SkinnyTok Isn’t A Trend — It’s The Latest Iteration of Diet Culture & Fatphobia

At 30, I’d hoped diet culture and fatphobia were relics of the past. I grew up in the thick of it: girls competing over who could eat less, “you’re so skinny” being the highest form of flattery. If you weren’t thin, you were fat. There was no middle ground. My parents did their best to counter the messages, but school corridors and magazines were louder.

Over the last ten years, after coming off the contraceptive pill at 21, my body gradually changed — from a size 8 to a size 16. I’ve only recently been diagnosed with PCOS. During that time, the shift in how others perceived me was stark. Strangers, colleagues, even acquaintances suddenly had opinions, and most of them were steeped in fatphobia.

That’s when I found body positivity. As a barely-adult scrolling through Instagram, I found solace in the fat liberation movement — a space built largely by fat Black women who’d been fighting this fight for decades. It gave me language for what I was feeling, and hope that we’d moved beyond the tabloid “whale watch” sections of the 00s. But that hope was premature. The pressure to be thin never disappeared; it shapeshifted, cloaking itself in wellness, productivity, self-optimisation. Fatphobia didn’t die. It just changed costumes.

Which brings us to SkinnyTok, a community on TikTok that many of you will have come across whilst scrolling. And yes, it’s as bad as the name sounds. It refers to a dark subculture on TikTok where thinness is idolised, often aggressively so. Videos show extreme calorie deficits, body checks, “what I eat in a day” routines that hover around 700 calories. Creators document their shrinking figures, sometimes proudly announcing how they’ve “gaslit” themselves into being skinny. One says she goes to the gym every day because she feels “fucking fat”, despite being objectively slim.

TikTok, for its part, has tried to distance itself. Searching for “SkinnyTok” now triggers a warning message: “You are more than your weight.” They banned influencer Liv Schmidt in 2024, known for her “blonde & skinny” brand, after she gained over 670,000 followers. But bans and warnings don’t fix an algorithm that’s still aggressively promoting the very content it claims to protect us from (Refinery29 reached out to TikTok for comment). 

None of this is new. We’ve seen it all before. Diet culture has been relentlessly pushed by mass media for decades, from the rise of Weight Watchers in the 1960s, to the heroin-chic supermodels of the 90s, to the carb-phobic 00s with Special K diets and flat tummy teas. In the 2010s, we saw a shift toward “slim thick” (a body type popularised by the Kardashians), which still glorified small waists, just now with curves in the “right” places. But it was still about managing and shaping the body into a narrow ideal. And all the while, fat activists were pushing back.

Progress was made. Terms like body positivity and neutrality entered the mainstream. Plus-size models appeared in major campaigns. For a moment, it felt like we’d broken something open. But the backlash has been intense, and SkinnyTok is a symptom of that.

What’s different now is the reach. TikTok’s scale makes this version of diet culture more insidious than ever, particularly for young users. As body image pressure floods back into the mainstream, we see the same pattern playing out: people in slim bodies feeling the squeeze of impossible standards — standards that fat and curvy people have never been allowed to escape.

Kitty Underhill, model, speaker and body image advocate, tells Refinery29: “As much as celebrity tabloid culture and Tumblr thinspo were so pervasive, SkinnyTok feels like an even more heightened, intense kind of pervasiveness because TikTok has a much larger and significant presence in people’s lives than Tumblr or the tabloids did.” She adds: “When something trends on that platform, it spreads like wildfire.”

Underhill draws a direct line between SkinnyTok and what came before: “The message is the same — thin is best and a signifier of moral superiority, while fat is inherently bad and a moral failing.” She adds: “It’s pro-ana content with more glamour and filters, making thinness seem even more aspirational. One video spoke of how SkinnyTok gave them a ‘reality check’, but it couldn’t be further from that, it’s distorting how we view our own bodies and those that fall outside the trend’s narrow ideals.”

Crucially, she says: “Fatphobia is at the heart of all these body-negative trends. If we don’t confront fatphobia, these movements will simply keep morphing into new forms. It helps us unlearn the belief that fat bodies are bad and thin bodies are inherently good.” This is the crux of the issue: we keep treating the symptoms rather than the root cause. Until fatphobia is addressed systemically — and the prejudices fuelling it are confronted — newer, shinier, and often more harmful body trends will keep emerging.

Therapist and author Colleen Conklin tells Refinery29: “SkinnyTok mirrors earlier manifestations in many ways, especially Tumblr thinspo. The verbiage is centred specifically on being skinny, not healthy, which reveals the toxic aesthetic obsession beneath it.” She adds that today’s teens, who now get smartphones earlier than ever, are particularly vulnerable. Conklin is right, reports have shown that 31% of eight-year-olds had smartphones in 2021 (up from 11% in 2015). She adds that “even with parental controls, content like this can still be accessed, and many teens haven’t developed the media literacy to know it’s not sustainable or healthy.”

What makes this resurgence even more insidious, Conklin says, is that it’s once again drowning out the voices of fat people. “Being in a larger body is still framed as a personal failure, rather than the result of natural body diversity or systemic issues like medical discrimination and a lack of accessible public spaces.” She suggests turning to resources like Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings or the Maintenance Phase podcast to dig deeper. “We all have a role to play,” she says, “even if it’s just voicing discomfort when harmful conversations come up.”

One person who’s lived both sides of it is *Alice, 22. “I got deep into SkinnyTok two years ago,” she says. “At first it felt empowering, like I was taking control. But quickly it became obsessive. I was tracking everything I ate.”

What helped her climb out? “A friend approached me, and asked if I was okay and sat me down for a serious conversation. My weight had dropped quickly, and my hair was thinning. Someone looking from the outside in helped me see that I’d been, I don’t know, almost radicalised?” Alice has blocked certain content and creators from her social media accounts, and is recovering slowly. “SkinnyTok wasn’t the start of my disordered eating, but it definitely preyed on it,” she added.

The crux of the heartbreak here is how easily progress is stripped from us, and how so many of us ignore the wider context around SkinnyTok’s popularity. The recent rise in far-right politics, misogyny, racism, and gender-based violence is mirrored in the hyper-surveillance of bodies — especially marginalised ones. Keeping us preoccupied with thinness is a tactic of oppression, and we’re falling for the same tricks once again.

Fatphobia didn’t vanish, it evolved. Whilst the backlash against body positivity has led some to declare it a failure, what we’re really seeing is the need for more: more fat and plus-size representation, more education, more body neutrality and liberation movements, and honest conversations about things like Ozempic, disordered eating, and health — free from moral panic.

SkinnyTok is part of a wider, long-standing system of oppression, not a standalone moment. It’s using the same language we saw on Tumblr a decade ago, and yet is still persuasive. And so we must all ask: How are we falling for this bullshit again? And then we must resist, resist, resist.