HONEY, I SHRUNK MYSELF...

Ok guys, it’s official: everyone is skinny now. Rampantly, eerily, algorithmically skinny.

Cross the country, cross the ocean — scroll anywhere — and the formerly normal-sized women who built empires on being lovable little messes just like the rest of us now have cheekbones sharp enough to open a FedEx box. Even the men have mysteriously slimmed down and streamlined, like they’re privately prepping for a catalogue shoot we were never called for.

And the rest of us — the generational size 6s hunting for jeans on Madison Avenue, the stalwart 27-inch waists since 2004, the women who have always been solidly thin-ish without ever announcing it — are standing here at perfectly respectable body-fat levels, blinking, wondering when our quietly acceptable bodies became outdated sample sizes.

For years, the culture begged us not to diet. “Be healthy!” it said. “Strong is sexy!” Apparently strong went out with peplum tops. If I see visible quadriceps now, I assume someone either rescues people from burning buildings or simply forgot to update their settings.

Thanks to whatever the global thinness industrial complex is doing — injectables, peptides, protein, meds, air, moon cycles — there is now a uniform body shape. Not so much “thin” as sleek. The silhouette of someone who was once human and is now the icon on a unisex restroom door.

And it’s messing with us. Not the weight, exactly. The sameness.

Watching the whole culture slide into one standardized template feels like everyone selected the same character preset. I’m not even convinced the new proportions look “better.” They just look… patched. As though we all woke up in Body 4.0 — Beta.

The funniest part? No one is bragging about it. No paleo preaching, no SoulCycle revelations, no heroic 5 a.m. discipline. They just “made some small changes.” The subtext is always humble:

“I’m prioritizing longevity.”

Same, baby, same. That’s why I floss daily and spend $15 on organic blueberries. I didn’t realize I was also supposed to remove two ribs and an interior supporting wall, but absolutely — send over the checklist.

It used to be that being normal-thin was enough here. A quiet, citywide B+. You could drift through a dip-dye of neighborhoods — Nolita brunch lines, Fifth Avenue bar mitzvahs, the escalators at Bergdorf — and no one batted an eye. We were the unimpeachable average!

Now, every time you’re in a group photo with the newly aerodynamic, you think: Wait, I look like a nice upholstered chair among floor lamps. Or even better: Hmmm, is that me on the end shaped like a decorative gourd? (You’re on the end, of course.)

And don’t get me started on the faces, oh the faces — something’s happening there, too. Everyone looks smoother, lifted, lightly refracted, as though FaceTune wandered off its leash and began freelancing pro bono. In certain zip codes, the number of women who now appear ocean-polished feels like a study waiting to happen.

Look, I’m not angry. I’m… processing.

A beloved downtown comedian whose whole brand was unvarnished truth-telling now looks like a Sephora brand ambassador. An actress who once specialized in “quirky best friend” roles now more closely resembles a travel-size toothbrush. Is Lilliputian-chic the new black?

What I really miss is contrast. A visual ecosystem. The anthropology of varied silhouettes.

And yet here we mediums stand. Not spiraling, not panic-purchasing syringes, not ingesting tinctures distilled from Norwegian glaciers. Just quietly wondering whether our reasonable thighs and reliable jawlines are headed for the archives — like someday we’ll appear in a museum diorama:

“THE LAST MODERATELY SMALL WOMAN, circa 2000–??”

Children will press their sticky fingers up against the glass and whisper,“Did people really look like that? With mass? And distribution?”

All I know is this: the national BMI reset is a psychological fog. No one coordinated it — it just wafted in.

But here’s the other thing I know: even if being medium now borders on subversive, we’re the holdouts. If sameness is the trend, mediumness is the classic — steady, durable, maybe a little harder to light in group photos, but unmistakably real.

As I’ve written about everything from pandemic grocery lines to preschool admissions: it’s all material. And honestly? So is this. The cultural body rebrand is just the latest entry in our shared absurdity catalog.

So go ahead — let the national silhouette keep shrinking.

We’ll be warmer this winter.