Thinness has always been sold. For most of the last century, the vehicle was advertising — billboards, fashion campaigns, magazine covers, the consistent visual message that a slim body is a better body. What has changed is the delivery mechanism. It is now, increasingly, a prescription.

A wedding dress gets ordered five to nine months before anyone wears it, and it's standard practice in bridal shops to order a size down as "motivation". Nobody hides this: sales assistants suggest it, wedding forums recommend it, and the dress arrives built to be taken in, not let out, because the whole system assumes the bride's body will have shrunk to fit the size on the label by the time she walks in for her first fitting.

I opened Instagram to check one message. That's it. Quick task; in and out. The second I opened the app, the first thing on my feed, before a single post from a single person I actually follow, was an ad for weight loss medication. Now in pill form!