Dr Max Pemberton: Thigh gaps aren’t normal nor healthy!
In more than a decade of running NHS eating disorder clinics, Dr Max Pemberton witnessed firsthand the damaging and heart-breaking effects of body dysmorphia, and how it can wreck relationships with family and friends, relationships with food, eating and exercise, and cause profound damage to an individual’s sense of self-esteem.
Of all the issues he tried to help overcome, the desire of young women to achieve a “thigh gap” – a space between a person’s inner thighs when standing with their feet together that has been popularised on social media as a shorthand signal of slimness – was the one that he encountered the most and caused him the greatest amount of frustration.
Why? Because a thigh gap is only possible through a genetic predisposition, which you can do nothing about, or through reducing body-fat levels to such an extent that it poses immediate and long-term health risks.
In our exclusive interview, Dr Pemberton details his experience of treating patients with extreme forms of body dysmorphia, and outlines his growing concerns that nobody – not him, nor you or me – are immune from suffering body image issues and the accompanying low self-esteem from the constant bombardment of surgery-altered and drug and anabolic steroid-enhanced bodies on TV shows like Love Island and social media platforms including Instagram and TikTok.
