Kate Moss famously said in 2009 that her motto was “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”. It caused an uproar, and throughout the 2010s, “skinny” was a dirty word. Victoria’s Secret Angels like Candice Swanepoel identified as “strong, not skinny”, while the body positivity movement came to the fore.
Wanting to be thin was problematic and taboo. Yet on dark corners of Tumblr, Moss’s mantra was picked up with gusto and pasted onto many a black and white image of thigh gaps and protruding ribs.
Yet recently, there have been a slew of articles pronouncing the body positivity movement dead, with Ozempic as the prime murder suspect.
Meanwhile, weight loss influencers are back and they have reclaimed the word skinny, leading to a trend on TikTok called #SkinnyTok. It’s no wonder WeightWatchers has gone bust: people are now turning to perfectly toned influencers for their dieting advice.
SkinnyTok’s rise in popularity has left government officials concerned. The French digital media minister has reported the hashtag to the country’s watchdog, while the EU commission said on Tuesday that they were “well aware of the issue”, and have launched an investigation into the potential harm for minors.
There are over 70,000 videos under the hashtag, and the content ranges from sound health advice to glamorising anorexia.
Its popularity is symptomatic of the general move away from woolly, politically correct language and the idea that we should all be less hard on ourselves.
We’re in the era of the grind, where motivational gurus like Mel Robbins tell us to count down from five as soon as we wake up and get out of bed. No snoozing the alarm, no staring at the ceiling, no excuses. “Stop being lazy,” she says.
A few years ago Robbins might have been accused of being unkind to people who suffer with depression and struggle to get out of bed. But no one has time for that sort of snowflakery these days.
To that end, lots of the most popular accounts on SkinnyTok opt for “tough love” in their videos: the women look dead in the camera and say that “What you eat in private shows in public”, or “you’re not a dog, stop rewarding yourself with treats”.
There is lots of harmful content which promotes unrealistic body images
One SkinnyTok influencer called Susanne Stoughton even advises her 85,000 followers to rename “a little treat” to “a little sabotage”.
One of the originators of SkinnyTok is a New York based influencer called Liv Schmidt, who was actually banned from TikTok for violating its community guidelines. She now shares her advice on Instagram, where her videos have racked up millions of views. “It’s not a sin to want to be thin,” she says.
How to be a “skinny legend”, then? There is a formula which most of the influencers follow. Getting in 10,000 steps a day, going to the gym, doing Pilates, and eating whole food, high protein diets which are in calorie deficit, meaning they add up to lower than the guideline daily amount of 2000 calories for women.
Most of the popular influencers like Schmidt say that you can have desserts and pizza, but it’s all about balance and portion control. It’s all sound advice for losing weight if you have plenty of time on your hands and are ideally unemployed – that 11am gym sesh won’t do itself.
Many SkinnyTok influencers do appear to eat a balanced, healthy diet, but most of the videos start with a shot of these rakish women flashing their washboard stomachs and toned abs. One English influencer @eveoliviaa advises her 155,000 Instagram followers to press the “panic button” on an app called Stoppr when they are craving sugar. Motivational messages like “your health is non-negotiable” will pop up, alongside a tally of how many days you have gone without sugar.
Users who crack have to click a button which says “I relapsed” and go back to zero. Sugar may be addictive, but invoking the language of Narcotics Anonymous so that you can have a snatched waist in time for summer feels somewhat regressive.
There is no beating around the bush here. The SkinnyTokkers say they want to be thin because it looks hot and it makes them feel good. It’s reminiscent of Bridget Jones tallying her daily calories and weight in her diary, though these influencers appear to have more success with it. They would berate Bridget for having no self control and often indulging in those dreaded little sabotages.
There is lots of harmful content which promotes unrealistic body images – mantras like “last month’s diet is this month’s body” hark back to the pro-anorexia culture on Tumblr. But many of the influencers defend themselves by saying that they are being realistic about losing weight.
One popular influencer called TheSkinnyMillionaire says: “moving more and eating less is what works, and that is exactly what SkinnyTok promotes.” In fact, she is “insulted” by the allegations that it is glamorising eating disorders. Their argument is that lots of women want to lose weight, so why not call a spade a spade? They don’t couch things in fluffy language, and if their content is not for you, that’s not their problem.
TikTok needs to do better at cracking down on the dark side of SkinnyTok. They are right – teenagers should not be exposed to this kind of content, yet it is still happening. But the tough love approach is not necessarily bad in itself. As one 37-year-old SkinnyTok fan put it: “I have never walked so many steps, I have never been so motivated… but damn, I would not let a young person see those videos.” As long as the fashion industry holds up thinness as a beauty standard, then a large portion of women will want to look that way. Why not be honest about it?
Claudia Cockerell is the Londoner’s Diary editor
