This article discusses diet culture, fatphobia and beauty standards concerning the resurgence of weight-loss trends and eating disorders online. If this potentially triggering article is an area of sensitivity for you, reading is not advisable.
As someone who grew up well-versed in diet culture, unrealistic standards of thinness, and eating disorder-centered online forums, I have been shocked to discover the resurgence of these cultural discussions on contemporary platforms such as TikTok. It is nearly impossible to scroll through the site without seeing a ‘What I Eat in a Day’ video or a weight loss transformation. Despite unrealistic standards of thinness as a constant influence that has permeated media for decades, the ‘Body Positivity’ movement’s media attention in the 2010s was supposedly a turning point in how we view and represent plus-sized individuals. Clothing companies’ use of bigger models increased, discussions online called out fatphobia in daily life, and things seemed to be changing for the better. However, the desire to be slim has remained at the core of our cultural influences, with paradigms of health and beauty gaining a concerning amount of traction on TikTok which reflects how little we’ve moved from the ‘pro-anorexia’ days of the 90s-2000s. Discussing a range of related TikTok trends, I posit that the online minefield of diet culture is dangerous for young people’s mental and physical health, upholding slimness as the highest moral and aesthetic standard.
the body positivity movement
Despite fat liberation being firmly established in political activism since the 1960s with the ‘Fat Acceptance Movement’, the 2010s saw more mainstream news coverage which criticised thinness as a social standard. Originating with primarily plus-sized female activists and writers, the movement progressed further into an all-encompassing, ‘sanitised-for-general-consumption’ theme that pushed self love and inclusivity, especially in the fashion and modelling industries. The ‘Health at Every Size’ sentiment became criticised for promoting obesity, and was possibly replaced by ‘Body Neutrality’, which emphasises a body’s function and purpose separate from its beauty, and that only the individual and their doctor can determine how healthy they are. However, hegemonic fatphobia remained throughout society regardless of these changes, and it is debatable how successful the Body Positivity movement was in reducing fatphobia. Institutional changes such as increased representations of different body types in films and magazines have been criticized for practicing Tokenism and using body positivity merely as a marketing strategy to seem inclusive, inciting no real structural progression. Additionally, plus sized representation has been primarily white, able-bodied, and otherwise conventionally attractive.
Modern Celebrity Culture: Surgeries and Ozempic
There have been widespread criticisms about the use of the ‘Ozempic’ drug by celebrities who once preached unconditional bodily acceptance and had a platform consisting of impressionable teens. The problem doesn’t lie in the individual use of weight-loss drugs or surgeries, instead outrage has been expressed to those that deny their involvement in taking them, creating an impossible standard where the lines between ‘realistic’ weight loss and pharmaceutical involvement are blurred. This manifests on Tik Tok where products such as workout routines, diet plans, and supplements are sold under the impression that their results are solely constituted from them, ‘scamming’ people into the premise that they can get similar results by indulging in these commissioned items. New surgery trends also signify beauty standards involved in slimness and youth, where it is popular to remove fat from ‘undesirable’ places such as buccal fat removal. Cosmetic surgery and weight-loss interventions are absolutely not new, yet the prevalence of them on Tik Tok indicates that we are far from so-called body neutrality as a society.
‘What i eat in a day’
The ‘What I Eat In A Day’ videos, containing a list of everything someone has consumed in 24 hours, are a breeding ground for false information and unhelpful comparison. These videos usually glamorise pretty-looking, healthy meals, often including calories and macronutrient information. Despite every person’s needs and health journeys being unique, the comment section is often full of criticism, pseudo-scientific discourse and even harassment. What’s worse is the reaction videos ‘nutritionist’ influencers and daily users make, scrutinising each tiny decision and rating their meals on their own subjective scales of appropriate consumption. It is completely ridiculous to take a snippet of someone’s eating habits and shame them on your platform for their meal ‘not having enough protein’, or ‘eating at the wrong time of day’. It is further nonsensical to gain nutritional advice from a short – most-likely edited for the purposes of posting the video – food log that is so specific to one person’s culinary likes and dislikes, along with personal routines and many more variables. This increases the anxiety in viewers that they are not eating as well as people online, and need to study each food choice they make to compete with these videos. Additionally, a small creator will have significantly less backlash from a high quantity, highly processed food log, yet a larger person with the exact same diet will be shamed for eating too much, or even lying about their food consumption. Finally, these videos often contain a ‘body check’: a posed full-body photo that showcases someone’s weight-loss or generally small figure, which is the oldest trick in the book for displaying eating disorder-adjacent content.
Gym Bros and the Carnivore Diet
Closely bound to political conservatism involving toxic masculinity and essentialist notions of a nutritional ‘survival of the fittest’, ‘gym bros’ are a recurrent breed of man online. And if you’ve seen a chopping board adorning a rare steak and seven fried eggs for some apparent reason, you’ve seen the ‘Carnivore diet’. This diet, causing havoc in mainstream cultural discussions, emphasises an excessive amount of protein and a return to a more ‘efficient’ time where cavemen had to hunt animals and died by the time they were 30. Whichever diet someone believes to be optimal for their bodies is none of my business, but when I see a fully-grown adult munching on a full stick of butter and calling it the peak of fitness, I have a problem with what we’re teaching children on Tik Tok. This content is often closely related to moral associations of masculinity with strength and self-restraint, the idea of an ‘alpha male’ someone that is willing to spend hours in the gym to unleash their masculine potential while shaming the ‘betas’ that eat carbohydrates. Not only can this be dangerous for how we understand gender roles, but is an arguably unrealistic portrayal of nutritional expectations. Those that want to increase their efficiency in workouts and health goals, or are particularly lacking in recommended protein intake may find these videos useful, but a moral panic is started when this is seen as the expectation for all.
Mukbangs
Mukbangs, generally described as videos of people eating for viewers’ entertainment, have been popular for years, stemming from Korean online broadcasts and becoming extremely popular on Youtube. The modern equivalent on Tik Tok spans from ‘eat with me’s of dinners to incredibly large portions which exceeds reality regarding how much one can eat in one sitting. Once again, there is a discrepancy with how they are received; larger people are far more likely to receive abuse from their portions than slimmer people. There have been scandals due to people lying about how much they eat, spitting out food in between takes to make it seem as thought they are eating more. This is not only deceitful and wasteful, but also proves the privilege smaller people get for producing food content, inciting sensationalist content that reproduces fatphobic double standards.
‘skinny tok’
Hailed ‘Skinny Tok’, there is an area of the app that literally contains ‘pro-anorexia’ content, an incredibly dangerous and disappointing market that mimics eating disorder rhetoric. Content creators share ‘tips’ on how to ignore hunger and shame people for a so-called lack of self restraint, which is extremely upsetting for someone that thought this kind of content isn’t so explicit in social media. A new trend has emerged that encourages people to swap ‘toxic advice’ in the comments to motivate weight loss that would otherwise be frowned upon. This is eating disorder forums all over again. Skinny people are said to have a different mindset and collection of habits that are morally superior, perpetuating the notion that starving yourself grants you a more ethical, self-respecting existence. Needless to say, this is fictional and an extremely disordered way of viewing your self-esteem: eating habits are not an indicator of how good of a person you are. Fat people are dehumanised in this respect, compared to animals and put down for simply not possessing the restrictive goals of diet culture.
Where does that leave us?
Diet culture on TikTok can be extremely harmful for viewers’ self-esteem, promoting unhealthy relationships to food and bodies. Despite this not being representative of the entire platform, one cannot ignore how this representation can seep into impressionable people’s For You Pages, spreading disordered rhetoric that only seeks to push our society into further fatphobia. When coming across this content, remember that this is only a small section of societal belief, and that there are countless corners of the internet that embrace different bodies and lifestyle choices. You can flag these videos as ‘not interested’ to make them suggested less often and, if they are particularly harmful, they can also be reported. Focus on your own health regardless of the moral panics pushed by these areas of TikTok.