Heroin Chic

_{Note: When reading this, please remember I am not advocating for eating disorders. I am simply exploring what truly motivates us beneath our stated reasons. Our self-narratives and conscious explanations often mask deeper, less flattering motives.}

“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” - Kate Moss

And she was right. As someone who likes to dive into every corner of the internet, I see this phrase often repeated within the eating disorder community. It states a truth that people do not want to admit. And because it is an uncomfortable truth, it gets dressed up in different language, hidden behind more palatable ideas like “self-care” and “wellness.”

This is why the entire health space is, at its core, a joke. The dieting industry, the wellness bloggers, the fitness influencers, every single piece of nutritional advice. They all exist to convince people that vanity is not the real reason anyone does anything. People will tell you they exercise to “feel good” or “live longer.” They will say they eat clean because they “care about their bodies.” They will claim that they lift weights for mental discipline. None of these reasons hold when you really challenge it.

Humans act out of vanity first. They always have and always will. Everything else is secondary.

Consider the idea of working out for “health.” Health is prioritized when it becomes a problem, which means it is functionally meaningless to most people. If you are in your twenties and relatively free of chronic illness, you do not think about health. You think about looking good. And if prioritizing health ever conflicts with looking good, vanity always wins.

If the healthiest body type for you involved being obese and grotesque, you would not pursue it. If the most efficient way to live to 100 years old meant gaining 100 pounds, sagging in inconvenient places, and becoming invisible in a room, no one would do it. The appeal of health is only ever in its aesthetic outcomes. Nobody wants to be healthy if it makes them ugly.

The proof of this is everywhere. People who go to the gym regularly often follow routines that optimize for looks. You really think the girls doing ass workout five times a week are there for their health? They are doing it because they want a body that is seen as desirable. And they want nothing more to be desired.

And the men are no different. They all know why they’re in the gym. To get pussy. Simple.

The most honest people in this equation are the ones with eating disorders. They have stripped away all the justifications and cut straight to the core desire: to be thin. To be hot. Not to be “healthy.” Not to be “strong.” Just to be looked at and deemed desirable. They have reached the answer to what everyone else pretends is not true.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world makes elaborate narratives to avoid admitting this. The wellness industry is a trillion-dollar system built on the need to be attractive while pretending that isn’t the goal. The reason this industry thrives is because people want to believe they are better than their vanity, when really they are completely ruled by it.

I want you to ask yourself this: if exercise made you gain fifty pounds of unflattering, unshapely fat, would you still do it? If a diet made you healthy, but disgustingly ugly, would you still follow it?

You wouldn’t. Nobody would. Because none of this has ever been about health. It has only ever been about being seen, being desired, or at the very least, not being ignored.

So much of what people do is driven by this invisible force of vanity. It dictates who gets treated well, who gets opportunities, who is allowed to take up space. But acknowledging this openly is still frowned upon. You know why? Because it makes people feel ugly.

Keyword: ugly.

They will go to great lengths to insist their choices are about something deeper, something more meaningful. When you strip it all down, you see the truth.

Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. It is not just a statement about weight. It is a not just statement about liking what you see in the mirror. It is about power. It is about the very core of what drives human beings. And yes, human motivation is rarely singular, but we all know what sits at the top of the pyramid. No matter how much you try to convince yourself otherwise.

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