2 weeks Ago By Brianna Parkins
At least, until someone went on a smoke break and let “SkinnyTok” slip into my doomscrolling. Or maybe I had done it to myself. I’ve been seeing a personal trainer to learn how to lift weights with a broken wrist.
I’d been looking up rehabilitation exercises and “easy protein-heavy dinners” – the classic gateway drug to weight-loss clips. Now I was deep in the bowels of SkinnyTok – the genre of content that does what it says on the tin. It’s made up mainly of thin, usually white women wearing athleisure staring into the camera with the concerned air of a big sister sitting us down for a serious chat.
The tone is mean but well meaning. They want to be honest, guys. They’re telling us this because no one else will.
We need to stop eating so much. We need to exercise more. No excuses.
“I’m going to hold your hand when I say this,” says a twentysomething stranger, looking into my eyes, her hair held back in a sweatband. SkinnyTok is designed to be “tough love” motivation for weight loss aimed at women, which is odd because I’ve never known a woman who has been “too easy” on herself when it comes to the size of her own body. I don’t need a Lycra-clad nearly-teenager lecturing me from her parent’s box room on how to hate myself, thanks.
Popular motivational slogans include, “I hope the comfort you found in being lazy today makes you uncomfortable at the beach this summer”, and “would you rather be covered in sweat or covered in clothes at the beach?” Because presumably if you try to wear a swimsuit on the beach without exercising five days a week, the beach police will fine you on the spot and pour sand down your bum crack. Then there’s my personal favourite, “Your skinniest weight is someone else’s worst nightmare”. Anything I have learned about calories I have learned against my will, but even I know “meal plans” for adult women with only 500 calories total in a day are not good.
The “meals” are usually a liquid grey goop last seen on the set of Oliver Twist. On other pages, SkinnyTokkers share their “hacks”’ for “staying small”, which include “spraying perfume on cake so I didn’t eat it out of the trash” and “daily laxatives”. A woman points to text on the screen asking “How do I stay skinny?” She holds up a box.
“This is my favourite snack.” It’s a box of herbal tea. Yum.
[ Eating disorders: ‘I wouldn’t speak to my worst enemy the way I talked to myself’ Opens in new window ] As a former young person, I used to hate older columnists jumping on an internet trend and getting into a moral panic flap about what kids were up to online. But I had hoped, naively, that Gen Z and Gen Alpha had been spared this. I thought we had left the Special K cornflake diets and heroin chic behind and traded it in for high-waist mom jeans and those Dove ads that told us to love ourselves.
But as any girl who lurked the depths of Tumblr in the 2000s can recognise, the disordered eating content is back – it’s now just wearing activewear. My generation had to contend with “pro Ana/pro Mia” (pro anorexia, pro bulimia) blogs that posted “thinspo” of bony hips with the caption “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”. It’s resurfaced, but this time under the guise of “wellness” and “discipline” and using HD video.
I hate that they’re on the same internet that my nieces use. They are not as old and cranky as me to laugh then scroll. What if they believe they have to whittle their strong, functioning bodies down in order to be worthy because of someone trying to gain followers from their vulnerability.
I pray for people in recovery for eating disorders, who already have to battle with the shortcomings of health systems, now having to stare this down when they pick up their phone to have a morning scroll. [ ‘I lost a lot through my bulimia – including some of my teeth and a lot of time’ Opens in new window ] TikTok’s community guidelines “do not allow showing or promoting disordered eating and dangerous weight loss behaviours” with at least one prominent “SkinnyTok” influencer banned last year. They know it’s a problem but are obviously having difficulty playing regulatory whack-a-mole with new videos uploaded every second.
So I will try in a stupid and futile way to shield my nieces from the tides of self-hatred threatening every wave of girls growing up..
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