Why Does Getting Sober Equal Getting Skinny?
When recovery gets measured by shrinkage instead of freedom.
With Dry January now behind us, the annual wave of sobriety before-and-after content is still in full effect, encouraging others to join the ranks of non-drinking, to experience the benefits in full (“jump in, the water’s fine!”).
Some are focused on mental clarity and emotional healing. Others are focused on the physical glow-up.
You know the ones: a side-by-side collage, a caption about “choosing me,” and a transformation so huge you can’t help but feel inspired. The skin glows. The eyes sparkle. Maybe the abs appear. The comments section becomes a deserved standing ovation.
I’m not here to hate on anyone’s joy or progress. If sobriety helped you lose weight and you feel good in your health and body, I’m genuinely glad. Empowering fitness wins are in NO way wrong to celebrate: feeling better, stronger, and healthier.
But as a sober person, I need to ask something that feels urgent, in a culture that acts like thinness is the ultimate proof that you’ve done life “right.”
Why does getting sober need to equal getting skinny?
WHY is that the proof we’re always expected to provide?
The skinny promise is not universal.
Alcohol is a concentrated sugar ethanol and yes, cutting it out can mean you stop drinking half your daily calories. A lot of people lose weight. That’s real.
But sobriety isn’t a weight-loss program. It’s a life raft.
And for some of us, the body doesn’t shrink when we get sober. It returns. It rebuilds. It stabilizes. It comes back online.
I got sober almost two years ago.
And since then, I’ve gained about thirty pounds.
Not because sobriety “didn’t work.” Not because I’m doing it wrong. Not because I’ve “let myself go.” But because my life changed in ways that weren’t possible to capture on camera — and my body responded like a body.
Some people gain weight in recovery because they’re finally eating full meals every day. Because they can keep food down. Because they’re sleeping more than four hours on the weekends after “fun” binges. Because their nervous system isn’t in a constant state of sirens. Because they’re not living on adrenaline and shame and chaos.
The body doesn’t just forget alcohol the moment the buzz wears off.
Even three drinks — what plenty of people would call “normal,” even “responsible” — can take days to truly shake out of your system in terms of hormones, sleep, inflammation, cortisol. It’s not just about how quickly your liver metabolizes ethanol. It’s about how long it takes your body to re-regulate once the alcohol is gone.
When you’re drinking regularly, even in what people call “moderation,” you’re constantly nudging your body out of baseline. Then wondering why you feel anxious. Why you’re hungry at 10 p.m. Why your cravings feel feral. Why your sleep feels fake. Why your skin is weird. Why you can’t lose weight, or why your body seems confused.
In recovery, you stop poking the bear.
You finally let your body stabilize.
And, weight can actually go up. Because your system isn’t riding the roller coaster anymore. Because your hunger cues return. Because deep sleep comes back online. Because your hormones stop being thrown into mild chaos every weekend.
Sometimes the “drunk body” wasn’t the person’s natural body at all. It was an emergency version. A survival version.
My skinny drinking days
As a heavy drinker, I was unhealthily skinny. Not in an eating-disorder way, but in a depleted way. A weak way. A “my body is not receiving what it needs” way.
But if you looked at my photos from that time?
I could sell you a story.
Gym mirror pics. Running in the morning, even after a night where I didn’t even remember driving home. Smoothies. “Sparkly” eyes. Clear skin.
I could pose as perfectly adjusted and fine. Lighting and angles can make you sell any story you want to, really.
Also, when I was drinking — and for a while after I got sober — I was sneakily smoking a nicotine pen. It helped me quit; like an emergency exit slide that gets you off a burning airplane. It was 1000% a crutch that helped me early on.
Obvi, nicotine suppresses appetite. So when I quit drinking and quit nicotine (a few weeks apart), a truer weight came up.
Sobriety is not a brand deal.
If you follow sobriety content online, you learn fast what people reward.
They reward shrinkage.
They reward the visible “upgrade.”
They reward the kind of recovery that looks like a commercial: clean kitchen, cute workout set, inspirational quote, and a waistline that tells the audience: See? If you do what I did, you’ll be rewarded with thinness.
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And that’s where it starts to feel… spiritually rotten to me.
Because I support the fully-embodied liberation of women — AND because I reject fascism.
Thinness often becomes more culturally enforced during times of social control.
The fixation on thinness lately isn’t neutral. It’s not just “health.” It’s a hierarchy. It’s perniciously political. It is a moral system. It teaches people — especially women — that the ultimate evidence of being “good” is being smaller.
Thankfully, many people are blatantly speaking out on this — and calling it what it is. Leslie Vargas wrote an incredible AFROPUNK op-ed last year, “The People’s Ozempic: Thinness, White Supremacy, and Fascism,” specifically about how this impacts Black women — but naming what so many of us, regardless, feel in our bodies and struggle to articulate: thinness isn’t merely a preference.
Thinness has been built into the architecture of white supremacy — a physical marker of “purity,” “discipline,” “control,” and moral superiority.
That, and more, is why this moment we’re living in (the if you’re good you’ll get smaller moment) feels so alarming.
Because fascism doesn’t only show up in laws and flags and violence. It shows up in what bodies are allowed to take up space. It thrives on uniformity and policing. It demands conformity, then punishes anyone who refuses it. Vargas says it plainly: fatphobia aligns seamlessly with fascist ideology by upholding rigid standards of which bodies deserve full humanity.
So, it begs the question: If sobriety becomes just another pipeline into diet culture, what exactly are we recovering into?
What sobriety actually gives me (the receipts I trust)
Here are some of the transformations I trust more than a thigh gap:
- It helps me break maladaptive coping strategies. I can feel my feelings without negotiating with them.
- My relationships are clearer — including the ones I need to leave.
- I remember my nights, and my mornings don’t begin with bargaining.
- It’s breaking generational cycles in my family around alcohol.
- It keeps power in my own hands and builds real self-confidence (not liquid courage).
- It improves my sleep and reduces the long tail of anxiety drinking gave me (weeklong, monthlong).
- It helps me stop hurting my body and rejecting what it asks from me.
- It shows me how much time I used to lose — and giving it back.
- It’s proof that I can create joy and uninhibitedness organically.
- I can sit in discomfort longer, without running.
- It helps me build a life that doesn’t require escape.
Some of these changes are messy. Some are slow. Some make you heavier, not lighter — because you’re finally eating, resting, stabilizing, living.
And if you’re gaining weight in sobriety, you are not failing.
You might be healing.
Let’s stop treating thinness like the proof of recovery.
If you lost weight in sobriety and you’re happy, you don’t need to hide that. You’re allowed to celebrate.
But I’m begging us — culturally, collectively — to stop acting like thinness is the universal outcome and the ultimate trophy.
Because what happens to the person who gets sober and gains weight?
What happens to the person whose face is puffy for a while? Who breaks out? Who cries a lot? Who can’t run a mile confidently? Who doesn’t look like a transformation reel?
They start to wonder if sobriety “isn’t working.”
They start to wonder if they’re doing it wrong.
They start to miss the version of themselves that looked acceptable — even if that version was dying.
And that’s how we accidentally recreate the same shame that drove a lot of us to drink in the first place.
Sobriety is not about becoming conventionally hotter. (Although most people — myself included — do end up experiencing benefits that make us feel, and look, sexier after ditching booze.)
Sobriety is becoming real in the most authentic, glorious way.
And real is not always thin.
