Therapist Asks Who Women 'Want To Be Skinny For'—Her Theory Is Eye-Opening

Newsweek

09-05-2025

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In a moment of candid reflection that she did not expect to go viral, therapist Lucie Vallée, who herself had once struggled with body image issues, turned her phone camera on, hit record, and asked other women online: "Who are you trying to be skinny for?"
She told Newsweek that her prompt, which she shared to Instagram on April 25, was less of a challenge and more of an invitation—to reexamine long-held beliefs about beauty, value, and the social currency of being thin.
Vallée, a 31-year-old French gestalt therapist based in Berlin, Germany specializes in helping clients navigate body image issues and eating disorders. Her spontaneous video—viewed more than 90,000 times at the time of writing—is what has brought her voice into a much larger conversation. Speaking plainly into the lens, she dismantled the idea that thinness is may be universally admired, or even deeply noticed by most people.
"The only people who care about how skinny you are," she said in the video, "are 1. [Judgmental] women that are also in the skinny competition and 2. Very specific [types] of men, the kind of men that you don't really want to be with because if they're attracted specifically to skinny women that says something really strong—it says they like women that make themselves smaller."
Her remarks landed with a cultural thud—prompting an outpouring of both gratitude and frustration on a platform where content under hashtags like #bodygoals and #whatIeatinaday continues to trend.
"This particular post was spontaneous—simply sharing thoughts I had in that moment," the therapist told Newsweek. "That day while scrolling, I kept seeing videos with an intense skinny focus, promoting the idea that being skinny is incredibly important, with hooks like 'pretty privilege is real,' 'how to get your summer body,' or 'skinny is a decision.'"
From left: Lucie Vallée speaks to her followers in an Instagram video; and poses for a photo at home.
From left: Lucie Vallée speaks to her followers in an Instagram video; and poses for a photo at home.
@fightthiswithlucie
From her professional vantage point, Vallée sees the lasting effects of beauty culture's pressures every single day.
"The pressure to conform to unrealistic beauty standards creates a persistent background threat to women's sense of safety and worth," she said. "This generates symptoms such as constant hypervigilance, disconnection from one's body, feelings of unworthiness, isolation, anxiety, and shame."
The End of Body Positivity
Still, that cultural pressure has not suddenly abated. In fact, many believe it is intensifying due to a number of factors.
The body positivity movement of the mid-2010s, which championed self-acceptance at any size, is now competing with the return of so-called "heroin chic"—a hyper-thin aesthetic often seen on runways and in celebrity circles.
Social media platforms have fueled the shift, glamorizing the ballet or Pilates body, and flooding feeds with weight-loss journeys, sometimes centered on rapid transformations or medically assisted methods like Ozempic.
Vallée's post struck a chord because it acknowledged that despite these louder messages, the reality may be far more complicated.
"I used to be very deep in the skinny obsession my whole life," she said in the video. "I used to think that everyone was as obsessed as I was with being skinny...But it turns out that most people don't care about this stuff."
The reaction to her personal take was far from unanimous.
"Some people clearly embraced the message," Vallée said. "I received DMs expressing how much they appreciated this perspective, how healing it was for them, and how they needed to hear more of that."
Others pushed back, accusing her of minimizing the importance of one's weight, which she said reveals a "fundamental confusion."
"Some had a completely different reaction, insisting that being skinny is actually very important and that I was wrong to suggest otherwise," she added.
One commenter had responded: "I care if I am skinny because feeling heavy, lethargic, lazy [and] having body of inflammation isn't normal...Being skinny feels lighter, when your gut is healthy...You feel happier, inspired [and] everything else feels good...So it's not just about being skinny...It's about your gut health, it's about living a healthy life, it's about being fit [and] strong...Because if your body doesn't feel good, then you can't enjoy anything in life."
Vallée sees this as a key misunderstanding, where the cultural prominence of the skinny aesthetic had been conflated with the benefits of being a healthy weight relative to your individual size, age and backstory.
"There's a clear confusion between being skinny and being healthy," she said, reflecting on this particular comment. "For many #Skinnytok influencers, 'skinny' seems to mean being significantly underweight, having a body that looks like the heroin chic ideal."
She emphasized that bodies can be healthy and strong at all different sizes, and that the pursuit of extreme thinness often requires severe dietary restrictions that can harm both an individual's mental and physical health.
"While some are naturally built with a body like that, for most of us, achieving that silhouette would demand severe restrictions that often take a toll on our health," she said,
Hannah Holmes, a licensed psychologist based in North Carolina, agreed that the people around us are often not as bothered by our or even their own size as people navigating body image issues imagine.
However, Holmes, who frequently supports patients with body image concerns, told Newsweek that people can certainly make negative judgments about others' looks, including their weight.
"I completely agree that women are harmed by this pressure to conform to unrealistic beauty standards," the psychologist said. "For that reason, one of my goals with clients who are trying to develop healthier body image is to help them navigate that reality in a healthy way, including challenging their own weight biases, disentangling their self-worth from others' opinions and tolerating the uncertainty of not knowing what others might think of them."
Despite Vallée's argument that most people are not fixated on thinness, she concedes that society as a whole continues to favor and better accommodate slim individuals as they fall within the current beauty standards of what is conventionally attractive.
This is precisely the paradox Vallée wants to expose through her work, because the weight of these expectations is often institutional, systemic, and pervasive. The millennial therapist aims to utilize her online presence to equip her audience with tools to resist these messages.
"I began sharing my knowledge about two years ago with a clear mission," she said. "[To] give detailed insights on how beauty culture functions as a chronic stressor and a trauma-creating system."
Though she has no intention of stepping away from the conversation, Vallée said the post's reaction revealed how deeply entrenched these beliefs remain.
"I did not expect my post to be so divisive," she said.
Still, she is determined to keep speaking to those who need a reminder that they are already enough, no matter their size.
She added: "There is no need to be that thin to have a body that is healthy, that feels good, and that supports us in fully enjoying life."
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