Latest news with #SkinnyTok
Hindustan Times
18 hours ago
- Health
- Hindustan Times
#SkinnyTok banned: A look a viral weight loss hacks on TikTok and why you should avoid them
Scrolling through social media quite often lands users on videos featuring people gushing about their weight loss journeys. This has become a highly popular trend, and people look forward to trying out these hacks to shed some extra kilos. However, these trends more often than not pose health risks. TikTok has banned #SkinnyTok According to USA Today, TikTok recently put a ban on the hashtag #SkinnyTok after multiple warnings and public outrage regarding the trend promotion of highly dangerous body standards and extreme weight loss. This hasn't happened for the first time. In September last year, Liv Schmidt got banned after building her platform around weight loss and thinness. From #SkinnyTok to extreme diet challenges, social media platforms, such as TikTok, are filled with millions of videos centered around health and wellness. Viewed by a large number of users, these videos boast about how people can shed weight in less amount of time. What remains concerning is that such trends fail to have any scientific backing and often can end up posing serious health risks to individuals. Also read: Influencer Erika Cramer's Instagram account suspended due to shocking reason: 'I've been accused...' Popular weight loss hacks on TikTok Ozempic medication Although a diabetes medication, Ozempic is misused by individuals and promoted as a fast weight-loss solution. But experts suggest that it can ultimately lead to serious side effects, such as nausea, pancreatitis, and thyroid tumors, according to digital magazine Coffee and lemonade Having a mix of coffee and lemon juice can help in suppressing appetite, according to some social media influencers. However, they fail to inform their fans that it can ultimately lead to dehydration and even stomach ulcers in some cases. Rice water detox Another popular health trend advises consuming rice water as a metabolism booster. This is being promoted without any scientific evidence supporting the claim. Extreme fasting Fasting for longer periods can result in muscle loss and deficiency of nutrients in the body, according to experts. FAQs: 1. Does Ozempic help in weight loss? According to the Cleveland Clinic, taking Ozempic or similar medications makes more GLP-1 in the body, which decreases appetite and makes people feel fuller. 2. What is #SkinnyTok? This was a popular hashtag on TikTok, which promoted content which advises people on how to be skinnier. 3. What's the best method for weight loss? There are several authentic ways advised by experts to lose weight, with sustainable lifestyle changes being a key focus.
Malaysian Reserve
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Malaysian Reserve
TikTok's #SkinnyTok rebranded eating disorders dangerously fast
Social media influencers mask their harmful content with seemingly-innocuous healthy buzzwords to reach a broader audience #SKINNYTOK is dead. Or at least that's what TikTok wants you to believe after its recent ban of the hashtag promoting an extreme thin ideal. That might have appeased regulators, but it shouldn't satisfy parents of teens on the app. An army of influencers is keeping the trend alive, putting vulnerable young people in harm's way. Today's social media landscape makes it all too easy for creators to repackage and disguise disordered eating as a 'healthy' part of everyday life. That lifestyle then gets monetised on various platforms — via habit trackers, group chats and 30-day aspirational challenges — and shared with a much broader audience. The rise of #SkinnyTok is in many ways a rehashing of the pro-eating disorder content of the past. In the mid 1990s it was Kate Moss and 'heroin chic.' Then came the Tumblr posts in the early aughts praising 'Ana' and 'Mia,' fictional characters that stood for anorexia and bulimia. Now, it's 23-year-old influencer Liv Schmidt telling her followers to 'eat wise, drop a size.' Schmidt, a prominent # SkinnyTok influencer who is often credited with lopping the 'y' off of 'skinny' and replacing it with an 'i,' is the founder of the members-only group 'Skinni Société.' In September, she was banned from TikTok amid scrutiny by the Wall Street Journal. The fact that she continues to make headlines some nine months later drives home the perpetual game of whack-a-mole that regulators are playing with problematic content. After her TikTok ban, Schmidt simply moved her audience over to Instagram, where her followers have grown from 67,000 to more than 320,000. Until recently, she was charging people US$20 (RM94) per month for a 'motivational' group chat, but when The Cut found at least a dozen of those users were in high school, Meta Platforms Inc demonetised her profile in May. And yet her Instagram account still exists and she's actively posting to her YouTube channel. A video titled 'How to Create a Skinni Body on a Budget' raked in nearly 50,000 views within a week, a particularly disturbing level of engagement considering she's encouraging her viewers to consume fewer than 1,000 calories a day — far less than what health officials recommend for a nutrient-dense meal. In her Instagram bio, Schmidt links to a Google LLC application where anyone can apply to her Skinni Société. While membership previously cost just US$20 per month, screenshots posted on social media suggest this latest iteration could run about US$2,900 per month — a gulf that proves her schtick is a complete black box. Regardless of price point, she continues to use public platforms to lure people into private spaces where conversations promoting disordered eating can flourish unchecked — all while profiting from them. Bloomberg Opinion made several attempts to reach out to Schmidt for comment, but she did not respond. This sort of content is causing real harm. National Alliance for Eating Disorders, founder and CEO Johanna Kandel said the uptick in callers mentioning #SkinnyTok to her organisation's hotline began last winter. And despite social media companies' efforts to blunt the reach of the trend, as many as one in five calls fielded by the nonprofit in recent weeks have referenced the hashtag. Some of those callers had past struggles with an eating disorder that was restarted by the hashtag, while others started following #SkinnyTok to 'better themselves' or 'get healthy' only to be pulled into a precarious mental space, Kandel says. The bombardment of images of a skinny ideal can have even broader harms. Although this type of content has always lurked in the dark corners of the internet, people had to actively seek it out. Now, the algorithm delivers it on a platter. That's being served in insidious ways. While Schmidt's rhetoric may leave little to the imagination, other influencers frame their content more subliminally. They encourage a disciplined lifestyle that blurs the lines of health consciousness and restrictive eating, which makes it all the more difficult to detect: Walk 15,000 steps a day, drink tea, nourish the body — these are things that might not raise alarm bells if a parent were to find them on their kid's social feeds. Sure, the TikTok trends that do raise alarm bells — remember 'legging legs'? — are quick to get shut down. But what about something as seemingly innocuous as the popular 'what I eat in a day' videos? How are social media companies expected to police troubling content that's cloaked in euphemisms like 'wellness' and 'self-care'? It's a question that weighs on wellness and lifestyle creators who are trying their best to combat the negative content out there. When speaking with Kate Glavan, a 26-year-old influencer, it's clear why she has been vocal about her experience with disordered eating: 'I don't know a single woman that hasn't struggled with some sort of body image or food issue,' she said. 'The only thing that snapped me out of my eating disorder was learning how it was destroying my health. I had a doctor look at my blood work and tell me I had the bone density of a 70-year-old woman at the of age 17.' Whether that would work on today's 17-year-olds is up for debate. 'A lot of younger Gen Zers now believe that everything is rigged — schools, doctors, the government. That paranoia has created a distrust of expertise itself,' Glavan explained. 'They think the whole medical system is corrupt, so they turn to influencers instead — which is incredibly dangerous.' How dangerous? University of Toronto assistant professor Amanda Raffoul, who studies eating disorders, says there's 'a pretty solid body of evidence that the more young people in particular spent time online and on social media, the more likely they are to have poor body image, have negative thoughts about their appearance and to be engaging in harmful eating-related behaviours.' For example, a 2023 review of 50 studies found that social media leads to peer comparisons and internalisation of a 'thin' ideal, which together contribute to body image anxiety, poor mental health and for some, disordered eating. That effect is exacerbated when someone has certain risk factors — they are female or have a high body mass index (BMI), for example — and are exposed to content that encourages eating disorders. The danger is most acute in adolescent girls. That skinny ideal can elicit strong emotions and feelings of inadequacy at a time when they don't yet have the tools to separate reality from fiction. But researchers also see a worrisome trend in adolescent boys who have been drawn in by fitfluencers pushing obsessive muscle training, unproven supplements and restrictive diets. After a 2021 Wall Street Journal investigation revealed Meta was fully aware of Instagram's potential to pull teen girls into a body image spiral, social media companies have offered some guardrails around problematic content. Kandel says when her nonprofit starts to hear multiple callers mentioning specific body image-related hashtags, it notifies companies, which typically are quick to shut them down. While helpful, it also feels like the companies are doing the bare minimum to protect kids. Although eating disorder researchers can glean insights from individual social feeds, they still can't get their hands on the internal data that could help them identify who is most at risk of harm and craft better safeguards. For adolescents, the most powerful solution would be to step away from social media. A research by American Psychological Association shows that spending less time scrolling can improve body image in struggling teens and young adults. But if that's not realistic, parents and teachers could help them think more critically about what they're seeing online — and how influencers like Schmidt make money by chipping away at their self-esteem. — Bloomberg This column does not ecessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. This article first appeared in The Malaysian Reserve weekly print edition
USA Today
4 days ago
- Health
- USA Today
TikTok has banned #SkinnyTok, but will it make a difference?
TikTok has banned the hashtag #SkinnyTok after public outrage and warnings that it was promoting unrealistic body standards, eating disorders and extreme weight loss. It's not the first time content like this has been blocked by the platform. In September, influencer Liv Schmidt, who built her platform on the outward pursuit of thinness, growing a following of 670,000, was banned. 'Basic fit because the accessory is being blonde & skinny,' she captioned one outfit video on Instagram, where she now has over 320,000 followers. 'Please don't ask me how I'm so skinny if you're not ready for the answers,' she wrote over another. #SkinnyTok's content is eerily similar to the thinspo – or, inspiration on how to be skinnier – that dominated social media platforms like Tumblr in the 2010s. Though Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest banned #thinspo in 2012, it didn't stop these communities from populating the sites. Even with the ban of #SkinnyTok, removing harmful content may be an uphill battle. Content creators like Schmidt have paved the way for the 'skinny influencer,' and mental health experts have cautioned that this represents a larger shift in how Americans are discussing thinness. 'We're almost seeing a return to the outward profession of the desire to be skinny, whereas for a while it's been, 'I want to be healthier, I want to engage in wellness,'' said University of Vermont associate professor Lizzy Pope, whose research focuses on how diet culture appears in popular culture and on social media. 'What I'm seeing is a return of that language being accepted.' The era of #SkinnyTok, Liv Schmit and 'gym bros' TikTok banned Schmidt's account for violating the site's community guidelines, according to the Wall Street Journal. A TikTok spokesperson did not respond to USA TODAY's request for comment on specifics, but some of Schmidt's videos appeared to violate the site's disordered eating and body image guidelines, which prohibit content that "promotes potentially harmful weight management." However, other communities on TikTok also promote unrealistic body standards, but do so under the guise of wellness. Some 'gym bros' are sharing similar content, amassing followers by sharing their tough-to-achieve physiques and gym journeys. A simple TikTok search of 'trust the bulk' will lead users to thousands of transformation videos, with many detailing how they toned their bodies through binge/purge cycles and excessive exercise. When regular gym goers don't see these same results, body dysmorphia and disordered eating practices can worsen, according to therapist and certified eating disorder specialist Sarah Davis. Experts say this is contributing to a culture of orthorexia, a lesser-known eating disorder characterized by an obsession with clean, healthy eating. More: Are 'gym bros' cultivating a culture of orthorexia? The rise in 'skinny' content can influence disordered eating in young people Sneakily named hashtags and covert 'what I eat in a day" videos that often portray unhealthy caloric intake also allow users to evade TikTok's new #SkinnyTok ban and restrictions around posting harmful weight-related content. Factors like social media and isolation have contributed to a large increase in youth eating disorders since the pandemic. The most widely viewed food, nutrition and weight content on TikTok are videos that perpetuate toxic diet culture among teens and young adults, according to a 2022 University of Vermont study that analyzed the top 100 videos from popular nutrition, food and weight-related hashtags. Lizzy Pope, one of the study's coauthors, said representation of diet culture and weight loss was framed as a part of being healthy or being fit in most of the videos they analyzed. If they did the study again in 2025, she suspects they would find 'a lot more of this very blatant, 'I'm doing this to be skinny' content.' In general, the best way to minimize eating disorder-related content is not to interact with it in the first place, since commenting or liking videos makes similar content more likely to appear in one's algorithm. Pope said working on the ability to reject content is an important aspect of making sure toxic diet culture doesn't permeate one's mental health, and recommended seeking professional support through therapists and dietitians if unhealthy thoughts persist. Contributing: Rachel Hale
Straits Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
#SkinnyTok rebranded eating disorders dangerously fast
Today's social media landscape makes it all too easy for creators to repackage and disguise disordered eating as a 'healthy' part of everyday life. PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO NEW YORK – #SkinnyTok is dead. Or at least that is what TikTok wants you to believe after its recent ban of the hashtag promoting an extreme thin ideal. That might have appeased regulators, but it should not satisfy parents of teens on the app. An army of influencers is keeping the trend alive, putting vulnerable young people in harm's way. Today's social media landscape makes it all too easy for creators to repackage and disguise disordered eating as a 'healthy' part of everyday life. That lifestyle then gets monetised on various platforms – via habit trackers, group chats and 30-day aspirational challenges – and shared with a much broader audience. The rise of #SkinnyTok is, in many ways, a rehashing of the pro-eating disorder content of the past. In the mid-1990s, it was British supermodel Kate Moss and 'heroin chic'. Then came the Tumblr posts in the early aughts praising 'Ana' and 'Mia', fictional characters that stood for anorexia and bulimia. Now, it is 23-year-old influencer Liv Schmidt telling her followers to 'eat wise, drop a size'. Ms Schmidt, a prominent #SkinnyTok influencer who is often credited with lopping the 'y' off of 'skinny' and replacing it with an 'i', is the founder of the members-only group Skinni Societe. In September 2024, she was banned from TikTok amid scrutiny by the Wall Street Journal. Resurgence of problematic content The fact that she continues to make headlines some nine months later drives home the perpetual game of whack-a-mole that regulators are playing with problematic content. After her TikTok ban, Ms Schmidt simply moved her audience over to Instagram, where her followers have grown from 67,000 to more than 320,000. Until recently, she was charging people US$20 (S$26) a month for a 'motivational' group chat, but when New York magazine The Cut found at least a dozen of those users were in high school, Meta demonetised her profile in May. And yet her Instagram account still exists, and she is actively posting to her YouTube channel. A video titled How To Create A Skinni Body On A Budget raked in nearly 50,000 views within a week. This is a particularly disturbing level of engagement, considering she is encouraging her viewers to consume fewer than 1,000 calories a day – far less than what health officials recommend for a nutrient-dense meal. In her Instagram bio, Ms Schmidt links to a Google application where anyone can apply to her Skinni Societe. While membership previously cost just US$20 a month, screenshots posted on social media suggest this latest iteration could run about US$2,900 a month – a gulf that proves her schtick is a complete black box. Regardless of price point, she continues to use public platforms to lure people into private spaces where conversations promoting disordered eating can flourish unchecked – all while profiting from them. Bloomberg Opinion made several attempts to reach out to Ms Schmidt for comment, but she did not respond. This sort of content is causing real harm. Ms Johanna Kandel, founder and chief executive officer of the National Alliance for Eating Disorders, said the uptick in callers mentioning #SkinnyTok to her organisation's hotline began in winter 2024. And despite social media companies' efforts to blunt the reach of the trend, as many as one in five calls fielded by the non-profit in recent weeks have referenced the hashtag. Some of those callers had past struggles with an eating disorder that was restarted by the hashtag, while others started following #SkinnyTok to 'better themselves' or 'get healthy', only to be pulled into a precarious mental space, Ms Kandel says. The bombardment of images of a skinny ideal can have even broader harms. Although this type of content has always lurked in the dark corners of the internet, people had to actively seek it out. Now, the algorithm delivers it on a platter. That is being served in insidious ways. While Ms Schmidt's rhetoric may leave little to the imagination, other influencers frame their content more subliminally. They encourage a disciplined lifestyle that blurs the lines of health-consciousness and restrictive eating, which makes it all the more difficult to detect. Walk 15,000 steps a day, drink tea, nourish the body – these are things that might not raise alarm bells if a parent were to find them on their kid's social feeds. Sure, the TikTok trends that do raise alarm bells – remember 'legging legs'? – are quick to get shut down. But what about something as seemingly innocuous as the popular 'what I eat in a day' videos? How are social media companies expected to police troubling content that is cloaked in euphemisms such as 'wellness' and 'self-care'? It is a question that weighs on wellness and lifestyle creators who are trying their best to combat the negative content out there. Young women at highest risk When speaking with Ms Kate Glavan, a 26-year-old influencer, it is clear why she has been vocal about her experience with disordered eating. 'I don't know a single woman who hasn't struggled with some sort of body image or food issue,' she said. 'The only thing that snapped me out of my eating disorder was learning how it was destroying my health. I had a doctor look at my blood work and tell me I had the bone density of a 70-year-old woman at age 17.' Whether that would work on today's 17-year-olds is up for debate. 'A lot of younger Gen Zs now believe that everything is rigged – schools, doctors, the government. That paranoia has created a distrust of expertise itself,' Ms Glavan explained. 'They think the whole medical system is corrupt, so they turn to influencers instead – which is incredibly dangerous.' How dangerous? University of Toronto assistant professor Amanda Raffoul, who studies eating disorders, says there is 'a pretty solid body of evidence that the more young people, in particular, spent time online and on social media, the more likely they are to have poor body image and negative thoughts about their appearance, and to be engaging in harmful eating-related behaviours '. For example, a 2023 review of 50 studies found that social media leads to peer comparisons and internalisation of a 'thin' ideal, which together contribute to body image anxiety, poor mental health and, for some, disordered eating. That effect is exacerbated when someone has certain risk factors – they are female or have a high BMI, for example – and are exposed to content that encourages eating disorders. The danger is most acute in adolescent girls. That skinny ideal can elicit strong emotions and feelings of inadequacy at a time when they do not yet have the tools to separate reality from fiction. But researchers also see a worrisome trend in adolescent boys who have been drawn in by 'fit-fluencers' pushing obsessive muscle training, unproven supplements and restrictive diets. After a 2021 Wall Street Journal investigation revealed Meta was fully aware of Instagram's potential to pull teen girls into a body image spiral, social media companies have offered some guardrails around problematic content. Ms Kandel says when her non-profit starts to hear multiple callers mentioning specific body image-related hashtags, it notifies companies, which typically are quick to shut them down. While helpful, it also feels like the companies are doing the bare minimum to protect kids. Although eating disorder researchers can glean insights from individual social feeds, they still cannot get their hands on the internal data that could help them identify who is most at risk of harm and craft better safeguards. For adolescents, the most powerful solution would be to step away from social media. Research shows spending less time scrolling can improve body image in struggling teens and young adults. But if that is not realistic, parents and teachers could help them think more critically about what they are seeing online – and how influencers such as Ms Schmidt make money by chipping away at their self-esteem. BLOOMBERG Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Atlantic
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
When SkinnyTok Came for Me
The bride had to do just one last thing before she walked down the aisle. 'I currently am in the bathroom in my wedding dress I asked everyone for just a few mins alone so that I could message you this.' Was she writing to an estranged friend? An old lover—the one that got away? At the beginning of her 'journey,' the bride weighed 134 pounds. 'My goal was to just lose 5lbs,' she wrote, but she had somehow dropped down to 110. 'I'm crying writing this because I have never felt so healthy and confident. THANK YOU!!!' The message was accompanied by two photos—a before and an after. The first shows a thin woman who looks to be a size 2 or 4. In the second, the woman's bones are visible beneath her skin, and her leggings sag. She owed all of this to Liv Schmidt, a 23-year-old influencer known for her harsh, no-bullshit approach to staying thin. 'You feel like a best friend and sister to me,' the bride wrote to Schmidt, who shared the message on Instagram. Schmidt is the queen of SkinnyTok—a corner of the internet where thin, mostly white women try to make America skinny again. Her 'what I eat in a day to stay skinny' videos thrust her into virality about a year ago. There she is with her mint tea—which she always drinks before eating anything, to check if she's really hungry or just bored—or a mile-high ice-cream sundae that she'll take three bites of before tossing. She's very clear: She stays skinny by not eating much. Many find this refreshingly honest. Others think she's promoting eating disorders. Influencers have condemned her; magazines have published scathing critiques. Last month, Meta removed her ability to sell subscriptions ($20 a month for access to private content and a group chat called the 'Skinni Société') on Instagram, and this month, TikTok banned the SkinnyTok hashtag worldwide, saying it was 'linked to unhealthy weight loss content.' And in response, the right has championed Schmidt. She has been canceled, and she may be more powerful than ever. I didn't mean to join the legions of young women on SkinnyTok. It happened fast. I liked an Instagram reel about an 'Easy High Protein, Low Calorie Breakfast.' What I got next, I didn't ask for. Within hours, my Instagram 'explore' page was flooded with videos of conventionally pretty, thin women preaching one message: Stop eating. Phrases such as 'You're not a dog, don't treat yourself with food' and the Kate Moss classic, 'Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,' began to flood my feed—and my subconscious. At lunch with a friend one Saturday, I didn't finish my salad. 'Do you know Liv Schmidt?' I asked. 'The three-bite rule? Of course I do. She's kind of a genius.' I realized I wasn't down this rabbit hole alone. Conor Friedersdorf: The many ripple effects of the weight-loss industry 'I know the advice I'm getting from these women is not healthy,' another friend said, but 'everything I want is on the other side of being skinny, and these women are going to help me get there.' 'I like SkinnyTok. It helps me to not eat 'the extra thing' I don't need. Don't like it? Don't follow it.' 'It's internalized misogynistic brainwash!' 'I love that skinny bitch.' Where had Schmidt come from, and what had happened to the 'body positivity' movement that had been so loudly touted through the past decade? You can form a community around anything online. When I was a kid in the 2000s, teenage girls with eating disorders were gathering on 'thinspiration' websites, where they could exchange tips. Tabloids sold copies off body shaming—one day Britney Spears was too fat; the next, Lindsay Lohan was too skinny—and my friends and I were going around with 100-calorie Chips Ahoy! packs in our lunchboxes. By the time I was a teenager, the body-positivity movement had arrived, promising to change the culture. Plus-size models started appearing in ad campaigns. The problem wasn't women's bodies, activists argued, but women feeling bad about their bodies. Yet when people tried to force society to embrace new body norms, society lashed out, bringing to the surface a lot of underlying hatred. 'Body positivity didn't resonate with a lot of people, because it felt like lying,' Maalvika Bhat, a 25-year-old TikTok influencer who is getting a doctorate in computer science and communication at Northwestern University, told me. Many felt that the movement was in denial about both the practical health risks of being overweight and America's willingness to put its engrained fat phobia aside. Ozempic has accelerated that backlash against body positivity. Many of the plus-size leaders of the body-positivity movement shut up and shrunk down. Their followers noticed that they were using a weight-loss drug. Apparently you didn't have to love yourself as you were—and you didn't have to suffer to change, either. You just had to have a prescription and enough money to pay for it. But what about those pesky last 10 pounds, the difference between being a size 6 and a size 2? Although some healthy-weight women with no medical reason to take GLP-1 drugs have nonetheless found work-arounds to get their hands on the medication, most aren't going to those lengths. How would they keep up now that skinny was back? For some, the answer was SkinnyTok. You don't need a prescription to be ultrathin. You just need a bad relationship with food, fueled by a skinny stranger yelling mean-girl mantras at you. In the end, the body-positivity movement's lasting effect may have been to prove the validity of the very message it was trying to combat—that thinner people are treated better. At least, many women feel, SkinnyTok is telling them the truth. As one SkinnyTok influencer put it, 'Don't sugarcoat that or you'll eat that too.' I started listening more closely to the SkinnyTok videos. They weren't just about self-deprivation. They were about being classy. They were about being a lady—the right kind of woman, one that men drool over. They were, most importantly, about being small. In one of Schmidt's videos, she's approached by a man in a black car during a photo shoot. The caption reads: 'This is the treatment Skinni gets you. Was just taking pics … Then a Rolls-Royce rolled up begging for my number like I'm on the menu mid photo. He saw clavicle he swerved. He saw cheekbones lost composure.' From the July 2025 Issue: Inside the exclusive, obsessive, surprisingly litigious world of luxury fitness SkinnyTok influencers basically never talk in their videos about politics. They aren't preaching about Donald Trump—let alone about issues such as abortion or immigration. And yet everything they talk about—the emphasis on girls and how girls need to behave and how small they need to be—is, of course, political. A few days after my Instagram feed surrendered to the SkinnyTok takeover, the tradwife content began to sneak in. Beautiful women baking bread in linen dresses spoke to me about embracing my divine femininity. I should consider 'softer living' and 'embracing my natural role.' All of a sudden, I wondered whether I, a single woman in her late 20s living in Manhattan, should trade it all in to become a mother of 10 on a farm in Montana. Watch a few more of these videos, and soon you'll be directed to the anti-vax moms, or the Turning Point USA sweetheart Alex Clark's wellness podcast, Cultural Apothecary, or the full-on conspiratorial alt-right universe. This is just how the internet works. Eviane Leidig, the author of The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization, sees a connection between SkinnyTok and tradwives in their 'very strong visual representation of femininity.' Whether they mean to be or not, they have become part of the same pipeline. Algorithms grab your attention with lighter, relatable content while exposing you to more extremist viewpoints. The alt-right, she said, is great at making aspirational and seemingly apolitical content that viewers relate to. 'This is a deliberate strategy that the conservative space has been employing over the last several years to capitalize on cultural issues as a gateway to radicalize audiences into more extreme viewpoints.' Two months ago, Evie Magazine, a right-wing publication that promotes traditional femininity, ran a profile of Schmidt: 'Banned for Being Honest? Meet Liv Schmidt, the Girl Who Made 'Skinny' Go Viral.' The magazine had one of the biggest tradwife influencers, Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, on its cover back in November. The article about Schmidt focused on her being canceled and banned on a number of platforms for promoting thinness. 'I don't owe the internet a version of me that's palatable,' Schmidt told the magazine. 'If a girl bigger than me posted what I eat in a day, no one would care. But when I do, it becomes controversial. Why? Because I'm blonde, thin, young, and unapologetic.' Last year, Evie profiled Amanda Dobler, another SkinnyTok figurehead, whom it described as 'TikTok's skinny queen'—'both brutally honest and surprisingly sweet.' The more the left has attacked Schmidt, the more the right has celebrated her. Bhat, who describes herself as progressive, said, 'I think the left is deeply, deeply exclusive.' On the right, 'you're allowed to make dozens of mistakes and not be shunned. They say, 'If the left doesn't welcome you, we will.' And they always do.' You can't deduce a political manifesto from someone's Instagram followers, but it seems worth noting that Schmidt follows conservative figureheads including RFK Jr., Candace Owens, and Brett Cooper. When she posted about losing the paid-subscription feature on her Instagram, through which she had been making nearly $130,000 a month, according to AirMail, she tagged Joe Rogan. 'She's clearly trying to get her foot in the door with the alternatives,' Ali Ambrose, an influencer who critiques SkinnyTok, told me. (Ambrose struggled with an eating disorder for years, and says Schmidt's content pushed her back into unhealthy habits.) Schmidt's appeal does cross party lines, though. When I polled a politically diverse group of my own friends, my most conservative friends loved SkinnyTok. A number of my progressive friends did too; they just felt like they shouldn't say so out loud. Schmidt has written that the Skinni Société is not 'a starvation or extreme diet community.' She didn't respond to multiple requests for an interview, but I spoke with Amanda Dobler, another SkinnyTok influencer. She remains on TikTok, though she has twice been temporarily barred from its Creator Rewards Program, through which she made some money for her videos, for not abiding by 'community guidelines.' Dobler is almost 10 years older than Schmidt, so she attracts a slightly different demographic. I asked her if she considered herself a political person, or her content politically charged. She responded with a decisive no. 'I'm up at 4 a.m. working my ass off, so I would say I'm the opposite of a tradwife,' she told me. 'If people relate it to right wing, to left wing,' she said, 'there's only so much of the narrative that I can control.' Sophie Gilbert: What porn taught a generation of women Dobler is known for her directness. If anything, she's even harsher online than Schmidt is. Right before our call, I scrolled through her TikTok profile: 'You are killing yourself with the shit you eat. It's disgusting. And you should feel shameful.' I briefly wondered if she'd be able to detect my own insecurities through the phone. But the Dobler I spoke with was approachable and friendly. I instantly liked her. I even opened up to her about the things I wish I could change about my body. 'There's nothing wrong with wanting to look a little better,' she said. Unlike a number of SkinnyTok influencers who only just entered the field, Dobler has been a fat-loss and mindset coach for six years. She talks about the importance of getting your nutrients instead of exclusively practicing restraint. She also pushes for a consistent workout routine, while others focus exclusively on their step count to burn calories and avoid bulking at the gym (SkinnyTok is a spectrum). I brought up the criticism that SkinnyTok content encourages young people to adopt disordered-eating habits. Dobler said that she doesn't coach children, and that the majority of her clients are in their 30s through 50s. 'I get it. It's hard if you're a parent seeing stuff online,' she told me. 'But at the same time, there's porn online; there's a bunch of weird crap. I think that there is a lot of other censorship that should be going on.' When I asked why she was so harsh in her videos, she told me, 'That's the type of talk that I need. I wouldn't say that I'm mean. I'm just blunt.' She added, 'I've been in all of the situations that I'm talking through. So it's not like I'm just up here scolding people.' This echoed something Bhat had said to me: SkinnyTok's ruthless tone rings true to many women because they're already being so ruthless toward themselves. I'd be kidding myself if I said a woman's body size doesn't affect her prospects for dating, and even jobs. I would be lying if I said I did not desperately want to be slightly thinner—that I hadn't wanted that from the moment I first watched my mother critique her own body in her bedroom mirror. I hesitate to admit that I've lost four pounds since I saw my first SkinnyTok video. I have not walked 40,000 steps a day, nor have I stopped eating after three bites. I've just stopped eating when I'm full, which, as silly as it sounds, I did learn from SkinnyTok. Still, I think it's time to unsubscribe. The body of my dreams isn't worth risking my health for. I have two nieces, ages 3 and 6. I hate the idea that somebody might one day tell them to shrink themselves. To them, a swimsuit is nothing but a promise that they'll spend the afternoon running through the sprinkler. They're perfect, and they dream of being bigger, faster, stronger—not smaller.
