4 to UK size 8.

Meanwhile, celebrities on red carpets are shrinking before our eyes – witness the diminishing Kardashians and actresses Mindy Kaling and Demi Moore. Even Lizzo, the one-time plus sized poster girl has shrunk beyond recognition (and has has admitted using the jabs.)

Light is not a fan. ‘Putting aside the controversies and the side effects,’ she tells me, ‘the true danger I see in GLP-1s is that they have moralised the issue of beauty and started to make being thin feel compulsory.

Blonde, clear-skinned and undeniably gorgeous, over the years Alex Light has been both very slim and very curvy 

‘There is no longer just an aspiration to be thin, but an expectation. “Why are you not thin when you so easily could be? When you know life is better for those who are thin, why wouldn’t you choose to be thin?”

‘By the time the GLP-1s are a pill and out of patent in 2032, and therefore much cheaper, I think the pressure will be on for every woman to carry them in her handbag alongside her aspirin and lip balm.’

Not being thin will eventually be the exception.

It’s a dystopian vision worthy of Brave New World. Fatness will be seen as even more of a moral failing than it is now. If you’ve got curves, you’ll be the odd one out.

Which is why Light is more determined than ever to wave the flag for women’s body diversity and to share her own life as a woman not in a size 8 dress.

Her latest book The Price of Pretty is both a cautionary tale and a call to arms – to her 1.3million followers on TikTok, 658,000 on Instagram.

I recognise in Alex Light a kindred spirit. I’m a size 18 and too much of my time during my first five decades was spent worrying about it. Those two brief years of body positivity were also a heady moment for me; I remember being beyond excited to try on the Victoria Beckham ‘plus size’ capsule range (well, 16-18 but it was a start), which she publicised in the summer of 2022 (only to smell a tokenistic rat when I realised that just a handful of each design had actually been made in those sizes).

So when I turn up at her sunny house in Sevenoaks, Kent, I am excited to meet someone who has had similar body struggles but who refuses to give up.

She gives me a plate of artisanal lemon biscuits with my coffee, and I note they stay uneaten while she tells me about the passage in her new book where she describes her father calling her ‘pretty but plump’. She grew up with four sisters, all of whom were monitored by the wider family, with each sister being congratulated when they went on a new diet and lost weight. It’s a familiar tale for me and so many other women in both our generations, 20 years apart.

Blonde, clear-skinned and undeniably gorgeous, over the years she has been both very slim and very curvy. She will never specify either her weight or sizes at these times, saying that numbers trigger both trolling and comparisons, but her Instagram feed makes her lived experience very vivid, showing her both painfully thin, unhappily fat and many curves along the road in between.

And the size at which she felt her best? This was, as she wrote in a social media post only a week ago, ‘whatever size I was when I realised that the problem was never about how my body looked.’

From that moment on, her path seemed clear. She even launched her own inclusive swimwear company in 2021, Light LDN, with all sizes (from UK size 6-32) available in all styles – no ‘plus size only’ designs – all modelled happily by Light herself.

But this venture was one of the first casualties of fat jab countermovement with Light closing the label a year ago.

And I am surprised to discover that Light has had her own brush with weight loss drugs, saying in a previous interview that her doctor had offered them to her when he’d discovered her BMI was in the ‘overweight’ category, not realising she had a history of eating disorders.

Their ability to silence the food noise is tempting, she tells me now, and she readily admits that in her twenties, when her eating was at its most disordered, ‘there would have been no lengths that I wouldn’t have gone to’ to take advantage of such a magic wand.

Both of us have so far resisted, however, and at the moment Alex is pregnant and glowing with her second child – though she admits she is glad both her two-year-old and the imminent arrival are boys, relieved she won’t have to parent a girl.

‘I know that men and boys are increasingly being pulled into the horrible world of body dysmorphia – why wouldn’t a diet industry want to double its market? – but I still think girls have it hardest, conditioned from all sides to believe that there could always be a better, thinner version of themselves.’

She would know. For the first three decades of her life, thin was all she ever wanted to be.

While working for glossy magazines, Alex feels that she lost most of her twenties to anorexia and bulimia

Brought up in the Wirral, she was the eldest of the five sisters, growing up in a family and a social context which, she says, divided the world into ‘plump imperfect’ and ‘thin perfect’.

‘By the age of nine, I was on my first diet and the others soon followed: even my petite sister went on to struggle with weight issues when she went through adolescence.’

An eating disorder was perhaps inevitable and not helped by her decision to work for glossy magazines. Dealing on a daily basis with slender ‘perfect’ models and celebrities, she lost most of her twenties to anorexia and bulimia.

‘I was surrounded by the pressures of thinness, always thinking that I only stood a chance of fitting in if I got to that magic point of being thin.

‘Anorexia became my control. Losing weight was like a kind of euphoria,’ she tells me. ‘I was in therapy for 15 years, which saved me because I realised that I had set body perfection as the end goal, but those goal posts were never going to stop moving, either because I was never going to be satisfied with how I looked, or because society was constantly redefining that ideal of beauty.

‘From about 2020 to 2022, we were starting to see a real change in the way ‘non-thin’ women’s bodies were accepted by the mainstream.

‘You saw girls who looked like us on the catwalk, on the cover of Vogue, on advertising billboards, showing off their curves and their cellulite in a really quite radical statement of resistance. Everyone even seemed to think they looked good.

‘It felt like we were all finally exhaling, releasing a lifetime’s worth of suffocating pressure to be perfect. And then, just like that, it was over.’

The twin forces of negative backlash and the gloves-off-let’s-just-get-thin ambush by the GLP-1s are described compellingly by Light in her new book, as she writes about how the forces of Big Pharma and Big Tech have conspired to change – and damage – women’s body image once again.

‘Even worse, AI filters are now presenting body and facial perfection as a ‘reality’, making us think the only way to achieve that perfect smoothness of face is to have ever-increasing amounts of Botox and other tweakments…

‘That was how The Price of Pretty came about. Thinness and perfection are now the only topics on the table. Brands no longer seem to care about body or age diversity. They’ve reverted straight back to using size 4/6/8 models with youthful perfect faces. Already thin celebrities have become thinner than ever and what plus-size representation we had on social media has dwindled.’

Worse, she says, warming to the theme: ‘It is now an open secret that thin, ‘beautiful’ women stand a better chance of being promoted at work; that women who do not fall in with thinness are seen as lazy and undisciplined.’

‘We don’t yet know the long-term effects of weight loss drugs but we do know that there is a multi-billion dollar weight loss industry invested in keeping women using them, just like they were trapped into dieting for a hundred years before that, keeping them on that quest for the perfect figure, threatened by the weight gain consequences of stopping.

‘Once we just had to cope with TV and magazines expounding body perfection. Now the speed and all-pervasiveness of technology means we have something in our hands 24 hours a day, chattering at us, shaming us, telling us we should do more, do better, to make ourselves over into that better version of ourselves.

‘So now we’ve got a situation where one in two girls hate their body by the age of 13. Eating disorder admissions are through the roof.’

We both agree that there’s never been a more urgent time to win this battle but, why, I wonder, do we do this to ourselves? For all her talk of self-empowerment, it is still women who populate the #SkinnyTok reels that promote unhealthy body sizes on social media.

‘I went to hell and back in my first 30 years and the first time I knew peace was when I escaped the cage of body dissatisfaction’

The celebrities who expose bony shoulders and stick-thin thighs are female. Fat jab influencers pushing GLP-1s as a means not of curing type 2 diabetes but slipping into a size 6 dress? They are women not men.

Alex smiles slightly bitterly and shakes her head.

‘Those women are merely participating in a system they didn’t build. The patriarchy is, so to speak, outsourcing the haters.

‘Viral trends like #SkinnyTok are put out by women, but the framework behind ‘Skinny’ being the goal is a framework society has been building for hundreds of years.

‘It suits society, you see, to keep women obsessed with their appearance,’ she goes on, and I can see the light in her eyes harden to a martial gleam.

‘Men soon realised that if they constructed a system in which women were prized for their beauty above anything else, then they could be stopped from trying to take power. They would be distracted by the need to pander to that beauty and the maintenance of it.’

I remind her she has just told me her husband Dave – who works in the sports industry – has never cared what body shape she’s been. He has always thought her beautiful, three spare tyres or none.

She laughs. Clearly she was never going to marry a man who wanted a Tradwife, one of those regressive home-maker types, who post endless reels of themselves cooking for their tribes of children while wearing glossy frocks and aprons tightly belted around tiny waists.

‘I went to hell and back in my first 30 years and the first time I knew peace was when I escaped the cage of body dissatisfaction,’ she reminds me.

‘The thing is, how we look is the least interesting thing about us and if I can get that message through to just one person, and it helps them, then the uphill battle is worth it and more.’

I admire her passion. But I can’t help thinking of her nostalgia for that moment of body positivity, when the talk was of the tide turning for potentially millions of women.

Her more modest ambitions for The Price of Pretty, and the speed with which body positivity crumbled in the face of an ‘easy fix’ like Ozempic doesn’t bode well. When losing weight is no longer a struggle, it seems most are willing to swap sides in an instant.

As I leave her house in Kent, Alex packs up half the untouched lemon biscuits to take with me. I am still so fired up by her brave and valiant words that I tuck into them on the train back to London. Then notice that I am the only woman eating.

The Price of Pretty by Alex Light is published by HQ and is available to buy now.