A new type of influencer is gaining popularity on TikTok. Tan, young, beautiful, and exquisitely thin, she is here to sell you a lifestyle. Daily posts offer a glimpse into her picture-perfect life. To her followers—made to feel part of an exclusive, enlightened group—she shares tips on how you, too, can look like her. Welcome to SkinnyTok.
Short for Skinny TikTok, this subset of the social-media app is exactly what it sounds like: a community dedicated to featuring thin bodies, both those naturally possessed and, more often, those obtained through extreme weight loss. Much of the content produced by popular SkinnyTok creators centers on their pursuit of skinniness and a skinny lifestyle after shedding 25 or more pounds. These women share advice ranging from diet to fitness to mental health, and their messaging is not, er, sugarcoated.
In a video filed under a TikTok playlist titled “Skinny Tips,” Ashley Warady, a 29-year-old creator with 223,000 TikTok followers, who lost more than 115 pounds, tells her audience, “Eat for the body you want. You want to be skinny, you got to eat less.”
For the last decade or so, the body-positivity movement has flooded social media with people of various sizes and messaging along the lines of “Love the body you’re in!” The 90s’ heroine-chic look embodied by a rail-thin Kate Moss was replaced by plus-size models walking the fashion runways and gracing Victoria’s Secret billboards. The Vogue writer Emma Specter (daughter of AIR MAIL Co-Editor Alessandra Stanley) published a whole book about embracing fatness. Now the pendulum has seemingly swung in the other direction.
SkinnyTok influencers would argue that their cause actually aligns with the body-positivity movement. They position themselves as advocates for the lean community, which they see as under-represented and shamed in our current culture, and equate being thin with being healthy.
Many of the creators point to American portion sizes, the obesity epidemic, and binge eating as reasons for why SkinnyTok is important. America is overweight, they say, and they are here to fix it.
They’re not wrong—it’s hard to argue that exercising and having a balanced diet isn’t healthy. But what goes seemingly unacknowledged on this corner of TikTok is that healthy, as Specter argues in her book, looks different on every body. And the prescriptions for how to get healthy—by “healthy,” naturally, they mean “thin”—are bound to set off alarm bells for most anyone with a developed frontal lobe and a good relationship to food.
On SkinnyTok, many creators preach living in a calorie deficit, consuming less than you burn in a day. Amanda Dobler, a self-described “Fat Loss & Mindset Coach” with 384,800 TikTok followers, said in one video, “There’s one thing that skinny people do very differently compared to others who are overweight or might be struggling with their weight.… Skinny people view food as something that is optional, always.”
Videos such as this are met with praise—comment sections are full of users thanking the influencers for the insight they are sharing—but are also spurring an “anti-SkinnyTok” trend. “Do you think if these ‘Don’t eat dinner so you can look good on Spring Break’ girls felt good about their body [sic], they would be insisting that you felt insecure about yours?” asks anti-SkinnyTok creator Ali Ambrose in one video. “It is a multi-level marketing scheme of the mind.… They are trying to infect you with what they have.”
To their point, the slippery slope of SkinnyTok is evident in its annals, where mantras like Moss’s “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” reign king and thinly veiled anorexia runs rampant.
Glamorous day-in-the-life videos show beautiful women living desirable “slim lives,” wearing fashionable size-0 clothes—as they say, “Being skinny is the outfit”—and eating a quarter of the $35 Polo Bar burger. Other TikToks are low-tech, unedited, and intimate, with creators dressed in athleisure filming themselves from their car, bed, or kitchen, creating the illusion of a FaceTime call with a friend.
The third type of SkinnyTok video is more raw, and hearkens back to the eating-disorder content of Tumblr, an early-aughts microblogging platform, featuring slideshows of women with protruding bones and lists of weights—starting, current, goal. Some of these videos are outright medically concerning, featuring thin, pregnant women tracking their calories. Creator @itsallyok, for instance—a TikTok creator with 303,200 followers whose posts show what she eats in a day and whose account bio reads “⚠️Trigger warning FOOD⚠️”—claims she doesn’t want to use her “condition” (pregnancy) as an excuse to overeat.
“I was on Tumblr in the days where [eating disorder] content was everywhere, but it was the least chic thing you’ve ever seen,” says Sydney, a 28-year-old living in New York City who has been hospitalized for anorexia. “It was a list of exercises to do, a list of numbers, and a clear mission: be as anorexic as you can. SkinnyTok doesn’t say the silent part. It’s trying to promote behaviors that are objectively disordered as healthy, and it’s using humor and expensive brands and restaurants to make it seem cool.”
The dangers of this trend have not gone unnoticed. When searching the term “SkinnyTok” on the app, users are greeted with a cartoon of a stomach hugging a heart, paired with the message “You are more than your weight” and basic information on mental health and how to find help if needed.
Some SkinnyTok videos have been flagged for community-guideline violations, resulting in the creators’ getting de-monetized (disqualifying them from the TikTok Creativity Program, which rewards influencers monetarily based on a video’s engagement and views) or removed from the platform altogether. “The censorship on SkinnyTok is insane,” Em Sheldon, a lean-community creator with 216,800 followers, complained in a recent video. “This week alone, I’ve had eight posts de-monetized.” (To circumnavigate TikTok’s safety measures, some SkinnyTok creators are turning to codes like “skinni” or “sk1nn1,” or avoiding the word altogether.)
The pinnacle of the SkinnyTok censorship came last September, when a TikTok creator named Liv Schmidt was banned from the platform for violating the app’s community guidelines.
While SkinnyTok has no official founder, Schmidt, a 23-year-old living in New York, is synonymous with the movement. Blonde, hot, and painstakingly thin (except in the lip area), she is brash and operates on sharing rage-baiting social-media content (on Instagram and YouTube, since the TikTok ban). “My favorite skinni hack: Before I start snacking I drink a large cup of tea to check if I’m hungry or just bored,” Schmidt shared in a recent Instagram reel walking through SoHo. For $19.99 a month, users can subscribe to Schmidt’s exclusive Skinni Société, a group built using Instagram’s Paid Subscription function, for further insights into achieving peak skinny. With more than 6,500 members, Schmidt makes nearly $130,000 per month to preach the gospel of thinness.
Despite TikTok’s safety measures, the app’s mighty algorithm is just helping to disseminate the SkinnyTok trend. When you watch one video—whether you searched for it or, by chance, one lands on your “For You” page—and linger, even out of curiosity or just disgust, the algorithm views this action as interest. TikTok registers it as a sign to serve you more.
After spending a week deep in the SkinnyTok community to research this article, TikTok has adjusted my “For You” page from my usual fashion, New York City, and generic brain-rot-centered videos primarily to content about being skinny. While America’s young men are falling down the pipeline of the alt-right via social media, the country’s young women are seemingly being pushed toward messaging of disordered eating and body dysmorphia.
In the New York TikTok community, a pair of bouncy-blonde, rail-thin identical twins were recently shamed for being “boring,” in a scandal that snowballed into including criticisms about their weight. The creator that made the original accusation video saw her followership balloon in response. But today, the twins’ own follower counts vastly outnumber their accuser’s, and they’re still making the same day-in-the-life videos they always were.
Thinness has arguably been the unspoken currency on social media for some time. The difference is that now—undoubtedly spurred by the popularity of Ozempic—people aren’t afraid to say it.
“Body positivity has made the judgment of thinness feel off-limits, and these creators are running with it,” Sydney says. “I don’t know if they recognize the impact that they have on young girls, but they are promoting eating disorders.”
She adds: “Tumblr felt less harmful to an extent because you had to acknowledge your eating disorder to be searching for these terms.… SkinnyTok is on your “For You” page without any warning or label of disorder, and it’s going to make people think that counting cum as calories is not insane.”
Gracie Wiener is the Social Media Manager at Air Mail
