My friend’s room was pink, with dolls and flowers and a grand window overlooking Central Park. She had a poster that said “Chanel” above her bed, and a card above her desk that said, “Happy 13th!” We were lying on her bed on our stomachs, pink-painted toenails kicking in the air, wearing Brandy Melville tank tops and boy shorts. We’d watched the movie Thirteen the night before, and were scrolling through Pinterest photos of all the great ’90s models — Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Shalom Harlow — when she rolled over and put her phone down. “Ugh, I wish I looked like them!” she exclaimed. “If only I had a thigh gap.” To which I naively responded, “What’s that?”
She took me to the mirror and carefully compared our legs, pointing out how hers touched and mine didn’t — and since that day, I’ve kept careful tabs on the growing and shrinking of the negative space between my thighs. Four years later, it’s only gotten worse. Ever since I’ve found myself swept up in “SkinnyTok,” the stakes have become even higher: God forbid my thigh gap ever disappears.
“SkinnyTok” and its other social media counterparts are the new faces of an age-old tradition when it comes to women and their weight. Society has had an obsession with our bodies for at least as long as there’s been media. In ancient times, women were sculpted; in medieval times, they were painted; in industrial times, they were stuffed into corsets; and in modern times, they are plastered on billboards and posted on our phone feeds. Recently, social media trends like SkinnyTok and Oatzempic have been gaining immense popularity.
SkinnyTok includes a wide variety of content, ranging from truly well-meaning diet and exercise tips to harmful content that preys on teen girls like me (and all the women whose bodies have been scrutinized their entire lives). On this platform, people share weight loss “tips” and their own journeys. Meanwhile, “Oatzempic” is a dietary hack; it means having oat-based diets, particularly blending oats with water and lime juice to promote weight loss. My FYP and algorithm know me well; I am a teen girl, and I see more than one of these videos a day. And it’s impossible for them not to infiltrate the culture around my eating and my friends.
Prom is coming up, and just a few weeks ago, my friend told me that she was “prepping.” When I asked her to explain, she said that she was going on a run every day, and having only a protein bar and small dinner. I asked her how she got this idea, and she showed me a video on SkinnyTok. After watching the video that inspired my friend, I was hooked on this account. I scrolled through for an hour, looking at all this woman’s tips and tricks. And when I got up to look in the mirror afterwards, I was about twenty pounds heavier than I was twenty minutes earlier — or at least, that’s how it felt.
Most videos have pretty much the same message: Stories and hacks, often dangerous, on how to lose weight fast. Some videos are meant to serve as motivation. Just today, I watched a woman showing off her body on the treadmill, and the text over the video said, “Do it for the compliments. Do it for the jealous stares. Do it for the concerned looks.” Another video gives insight into how “skinny girls” live. “They view food as optional,” the woman explains, and then goes on to promote a type of jelly that has five calories and is as filling as a full meal — a jelly I tried for a few days before feeling like I was gonna puke.
Those sorts of videos make me feel gluttonous: The woman talking to me has no problem turning down food, and yet I feel as if I’m always stuffing it in my face. Even without an eating disorder, it’s difficult to look away from this content. I get up feeling the need to go to the gym or walk 20,000 steps or maybe skip dinner, and when I don’t do these things, I’m left feeling like a failure.
My friends and I share these videos with each other, spreading the content and falling victim to the perils. Thanks to SkinnyTok, my friends and I got the idea to count our calories in a shared notes app. Obsessively, I searched for the magic number attached to everything I ate during the course of any given day, and if my total got too high, it was time to call it quits. And yet no matter what I do, the message from the other side of the phone screen is clear: The “skinny lifestyle” is never going to be the one I’m leading, and my body is never going to look as good as theirs.
Even without social media, the idea that girls can never be skinny enough would continue to infiltrate the teenage mind. But social media is particularly adept at spreading a message, and feeding into dark rabbit holes. Social media makes it all the easier to access this message and content; you no longer need to go looking for it, it finds you. It’s constantly in your face, telling you what you’re doing wrong and all the imperfections those wrong actions cause.
To be sure, there are some truly helpful videos floating around the internet. I learned that, when I get a sweet tooth after dinner, it’s better to eat whipped cream and strawberries instead of ice cream; and I learned that portion control is always healthy, when done right. But most of what festers within trends around dieting never leads to anything good, because the line between healthy and dangerous is almost invisible — and the mind of a teenage girl is delicate, bordering on fragile, bordering on wired-like-a-booby-trap.
Social media is addictive enough, but content about food and weight is even more so. It’s hard to look away, and it turns into an obsession with just the slightest indulgence. What’s worse, too, is that we seek it out. Once one video on the subject pops up, we’re hungry for more. We want to be skinny, and we want to know exactly how to do it. Everything talked about on SkinnyTok is like a carnival game designed to make us lose; if we girls don’t keep up with the diets and exercise, we surrender all of our progress.
I wish I could go around eating whatever I want, whenever I want. And I know my friends do too, but society doesn’t allow for it, and social media keeps us in line. As if our own twisted consciences were not enough, we now have monitors in our pockets at every moment of every day, looking over our shoulders, inspecting our plates and our thigh gaps, and reprimanding us of our lapses. We are kids; we should be allowed the sweet indulgences of childhood. But instead, we’ve been tortured in our relationship with candy for almost as long as we’ve known just how good candy tastes.
Eating has always been a perilous equation for girls, but now — thanks to our phones — the equation has gotten even more lopsided against us. There is no way for us to go anywhere near the kitchen, or the refrigerator, without having to answer to our social media feeds. And as a result, our minds are as full of bad ideas as our stomachs are empty of meaningful calories.