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“I didn’t get double chins because they ran in my family. I got double chins cause nobody ran in my family.”
This quip is just one example of the teachings of Toni Fine, 34, a TikTok influencer known for her no-nonsense approach to weight loss. Fine has become recognizable to her 900,000 followers for her speedy Instagram lives, where commenters get specific and often mean digs about their food consumption. “You’re hungry at night?” Fine says in one live. “Chew on your pillow. What about running? Run to the kitchen and eat less food.” But on TikTok, without ever posting the hashtag, Fine has become representative of a once-again popular lane for weight focused creators: #SkinnyTok. If the name doesn’t clue you in, here’s some of the most popular quotes floating around: “Don’t sugarcoat that or you’ll eat that too,” “What you eat in private will show up in public,” “Food is good for 15 minutes. Now you’re big for 15 years,” and “Do you want to look hot on the boat or sink it?”
Weight loss and disordered eating communities have long had a presence on social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Tumblr, YouTube, WeHeartIt, and Instagram. But in the past few years, weight loss content on TikTok was intensified by the development and popularity of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Wegovy. Many experts and users credit the success of these medications with rolling back the online acceptance of body positivity, replacing the movement with a return to the thinness driven health eras of old. #SkinnyTok —giving brutally honest advice about what people need to do to lose weight — isn’t new. It’s not even TikTok’s only disordered eating community. But as TikTok users begin to flock back to an obsession with thinness, the message behind the so-called encouragement seems clear: it’s about making weight loss mean again.
A quick TikTok search shows over 50,000 videos on the app that use the #SkinnyTok hashtag. While that counts both supporters and detractors, the top 11 videos using the hashtag are all #SkinnyTok creators or people who praise the community for its help in losing weight fast through tough love. In fact, many of the biggest #SkinnyTok creators promoting these messages don’t even use the hashtag. Fine is considered one such tough love creator, but tells Rolling Stone she doesn’t see herself as part of the #SkinnyTok community. She also posts videos about daily gym schedule, which can start as early as 3:40 a.m. and occur as much as three times a week. One of Fine’s recap videos from 2023 got so much attention in early April that even tennis pro CoCo Gauff went on the app to call the grueling schedules ridiculous. “Mind you, I’m an Olympic athlete, she said. “This is getting out of hand.”
Actively seeking out people who will be direct and mean can seem counterintuitive. But part of the draw for #SkinnyTok is that creators often publicly say out loud the thoughts people usually think to themselves, says Dr. Erin Parks, the chief clinical officer of Equip, the nation’s largest virtual eating disorder treatment center. “This is harmful for everyone, whether you have an eating disorder or not,” she tells Rolling Stone. “It is taking the depressive, self-critical thoughts that exist in all of our heads and it is amplifying them. I’m worried about the long term harm to our brains as we’re laying down these pathways —’How I look is my worth’ and ‘What I eat makes me good or bad’ —and reinforcing them again and again.
#SkinnyTok creators often publicly say that they’re not promoting unhealthy or disordered eating habits — they’re using tough language to get people to prioritize their health. It’s not mean. It’s honest. Many of the tactics these creators use also differ from older weight loss recommendations. #SkinnyTok creators, including Fine, tend to prioritize the knowledge and upkeep of food intake and metabolic output rather than counting and restricting calories outright. One of the most popular diets is the macro diet. Macro followers track the macronutrients in their meals — proteins, carbs, and fats — and then make sure that their food stays within a specific percentage for each of these categories.
Fine says to us that while she uses the macro diet to get people to understand calories, she doesn’t promote tracking macros daily, the idea of demonizing food, or a “thin at all cost” message. But what’s hard to push back against is that none of this so-called care or gets nearly as much traction as the unhinged and often snappy quotes associated with — and celebrated by —#SkinnyTok. When reached for comment, Fine even agreed that while she believes her messaging is “rooted in care,” many of the soundbites people have begun clipping and editing into giant, fast videos remove nuance and context from her actual advice.
For Parks, the idea that #SkinnyTok creators aren’t simply telling their followers to eat less, or not at all, doesn’t mean the advice isn’t full of the same old diet-culture rhetoric. In fact, she calls many of the macro-based diets “the most cognitively complex eating restrictions” she’s seen in years. “In the Nineties, it was about eating as infrequently as possible. Now it’s eating frequently, but perfectly. The bar has risen yet again,” she says. “We’ve always had a culture that decides that beauty is whatever the least attainable thing is. Now, it’s a militant schedule.”
Like many digital platforms, TikTok community guidelines prohibit “promoting disordered and dangerous weight loss behaviors,” and will restrict or make videos un-monetizable if they are restrictive or suggest rapid weight loss or ideal body types. When you search for #SkinnyTok in TikTok’s official search bar, a note about weight is displayed at the top of the offerings. “You are more than your weight,” it reads, encouraging people with questions to take care of themselves and visit the app’s Safety Center Resource for any questions. A spokesperson for TikTok tells Rolling Stone that they consult with public health experts and don’t want to guidelines so specific that they prohibit people from discussing their recoveries as well. But #SkinnyTok content itself — which uses demeaning phrases to shame overeaters — is still readily available.
Where weight loss content ends and disordered eating content begins can be a nebulous space, making it hard for moderators to remove accounts unless they’re specifically flagged by other creators. TikTok community guidelines prohibit “promoting disordered and dangerous weight loss behaviors,” and will restrict or make videos un-monetizable if they are restrictive or suggest rapid weight loss or ideal body types. When you search for #SkinnyTok in TikTok’s official search bar, a displayed banner encourages people to take care of themselves. But the content itself — which uses demeaning phrases to shame overeaters — is still readily available.
Emmeline Clein, the author of Dead Weight —a 2024 essay collection on disordered eating’s history and influence on pop culture — tells Rolling Stone that #SkinnyTok takes a “mask off” stance to content that removes some of the wellness language that disordered eating creators often hide behind. But she doesn’t see #SkinnyTok as separate from other explicitly “pro-ana” content online at all.
“The idea of anorexia as ‘going too far‘ down a given road implies that the person who ends up anorexic started off on the right track,” Clein says. “The media industry’s religious devotion to the idea that there is a difference between diet content and eating disorder content is integral to their advertising models. And their continued promotion of beauty standards that are not achievable without great amounts of self harm for most people.”
The problem of eating disorders is complex. Treatment ideas are varied. And when pushed, #SkinnyTok creators are adamant in their videos that if there’s a problem, it’s certainly not with them. But what can’t be ignored is that after years of eating disorder rates remaining relatively steady, the numbers have drastically increased, according to Parks. Data from the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) found that more than nine percent of Americans will have an eating disorder in their lifetime, a statistic that’s risen in the past five years. Hospitalizations for eating disorders in teen girls doubled during the pandemic, according to Centers for Disease Control data. After opiate addiction, eating disorders are the psychiatric illness with the highest mortality rate in the U.S.
Clein believes social media platforms have a responsibility to address how their algorithms promote these videos. It doesn’t matter whether it’s accounts with anorexia in the titles or the new buzzword of the day. “Focusing our rightful ire on creators mistakes the pawns for the players,” she says. “When these platforms ban users or tags that overtly mention eating disorders instead of using the word skinny, they elide responsibility for promoting equally dangerous content under a different banner.”
If you’re struggling with disordered eating, help is out there. Visit the National Eating Disorders Association website to find out the steps you can take to get better, or call the ANAD Helpline at 1 (888) 375-7767.
