July 1, 2025 • 46 mins
Welcome to #SkinnyTok — a corner of TikTok where extreme thinness is framed as “discipline,” wellness becomes control, and disordered eating is dressed up as aesthetic. Even though TikTok banned the hashtag and popular creators like Liv Schmidt , the content hasn’t disappeared, it’s just gotten harder to spot.
In this episode, journalist Kat Tenbarge joins us to unpack how TikTok’s design glorifies harmful beauty standards and quietly funnels users — especially women and girls — toward content that can distort how we see our bodies and ourselves.
She explains why simply banning it doesn't work, and how creators are effectively pushing back to confront it head-on.
Read more: Eating Disorder Content Is Infiltrating TikTok. Some Creators Are Going Viral Debunking It – by Kat Tenbarge, Wired
Follow Kat’s work at Spitfire News: https://spitfirenews.com/
💜 Struggling or need support? Visit The Project HEAL
If you’re listening on Spotify, you can leave a comment there or email us at hello@tangoti.com!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Quick heads Up. Today's episode talks about disordered eating.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
They want women to be small, they want women to
take up less space.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
There are no girls on the Internet. As a production
of iHeartRadio and unbost Creative, I'm Bridge Tad and this
is there are no girls on the Internet. Open TikTok
and it won't take long before you find it. A
perfect body, a suspiciously low calorie what I eat in
(00:33):
the day, A silent morning routine drenched in beaged and disciplined.
Welcome to skinny Talk. A world where thinness isn't just
the goal, it's the ideology. But this isn't just about
diets or aesthetics. It's about control, and it's about what
our culture expects women to be. Small, quiet, beautiful and
(00:54):
preoccupied with staying that way. And platforms like TikTok aren't
just reflecting the values, they're amplifying them. Journalist cat ten
Barge of Spitfire News has been reporting on how social
media glorifies extreme thinness and how it harms women and girls.
But what sets to work apart is that she doesn't
just cover the tech itself. She looks at how people
(01:15):
actually use it and what that reveals about the world
we're building online.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Particularly when you report on technology, A lot of times
it's coming from a male centered perspective and through a
sort of male lens, where the things that people are
actually doing with the technology are secondary to the companies
that are involved the products they're releasing like the technology itself,
and both sides are ultimately crucial to understanding the whole,
(01:42):
but too frequently we leave out sort of the negative
societal consequences of technology and internet culture.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Cat's reporting sits at the intersection of gender, social media,
and technology. She spent years digging into what women and
girls are doing online, beat that's often dismissed as not
serious news, but that underestimation has actually put her ahead
of the curve, catching major cultural shifts before they hit
the mainstream. What drew you to reporting on this kind
(02:12):
of stuff?
Speaker 3 (02:13):
For me?
Speaker 2 (02:14):
I grew up in like fully the social media age,
So by the time that I was in high school,
I was on YouTube, Tumbler, snapchat like all the time,
and I had aspirations of becoming a journalist, But I
didn't initially think that I would be reporting on these.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
Types of topics.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
I saw myself as more of a quote unquote like
serious news reporter. So like when I was in college
studying journalism, I was really looking at covering politics and
like politics through a very traditional lens. But over the
course of my college career, I over time realized that
I had all this knowledge about like influencers and social
(02:53):
media spaces, and that that was becoming more and more
important to our wider cultural converse and the.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Way that we all live.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
So when I graduated, I specifically pursued reporting on like
the YouTube space and the influencer space, And over the years,
what's been really interesting is that space has become more
and more relevant to the sort of mainstream politics that
I had originally thought I would be reporting on. You
kind of caught it early, Yeah, I feel like I
(03:24):
was like kind of on this wave and a lot
of particularly women journalists who I looked up to at
the time that I was in college, women like Taylor Lorenz,
has been a big mentor to me, and she was
someone who was at these major legacy institutions like saying
this stuff is really important, and it was really ahead
of the curve as to what we all now know,
(03:44):
which is that this makes up so much of what
our daily lives are like, She's right.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
What's happening in online spaces like skinny talk says a
lot about our culture and our politics. Skinny talk isn't
an official category. It's a term used to describe content
that centers on extreme thinness, weight loss, and often glorifies
disordered eating. It's the kind of stuff that can quietly
take over your feed depending on what the algorithm thinks
you want to see. TikTok recently announce they were banning
(04:14):
skinny talk. Now if you search the hashtag, you'll be
redirected to eating disordered resources instead of videos that this
content is not just about weight. It reflects a deeper
social message that women shouldn't just be thin, we should
be thin, hot, quiet, and constantly working to stay that way.
And while these ideas aren't really new, algorithms are turbo
(04:34):
charging them for a digital age. Kat you covered skinny
talk for Wired. This kind of content is definitely connected
to the current political and social climate, but it is
also not new because I remember it being all over Tumblr.
So what's changed about the way this kind of content
shows up on social media platforms like TikTok today?
Speaker 2 (04:56):
What I saw happening last year across a number of
different means stream social media platforms. One of them was
x formerly Twitter, another one was TikTok, and I'm been
seeing a lot on Instagram too. Is this corner of
the Internet that was previously really niche, This like pro
eating disorder part of the Internet, which, like you said,
(05:16):
it's been around for decades, even before social media. It
was on forums, Like from the time that the Internet existed,
there were communities of people who were sort of like
when you go into these communities, what it is is
it's like a space for people who are experiencing eating
disorders to connect. But unfortunately, the culture that flourishes within
(05:37):
them encourages and sort of promotes eating disorders. And so
what I saw happening last year is this culture had
escaped containment from these niche community spaces and was being
algorithmically pushed to almost everyone on these social media platforms.
I had people, multiple people reaching out to me being like,
this pro eating disorder stuff is on my for you page,
(06:00):
This pro eating disort of stuff is right when I
open up Twitter, it's the first tweet that I see
that's being pushed to me. And what I eventually figured
out is that these social media platforms, in the process
of developing new features like community tabs and tweaking their algorithms,
as well as some of these broader cultural changes that
were happening, it was a perfect storm where all of
(06:22):
a sudden pro eating disorder, content went from something you
had to seek out to something you could no longer avoid.
And so skinny talk is another iteration of this where
if you are a TikTok user, even now, even they've
they've recently banned the skinny talk hashtag in response to
a lot of this great reporting that's come out. But
even now when I open up TikTok, I cannot avoid
(06:45):
it is like my feed is cluttered with all of
these posts that are glorifying extreme thinness, influencing young women
in particular and girls to have an extreme calorie deficit.
There's content for boys and men that in coourages them
to lose a lot of weight, really dramatically and drastically,
And it's like this toxic soup that I find to
(07:07):
be like so harmful to people's mental health, especially a
disturbing kind of side effect of where we're at with
social media.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
I have experienced the exact same thing as I said.
I've been on the Internet for a really long time,
and only very very recently, like in the last few years.
I knew that kind of content was out there, but
this is the first time that it's really been surfaced
for me. Right, I went my entire life never thinking
about whether or not a human is meant to have
(07:35):
a flat stomach. It just never came up. And now
it is everywhere. And I am not somebody who has,
you know, struggled with disorder, eating and like real body
image issues in my life. But only in the last
few years have I found myself thinking about this because
it is all I am seeing on social media, and
I can only imagine what that would be like if
(07:56):
I wasn't an older person, Right, if I'm fourteen, fifty,
te teen, sixteen. If the way that it's impacting me
as like a fully formed adult, how is it impacting
youth who are being surfaced as kind of content on
the rent?
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Now? Yes, I've talked to like at least half a
dozen experts in the eating disorder space, people who work
with treatment, people who studied this through an academic lens,
and what I've heard is that over the course of
the last few decades, eating disorders have emerged as a
phenomenon and they have skyrocketed alongside the proliferation of mass media.
(08:31):
So what that means is that when TV and magazines
became much more commonplace in like the twentieth.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
Century, you started to see women.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
And girls in particular, they were encountering like cover images
on magazines, they were they were encountering women in commercials
and on TV and in movies who fit this beauty
standard that oftentimes was extreme thinness. And this beauty standard
it comes from a lot of different places, but it's
also beaut standard that prioritizes whiteness. It's a beauty standard
(09:03):
that prioritizes these sort of conventional Eurocentric features, and it's
a beauty standard that really overemphasizes being thin. And you
see diet culture reflect this. You see the way that
a diet and exercise are incentivized, in the way that
thinness is incentivized, and sort of all walks of life
all contribute to sort of the social factors that drive
(09:26):
eating disorders.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
So here's something I keep noticing in content that flirts
with disordered eating. The people making it rarely think they're
promoting anything harmful. They say they're just being real and
that life really is easier when you're thinner. And the
worst part is they are not entirely wrong, but calling
that honesty doesn't do anything to challenge the system. In fact,
(09:51):
it only props it up. It tells us this is
just how the world works, so don't blot it fighting it,
And that's the real damage.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
One thing that I have heard from a lot of
experts and other reporters in this field is like, it's
not just a problem of it all being in your
head or even what you're seeing on TikTok. It's like
in quote unquote real life. In these offline settings, women
will report that they are treated better if they are thinner.
Speaker 4 (10:20):
People.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Strangers will treat them better. When you go to a restaurant,
the waite staff will treat you nicer. Potential future romantic
partners might seek you out more or treat you nicer,
and you'll be given more opportunities professionally. A lot of
times as a woman, the closer you adhere to the
beauty standard. So this online culture, it's not creating eating disorders.
(10:43):
It's responding to this culture that already existed. But what
it's also doing is it's exponentially growing this culture. It's
like it's becoming something that's so inescapable and so unavoidable.
And another interesting thing I've picked up on within my
conversations with other reports or so I've been writing about
this is that when we look at this content for
(11:03):
extended periods of time, when I watch dozens of skinny
talk videos, when I spend hundreds of hours in these
pro eating disorder communities on platforms like x, I can
feel the effect, like it's a very tangible like I
can feel this and how bad it is for my
mental health in a way that I've reported on, you know,
(11:24):
violent misogyny, I've reported on political extremism, disinformation, I've gone
into some of the darkest corners of the Internet. But
this stuff, it like it is affecting in a way
that I previously haven't experienced.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Let's just say I can relate. I recently started making
a few changes to support my own health, including getting
into weightlifting, and just from showing a very casual interest
in weightlifting online, my social feeds instantly got extreme. Suddenly
I was being shown content of women with INCREDI lean
bodies and all of these intense routines that they do
(12:04):
to maintain those bodies. And honestly, I think it got
in my head more than any kind of content ever
has before. Something that you point to in your piece
that I have also seen with this content is how
a lot of the creators who are pushing it, like,
I don't think that they would say, oh, this is
pro eating disorder content or whatever. Sometimes they'll even say, well,
(12:25):
I'm just being honest. You know the culture that you
just described where people who are thinner report like or
if if you lose a lot of weight, you report,
you know, being treated nicer by at work, being treated
nicer by the staff at a restaurant, all of that.
What some of these creators are saying is I'm just
not sugarcoating it. I'm being honest with you. I'm giving
you the truth. What do you say to that.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
You know, that's a great point.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
And this content does really fall on a spectrum because
you have like the most extreme content that really is
like explicitly glorifying and advocating for disordered eating, and then
you have this content like you just described that isn't
saying like you should be you should be having an
Eightian sort or it isn't saying you should be inter
exit or you should be binging and purging. So when
(13:08):
you have these women and it is overwhelmingly women, like
you see it with some male influencers too, and I
think that's really interesting and also concerning, but overwhelmingly like
the skinny Talk influencer, the archetype is this is a
woman who is blonde, white, extremely thin, conventionally attractive. She
(13:29):
lives in a beautiful apartment in New York City or
another big city, and she's sitting there and she's telling you, like,
this is your path to winning and succeeding at life,
and it starts with you having a lot of times
it's framed as self control or being healthy, and as
long as you reach this sort of sin ideal, then
other opportunities will open up for you and you'll be
(13:50):
happier and you'll be healthier and you'll be freer. And
they may be starting at a point where like there's
a kernel of truth to this, which is that then
people are treated better in society, But rather than confront
that or seek to push back against that status quo,
what they're doing is they're really reinforcing and perpetuating that
(14:12):
status quo and saying that it's the right thing to do.
And a lot of times, the way that you see
this in the rhetoric that they share is they'll talk
about how, over the past decade or so, there has
been a social movement to push back against the beauty
standard and thinness and disordered eating, and a lot of
times that's called the body positivity movement or the body
(14:34):
neutrality movement, or health at every size is another one
of these movements. And these skinny talk influencers will actually
attack and undermine these movements directly, and they'll say, like,
it is unhealthy to be it is unhealthy to be obese.
These movements are promoting obesity, they're promoting negative health outcomes,
(14:54):
and that's not true. Like this carries into a misinformation
disinformation territory in which a lot of these creators are
actively spreading very dangerous information around health. Because it is
true that you can be healthy at any size. It
is true that you don't need to adhere to the
ultra thin ideal to be healthy or happy, and in fact,
(15:17):
if you go too far along that pathway of losing weight,
you are unhealthy. It's sort of like this conversation and
this reframing of thinness and health completely loses out on
the fact that eating disorders are incredibly dangerous and efforts
to lose weight and maintain that extreme thinness that these
influencers are selling. For most people, that's actually going to
(15:39):
be much more unhealthy and lead to worse outcomes than
if they maintained like their average weight or the weight
that they feel most comfortable at.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Is it the mortality rate for eating disorders, It's the
second highest of any mental issue you can experience.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yes, after drug abuse and drug addiction like heroin.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Wow, let's take a quick break at our back.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
An adults can survive on just five hundred calories a day.
Restrictive diets are healthy, there's clean food and dirty food.
Having fat on your body is always unhealthy. These are
all lies that I see online all the time. They're
medical misinformation, plain and simple. But because we live in
a deeply fat phobic society, this kind of misinformation is
(16:41):
often tolerated, even normalized. It rarely gets treated with the
same urgency or scrutiny as other kinds of false health claims,
and that is a very serious problem. A lot of
my work is grounded in the mis and disinformation space,
and when it comes to health information specifically, so often
it's like the conversation gets boiled down to like vaccine
(17:03):
disinformation and things things that seem things that they are,
things that are kind of you can talk about them
from a certain specific kind of black white lens. I
feel less often are we talking about the way that
content that glorifies extreme thinness and disorder eating is just
like genuinely health miss and disinformation, right, Yes, the idea
(17:24):
that a grown adult could could have their caloric intake
be like eight hundred or nine hundred calories what a
child would eat, that's not true. There's just like less
unless you are in some rare situation where you are
working with a doctor for them. For the majority of people,
that's simply false. And if you are getting online and
(17:45):
spreading a false message about people's health on the internet,
I don't understand why we don't see that as a
clear cut miss and disinformation issues the way that you
do with other kinds of health miss and disinformation. Does
that make sense? Absolutely?
Speaker 2 (17:58):
And one thing that's Froen really helpful for me over
my reporting has been talking to nutritionists about what the
truth really is. And I think you have kind of
like a collapsing different degrees of failure ups lay here
because there is sort of a lack of communication about
what healthy eating and what a healthy body type is.
(18:19):
Generally speaking. I think most people in the public who
are on platforms like TikTok, or aren't even on platforms
like TikTok, have sort of a misguided understanding of what
health and diet and exercise and beauty mean because for
so many of us, for the vast majority of us,
our knowledge of these topics is based on what we
(18:40):
hear from other people in our lives and what we
hear through mass media, and those formats spread misinformation and disinformation.
I look at how a lot of these, like dieting
and exercising tips, they are passed down from women to
women through generations. You hear it from your mother, you
hear it from your grandmother. You have the exacting s
slogans going viral on skinny Talk today that were diet
(19:03):
slogans being advertised to women in the eighties decades ago.
It's just constantly recycling this same old messaging over and
over again, and ideally, social media platforms could be used
to take real information coming from people like nutritionists and
scientists and eating disorder of providers, and you could take
(19:24):
that and enshare that with the world. And I do
think we're starting to see a little bit of that
turn when it comes to content that glorifies disordered eating.
Platforms like TikTok can be a double edged sword. On
the one hand, they can surface harmful content to users
who might not have sought it out, but they can
also be a source of support, a place where people
(19:46):
struggling can find connection, resources, and real hope. Creators like
registered dietitian Michelle Pilipitch use TikTok to share accessible, judgment
free content about building a sustainable, healthy lifestyle, no diets
or restriction required.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Welcome back to my series From Bad to Balance, where
I take the foods you think are bad and make
them into a balanced meal. In your piece, you spoke
to creators like Michelle Pilipitch, who's a registered dietitian who
makes kind of anti skinny talk content almost sort of
to retrain folks as brains against that kind of thinking.
Do you see social media platforms almost as this double
(20:23):
edged sword where there are folks showing up to use
the platform to glorify disordered eating and extreme fitness, and
also folks there who are using those same platforms to
sort of retrain folks to say like, hey, actually this
isn't healthy, Actually this is misinformation. Here's a better way
to be thinking about.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
It, exactly. And I think that a lot of times.
And you see this with eating disorders in particular. There's
a lot of legislation and a lot of activism happening
right now that's against social media, and oftentimes issues like
eating disorders will be framed within this anti social media
activism as like, we shouldn't let kids use social media
because eating disorders are rising at a scary rate among teenagers,
(21:05):
and we think it's because of social media. So the
answer here is to just never let them use TikTok.
But I really disagree with this because the way that
I see it is that social media is a double
edged sword. In the same way that it's been weaponized
against progress, it could.
Speaker 4 (21:20):
In fact be used for progress.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
And you see that with creators like Michelle who, like
you said, she's a nutritionist who I interviewed, and she
is so great and She's such a good example of
this because she what she did is she listened to
her patients who were telling her about this messaging that
they were hearing on platforms like TikTok, and she went
on TikTok and she started creating viral messaging in the
(21:42):
opposite direction that was actually informing people about what healthy
eating looks like, what health looks like, encouraging people to
share things that helped them recover from eating disorders instead
of what encouraged them to go down this path. And
her success, as well as other creators doing the same thing,
looking at their success, the way that I see it
(22:03):
is that we should actually be encouraging more speech around
these topics on social media rather than looking at how
we can limit this sort of speech. I think that
putting more of it out there, giving people the information
where they already are, reaching people where they are, I
think is the way forward here. And the flip side
of sort of these attempts to censor social media or
(22:27):
moderate social media is that time and time again, platforms
like Tumbler, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, all of them, they've all
made attempts to just ban pro eating disorder content they've
banned specific influencers, they've banned entire communities, they've targeted types
of rhetoric. And what we've always seen happen is that
(22:49):
it just migrates to another platform or just shape shifts
so that it can create a new form. So these
efforts to stop this content in its tracks have not
been successful. What we are seeing some success with I've
spoken to some people who are young, who are on
the pathway to recovery from eating disorders who found this
content on social media that actually helped them.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Trying to get social media platforms to curb this kind
of content used to be my job. We compile examples
to paint a bigger portrait, essentially saying you all are
not doing a good enough job keeping content that glorifies
disordered eating off of your platform. But what the leadership
at these platforms often seem to hear was just take
down these specific bad posts. They rarely engage with a
(23:34):
deeper issue of why this kind of content keep showing
up in the first place, or how to stop that
long term. It was incredibly frustrating, So I want to
talk about that a little bit. In a former life,
I worked in the sort of platform, advocacy space, and
so skinny talk. I personally met with leaders from TikTok
to bring corners of skinny talk to their attention. And
(23:57):
what it's interesting is I agree with you. I think
that the leaders at these platforms at least did tell
me like, oh, we're interested in stamping out this kind
of content. It goes against our terms of service. They
would ban the hashtag skinny talk. Sometimes within hours it
would be like skinny talk but spelled out with ones
or something, or like like the way that creators would
(24:21):
find a way around whatever kind of ban or whatever
kind of moderation these platforms would roll out. It made
me think, I don't know if this is actually something
that they can that they can eradicate from their platforms.
And you're saying that, like, well, maybe they shouldn't even
be focusing on that. Instead, they should be focusing on
bringing people who are able to make content around the
(24:42):
other side of like what you know, what actually is
healthy eating and like thinking about things a little bit
differently that actually might be more effective.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
I think so, and I think that you can have
a little bit of both. When I've done this reporting
on these really extreme pro eating disorder communities on platforms
like Acts. I do think that there absolutely is a
line where you do need to be moderating these communities.
And I think it's a good thing that in response
to some of my previous reporting, like x came in
(25:09):
and shut down some of these communities and they popped
back up again and they started growing again.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
But I do think that shutting down that.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Community that really toxic space, it was helpful because it
did at least stop the growth of some of these
massive communities in their tracks. So I don't think it
is a complete like a net negative or positive in
one direction or the other. I do think some moderation
that still needs to happen. But I think looking at
sort of the longer term issue, it's clear that we
(25:38):
cannot solve this problem just by like trying to ignore
it or stamp it out or censor it. We have
got to address it head on, and we have to
make that connection between what is happening in these online
spaces and what happens offline, because offline, the messaging is
all too familiar. When you are walking down the street
(25:58):
in New York City and you see the billboards and
you see the people around you, you begin to understand
that thinness and the types of things that are preached
about on skinny Talk are not just an online issue.
This is a reflection and a mirror distortion of the
world that we live in and have honestly lived in
for quite some time.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
We can't really talk about skinny Talk without talking about
Live Schmidt. Before she was banned, Live built a massive
following with TikTok videos that kind of looked like wellness,
you know, pastel smoothies, four im workouts, tiny meals in
perfect lighting. But beneath that esthetic was something darker, a
steady stream of content that promoted disordered eating and a
(26:42):
toxic obsession with thinness. She became the poster child for
a certain kind of that girl content, the kind the
algorithm devours, and she took it even further by creating
a paid subscriber only platform called Skinny Society, where women
and girls as young as high schoolers traded restrictive eating
tips and competed over restrictive eating practices. When the backlash came,
(27:06):
it wasn't the platform that stepped in first. It was
the users, calling out how content like lives pushed harmful
ideals to millions, especially young women and girls. After a
critical piece in The Cut, Live's TikTok page was banned,
so she moved to Instagram, where her content has been demonetized.
Her account may be gone from TikTok, but her influence,
(27:28):
well that's still everywhere. I know that's come tarsh, but
it's just you're in charge of your lifestyle and it shows.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
And so, yeah, being skinny is like the literal new Burkin.
So do you want to be a Burkin or do
you want to be a thrift store back?
Speaker 1 (27:48):
What do you make of the fact that people are
able to monetize this, make a business out of this?
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Yes, this to me is a really concerning sort of
evolution of like the pro eating disorder space, is the
ability for influencers to build these monetizable followings, because that's
something that you didn't necessarily see on Tumblr in like
the late aughts or the early twenty tens. Over the
past ten years, as social media has become so much
(28:18):
more all encompassing, as more people have spend more time
on social media, as it's wormed its way into every
facet of our lives, you've also seen the ability to
make money from social media grow exponentially, and so it's
not a surprising trend that you're seeing this in the
eating disorder space. But I find these communities to be
like particularly concerning because when you're paying for something and
(28:43):
when you're being put in these now like more private
spaces with like minded people, that is such a strong
conduit for more and more and more extreme thought. And
as a result of that reporting in the cut, Instagram
demonetized Liveschmidt's like sort of pain. But every time I
go on Instagram, every time I go on Instagram reels,
(29:04):
which is like a button on your page that you're
gonna hit accidentally, even if you don't mean to go
to it, I am bombarded with Live Schmidt's content.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
To this day, every daubt.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
And it's just like I it's inavoidable, it's inescapable, and
there's something very compelling about the what she does where
it's like I find myself almost unable to look away.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
More.
Speaker 5 (29:29):
After a quick break, let's get right back into it.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Well, something that you said that really reminded me of
Live is how when folks are kicked off of one
platform who are making this kind of content or demonetized
or moderated in some way. It's like she will say
things like, oh, I was a banned from talk for
spreading the truth about you know, but they don't want
you to know, like I'm just being honest and people
(30:05):
can't handle it. She has made being moderated off of
TikTok and having to like pop up on Instagram and
then being demonetized there almost like a like a branding
thing of like, don't you want to know what I'm saying?
That it's too real for the Instagram sensors.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yes, And it is like that kind of rhetoric is
unmistakably like similar to what you see from like the
alt right and what you see from conservatives who have
similarly mastered these online landscapes. They all use really similar rhetoric.
And I think that part of the larger picture here
that I also think has been kind of unexplored, is
(30:44):
that it's no coincidence that you see rising conservatism dominating
online spaces and the offline world, you see rising authoritarianism
around the globe at the same time that you see
this massive resurgence of pro eating just and just content
that glorifies extreme thinness for women. These movements are connected,
(31:05):
and Michelle Pilovich, the nutritionist, actually recently did a post
about this where she was like, if you are against
Trump like and you are a woman, and you are
a posor of the modern conservative party, you should be
nourishing your body. You should be eating enough food because
the ultimate goal of these sort of conservative, very misogynistic
spaces is that they want.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Women to be small.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
They want women to take up less space, They want
them to be frail, unable to help themselves, and they
want them to be very preoccupied with their own appearance,
because it becomes an obsession that distracts from you being
able to participate in democracy to the fullest extent. It's
a distraction that prevents women from being able to occupy
the same positions that men do. So this sort of
(31:49):
pro eating disorder content is part of this larger picture
of women's oppression. And it's just no coincidence that, like
the influencers in the alt right spaces and the influencers
in the Skinese faces are using the exact same types
of strategies.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
So I clock this all the time on social media,
and I feel like whenever someone says it out loud,
just the comments are like what are you talking about?
You're crazy da da da, And I mean I'll see
content that's like, you know, glorifying. It's not just being thin,
it's thin, blonde, rich, partnered sometimes like quiet and subservient.
(32:26):
Like it's just like like when you pull apart, the
kind of things that they're saying goes along with with
like the good life in scare quotes that will become
available to you if you are first thin. It really
is like it becomes very clear that this is about
a very oppressive vision of the future where women are quiet, frail,
(32:46):
not really participating fully in public and civic life. Like
it's it all goes together. It does.
Speaker 4 (32:52):
It does.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
And a lot of times when you have these skinny
Talk influencers, they will talk about like like LUs Schmidt
talks about this, She's like, you need to be having fun,
you need to be living like a full, fulfilling lifestyle.
But what she's modeling and what she's showing as the
example of that is that she is like a model.
So she's telling women that they should aspire to their
(33:13):
currency and their worth and their value being their appearance.
And part of the flip side of this that's very unfortunate,
both for live Schmidt as an individual and for all
of the women and girls who she's influencing, is that
no matter how skinny you are, no matter how much
you are able to adhere to this beauty standard in
your youth, you will age out.
Speaker 4 (33:32):
There is no future for you.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
If your entire worth and being is rooted in how
you look as a young, conventionally attractive person. And that
is really unfortunate because I think that along the way,
women and girls are going to learn that these types
of expectations and these types of standards are built purposefully
to be something that can never be truly met and
(33:55):
never truly last.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Is this such a productive way to think about what
we were put on this planet to do? Yeah, Like
obsess about our weight and are the way that we look? Yes? Yes.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
And you see this sort of rhetoric carryover into the
obsession around anti aging, and you have like billionaires who
are investing so much of their time and energy and
money into trying to literally stop the passage of time.
And it's like it's all connected because the modern conservative
movement is rhetoric that is about making a return to
(34:30):
what America was quote unquote great making your turn to
your childhood to sort of the American idealisms that never
truly existed, but you can just pretend that it was
in the past and it's something that we can go
back to. And the beauty standard in this ideal of
thinness fits into that so perfectly because it's something that's
sold as an attainable ideal, but you can never actually
(34:52):
truly get there when you go down this path of
self optimization or trying to stop aging, or trying to
constantly fit the ever shifting beauty standard. It's not something
you can win.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
No, absolutely not. And yeah, I agree with you. I
don't think it's a surprise that we have these rising
influencers saying the best thing you can be is hot, rich,
thin and mean. And the rise of this I concerned
this new conservative ideology.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Yes, yes, And people want to create this distinction, this
differentiation between what they view as like capital pe politics,
very serious, like what's happening in Congress, what are the
actual policies, what's the bill of the the text of
the law. But in reality, what the vast majority of
people are interested in is not capital pe politics, but
(35:43):
rather capital c culture and people on the right understand this.
I think it was Steve Bannon who said that politics
is downstream of culture, and that was part of the
key to unlocking Trump's wide stream like a wider appeal,
was creating this like cultural image around him that then
became a totem that his voters could project their desires onto.
(36:05):
And you see the same thing happening within the influencer space,
within the social media space, is that conservatism it doesn't
have as much should do with who's in office or
what they are doing in their position as elected officials,
as it has to do with what is the dominating culture,
what is everyone spending their time doing, what is the
what are the goals and the aspirations of the public.
(36:28):
And this has a powerful political connotation, and it's not
frivolous at all. It translates over to how people show
up and how they vote in the ballot box at elections.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
Things like patriarchy and rigid gender roles don't just harm
women and girls, they hurt everyone. Online, young men are
also being said pretty toxic messages about how they need
to look to be successful. Many are being pushed into
a practice known as looks maxing, a movement that encourages
extreme physical self optimization in the name of attractiveness. For
(37:02):
folks who have never heard that word before, what is
looks maxing?
Speaker 2 (37:05):
So looks maxing is kind of like the male version
of this that I alluded to a little bit earlier.
And I find this really interesting and it's really sad.
I spoke to this young man named Steven Iima who
is a college student in Texas, and he's this young
black man who has since pivoted his content into like
anti looks baxing and anti eating disorders, but he initially
(37:28):
fell down the rabbit hole. And so what looks maxing
is is it's a beauty standard for men that is
being sold again as this like attainable thing where if
you just do these like facial exercises and if you
just copy all of these like tips and tricks, then
you will be able to fit the male beauty ideal.
Speaker 4 (37:48):
You will be muscular, you will.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
Have very defined like jawline and cheek bones. And it
looks really bizarre on the surface to people who aren't
familiar with this subculture, and it gets mocked and made.
Speaker 4 (38:01):
Fun of a lot because it will literally.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
Be like you have to suck in your cheeks so
that you can have like the most pronounced cheekbones possible,
or like there was an article about how some of
the people in the looks maxxine communicate in the Looks
Maxing community were advocating like hammering your face into the
position that you wanted it to be in. It's alarming,
and so what's concerning about it to me also is
(38:25):
that you see the exact same sort of behaviors within
the extreme pro eating disorder spaces, like the extreme calorie deficits.
That's a mirror happening for boys and young men, or
for boys and men. And what I talked to Steven,
one thing that he told me is like this community
sold this like bake promise to him that if he
(38:47):
just did all of these things, he would have more
success with women, and he would be happier and his
life would be better. But when he got into that
community as a young black man, he realized that it
was incredibly racist. And this was ultimately the thing that
broke him out of it was he was like, there's
no place for me within this community if I'm not white,
(39:07):
And that understanding unlocked kind of like a new perspective
where he was like, this whole thing is built on
lies and fabrications, and it's just about harming yourself ultimately.
I think eating disorders are kind of a form of
self harm. And so within the looks maxing community and
within other parts of this online culture, you see this
desire to control and restrict and hurt yourself, and that's
(39:31):
sold to you as like how your life becomes better,
how you become more disciplined, how you experience more success.
Speaker 4 (39:36):
But for the people who are trapped.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Within these communities, it is a very toxic cycle of
actually beating down their self worth and actually feeling worse
about how they look. And maybe using you fixed some
part of how you look, but now you've identified all
of the other things that need fixing. So it's really
bad for self esteem.
Speaker 4 (39:55):
And I think it also.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Over time produces worse outcomes in terms of healthy living.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Do you see all of this getting better or getting worse?
Speaker 2 (40:06):
What we often see when we pick up on these
like big cultural shifts is that things get a little worse,
but then ultimately they do get better. Like I think
things we're on the pathway for things to continue getting
worse as of right now. But the fact that you
have people picking up on this and realizing it is
a sign that the pendulum will swing back. And I
(40:26):
do believe that the pendulum will swing back, but I
think that it takes within this platform environment that these
social media companies have created for us to exist within.
You have to build up so much momentum for the
algorithm to redirect itself in any new direction, and right now,
all of that momentum is being built up behind things
like skinning Talk. So it's going to take a lot
(40:48):
of people speaking out against this and making content and
opposition for this before the major platform landscapes begin to
reflect sort of the opposition. But I do have fake
that we'll get there.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
Yeah. I just recently decided I started weightlifting for the
first time a couple of years, a couple of months ago,
and just like again, I'm not I'm not interested in
losing way, I'm not interested. I'm just interested in learning
about weightlifting as a beginner weightlifter. The way that my
none of my algorithms will ever be the same. Like
like the stuff that the stuff that Instagram now is
(41:22):
convinced that I want to see simply because I am
interested in weightlifting is like, oh, certainly you're anti vax
I'm like, wait, what, like like the way, like my
algorithm will never be the same.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
I know, I know, I'm in the exact same boat.
I've spent so many months reporting on like eating disorders
that every social media platform is now convinced that I
am part of this like rabbit hole cycle. And that
is worrying to me because although the average social media
user is not a journalist studying these things for months
at a time, I feel like I'm living what someone
(41:54):
who's being on the pathway to being radicalized is seeing
on their social media feeds. And it's this is what
a lot of people are seeing on their social media feeds.
That's so concerning because there's just nothing healthy about being
bombarded with hours worth of this content on a daily basis.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
And as we were talking about before, if we are
looking at this content with a critical eye, like and like,
it still gets me. I have to like catch myself saying, actually,
you don't want your body to look like this, or like, actually,
that's not a reasonable amount of calories for an adult
woman to be eating. I come on, if that's if
that's how it's hitting me as somebody who was looking
at this from a critical eye, imagine somebody who was
(42:32):
just scrolling, or somebody who was very young.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
Yes, yes, if I I can't even imagine having a
kid in this like social media landscape. But if I did,
I feel like if I were parent, I would want
to be having honestly, like daily conversations like with my
child about this to try to push back against some
of the narratives that they will inevitably be hearing not
(42:54):
only online but in their classrooms, among their friends and
their peers, for older relatives, or from people in their community.
Like these messages around thinness and weight and health and
beauty are so pervasive and it takes so much work
to even be into breaks through on a personal level and.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Fight back against them. Is that what you would suggest
parents should be doing, like really having conversations intentionally with
the young people in their life and maybe doing some
internal recalibration of the way that they internally think about
these issues.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
Yes, one million percent. I think one of the biggest
things is that when you are in a position of
influencing someone else, whether you're a parent, whether you're someone
who does have a big social media following, or even
just in the way you interact with everyone around you.
It's like you do have to do that self introspection
to be like, what sort of negative and toxic and
harmful ideologies do I have to work on? And what
(43:50):
am I projecting to the people around me? What am
I modeling to the people around me. This can be
something as simple as when you grow up and your
mom looks in the mirror and is like, I hate
this about myself, or when your mother or when your
parental figure is constantly talking about because Dad's due this too,
constantly talking about like I need to lose weight.
Speaker 4 (44:08):
I need to go on a diet.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
I hate the way that I look you're modeling to
your kids and to the people who look up to
you and who are around you. That you should constantly
be self critical and then you should constantly be in
the state of working on yourself. And I think that
that is one of the most insidious aspects of diet culture,
is that it occupies so much of our time, energy, attention, money,
(44:30):
and lifestyle to trying to reach this unattainable ideal. So
I think that's something that we can all do, is
sort of do that introspection about the ways that we
carry diet culture into our lives and how that might
be affecting the people around us.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
If someone out there listening needs help with all of this,
what can I do?
Speaker 2 (44:48):
If you are struggling with this or if this content
has been having an effect on you, There are lots
of resources out there. There are more mental health professionals
and supports out there than ever, so never think that
you won't be able to get help or that it's
too late for you. There are always resources and things
that you can do to make things better.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
If you're looking for support, check out Project Heal, an
organization with the mission to break down systemic healthcare and
financial barriers to eating disorder healing. Check them out the
Project hel dot org. Got a story about an interesting
thing in tech, or just want to say hi, You
can reach us at Hello at tegody dot com. You
(45:30):
can also find transcripts for today's episode at tenggody dot com.
There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by
me Bridget Toad. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed.
Creative Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is
our producer and sound engineer. Michael Almado is our contributing producer.
I'm your host, bridget Toad. If you want to help
us grow, rate and review.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
Us on Apple podcasts.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts A heart
Then he lived.
Speaker 3 (46:04):
Long, He lived
Quick heads Up. Today's episode talks about disordered eating.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
They want women to be small, they want women to
take up less space.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
There are no girls on the Internet. As a production
of iHeartRadio and unbost Creative, I'm Bridge Tad and this
is there are no girls on the Internet. Open TikTok
and it won't take long before you find it. A
perfect body, a suspiciously low calorie what I eat in
(00:33):
the day, A silent morning routine drenched in beaged and disciplined.
Welcome to skinny Talk. A world where thinness isn't just
the goal, it's the ideology. But this isn't just about
diets or aesthetics. It's about control, and it's about what
our culture expects women to be. Small, quiet, beautiful and
(00:54):
preoccupied with staying that way. And platforms like TikTok aren't
just reflecting the values, they're amplifying them. Journalist cat ten
Barge of Spitfire News has been reporting on how social
media glorifies extreme thinness and how it harms women and girls.
But what sets to work apart is that she doesn't
just cover the tech itself. She looks at how people
(01:15):
actually use it and what that reveals about the world
we're building online.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Particularly when you report on technology, A lot of times
it's coming from a male centered perspective and through a
sort of male lens, where the things that people are
actually doing with the technology are secondary to the companies
that are involved the products they're releasing like the technology itself,
and both sides are ultimately crucial to understanding the whole,
(01:42):
but too frequently we leave out sort of the negative
societal consequences of technology and internet culture.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Cat's reporting sits at the intersection of gender, social media,
and technology. She spent years digging into what women and
girls are doing online, beat that's often dismissed as not
serious news, but that underestimation has actually put her ahead
of the curve, catching major cultural shifts before they hit
the mainstream. What drew you to reporting on this kind
(02:12):
of stuff?
Speaker 3 (02:13):
For me?
Speaker 2 (02:14):
I grew up in like fully the social media age,
So by the time that I was in high school,
I was on YouTube, Tumbler, snapchat like all the time,
and I had aspirations of becoming a journalist, But I
didn't initially think that I would be reporting on these.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
Types of topics.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
I saw myself as more of a quote unquote like
serious news reporter. So like when I was in college
studying journalism, I was really looking at covering politics and
like politics through a very traditional lens. But over the
course of my college career, I over time realized that
I had all this knowledge about like influencers and social
(02:53):
media spaces, and that that was becoming more and more
important to our wider cultural converse and the.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Way that we all live.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
So when I graduated, I specifically pursued reporting on like
the YouTube space and the influencer space, And over the years,
what's been really interesting is that space has become more
and more relevant to the sort of mainstream politics that
I had originally thought I would be reporting on. You
kind of caught it early, Yeah, I feel like I
(03:24):
was like kind of on this wave and a lot
of particularly women journalists who I looked up to at
the time that I was in college, women like Taylor Lorenz,
has been a big mentor to me, and she was
someone who was at these major legacy institutions like saying
this stuff is really important, and it was really ahead
of the curve as to what we all now know,
(03:44):
which is that this makes up so much of what
our daily lives are like, She's right.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
What's happening in online spaces like skinny talk says a
lot about our culture and our politics. Skinny talk isn't
an official category. It's a term used to describe content
that centers on extreme thinness, weight loss, and often glorifies
disordered eating. It's the kind of stuff that can quietly
take over your feed depending on what the algorithm thinks
you want to see. TikTok recently announce they were banning
(04:14):
skinny talk. Now if you search the hashtag, you'll be
redirected to eating disordered resources instead of videos that this
content is not just about weight. It reflects a deeper
social message that women shouldn't just be thin, we should
be thin, hot, quiet, and constantly working to stay that way.
And while these ideas aren't really new, algorithms are turbo
(04:34):
charging them for a digital age. Kat you covered skinny
talk for Wired. This kind of content is definitely connected
to the current political and social climate, but it is
also not new because I remember it being all over Tumblr.
So what's changed about the way this kind of content
shows up on social media platforms like TikTok today?
Speaker 2 (04:56):
What I saw happening last year across a number of
different means stream social media platforms. One of them was
x formerly Twitter, another one was TikTok, and I'm been
seeing a lot on Instagram too. Is this corner of
the Internet that was previously really niche, This like pro
eating disorder part of the Internet, which, like you said,
(05:16):
it's been around for decades, even before social media. It
was on forums, Like from the time that the Internet existed,
there were communities of people who were sort of like
when you go into these communities, what it is is
it's like a space for people who are experiencing eating
disorders to connect. But unfortunately, the culture that flourishes within
(05:37):
them encourages and sort of promotes eating disorders. And so
what I saw happening last year is this culture had
escaped containment from these niche community spaces and was being
algorithmically pushed to almost everyone on these social media platforms.
I had people, multiple people reaching out to me being like,
this pro eating disorder stuff is on my for you page,
(06:00):
This pro eating disort of stuff is right when I
open up Twitter, it's the first tweet that I see
that's being pushed to me. And what I eventually figured
out is that these social media platforms, in the process
of developing new features like community tabs and tweaking their algorithms,
as well as some of these broader cultural changes that
were happening, it was a perfect storm where all of
(06:22):
a sudden pro eating disorder, content went from something you
had to seek out to something you could no longer avoid.
And so skinny talk is another iteration of this where
if you are a TikTok user, even now, even they've
they've recently banned the skinny talk hashtag in response to
a lot of this great reporting that's come out. But
even now when I open up TikTok, I cannot avoid
(06:45):
it is like my feed is cluttered with all of
these posts that are glorifying extreme thinness, influencing young women
in particular and girls to have an extreme calorie deficit.
There's content for boys and men that in coourages them
to lose a lot of weight, really dramatically and drastically,
And it's like this toxic soup that I find to
(07:07):
be like so harmful to people's mental health, especially a
disturbing kind of side effect of where we're at with
social media.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
I have experienced the exact same thing as I said.
I've been on the Internet for a really long time,
and only very very recently, like in the last few years.
I knew that kind of content was out there, but
this is the first time that it's really been surfaced
for me. Right, I went my entire life never thinking
about whether or not a human is meant to have
(07:35):
a flat stomach. It just never came up. And now
it is everywhere. And I am not somebody who has,
you know, struggled with disorder, eating and like real body
image issues in my life. But only in the last
few years have I found myself thinking about this because
it is all I am seeing on social media, and
I can only imagine what that would be like if
(07:56):
I wasn't an older person, Right, if I'm fourteen, fifty,
te teen, sixteen. If the way that it's impacting me
as like a fully formed adult, how is it impacting
youth who are being surfaced as kind of content on
the rent?
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Now? Yes, I've talked to like at least half a
dozen experts in the eating disorder space, people who work
with treatment, people who studied this through an academic lens,
and what I've heard is that over the course of
the last few decades, eating disorders have emerged as a
phenomenon and they have skyrocketed alongside the proliferation of mass media.
(08:31):
So what that means is that when TV and magazines
became much more commonplace in like the twentieth.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
Century, you started to see women.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
And girls in particular, they were encountering like cover images
on magazines, they were they were encountering women in commercials
and on TV and in movies who fit this beauty
standard that oftentimes was extreme thinness. And this beauty standard
it comes from a lot of different places, but it's
also beaut standard that prioritizes whiteness. It's a beauty standard
(09:03):
that prioritizes these sort of conventional Eurocentric features, and it's
a beauty standard that really overemphasizes being thin. And you
see diet culture reflect this. You see the way that
a diet and exercise are incentivized, in the way that
thinness is incentivized, and sort of all walks of life
all contribute to sort of the social factors that drive
(09:26):
eating disorders.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
So here's something I keep noticing in content that flirts
with disordered eating. The people making it rarely think they're
promoting anything harmful. They say they're just being real and
that life really is easier when you're thinner. And the
worst part is they are not entirely wrong, but calling
that honesty doesn't do anything to challenge the system. In fact,
(09:51):
it only props it up. It tells us this is
just how the world works, so don't blot it fighting it,
And that's the real damage.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
One thing that I have heard from a lot of
experts and other reporters in this field is like, it's
not just a problem of it all being in your
head or even what you're seeing on TikTok. It's like
in quote unquote real life. In these offline settings, women
will report that they are treated better if they are thinner.
Speaker 4 (10:20):
People.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Strangers will treat them better. When you go to a restaurant,
the waite staff will treat you nicer. Potential future romantic
partners might seek you out more or treat you nicer,
and you'll be given more opportunities professionally. A lot of
times as a woman, the closer you adhere to the
beauty standard. So this online culture, it's not creating eating disorders.
(10:43):
It's responding to this culture that already existed. But what
it's also doing is it's exponentially growing this culture. It's
like it's becoming something that's so inescapable and so unavoidable.
And another interesting thing I've picked up on within my
conversations with other reports or so I've been writing about
this is that when we look at this content for
(11:03):
extended periods of time, when I watch dozens of skinny
talk videos, when I spend hundreds of hours in these
pro eating disorder communities on platforms like x, I can
feel the effect, like it's a very tangible like I
can feel this and how bad it is for my
mental health in a way that I've reported on, you know,
(11:24):
violent misogyny, I've reported on political extremism, disinformation, I've gone
into some of the darkest corners of the Internet. But
this stuff, it like it is affecting in a way
that I previously haven't experienced.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Let's just say I can relate. I recently started making
a few changes to support my own health, including getting
into weightlifting, and just from showing a very casual interest
in weightlifting online, my social feeds instantly got extreme. Suddenly
I was being shown content of women with INCREDI lean
bodies and all of these intense routines that they do
(12:04):
to maintain those bodies. And honestly, I think it got
in my head more than any kind of content ever
has before. Something that you point to in your piece
that I have also seen with this content is how
a lot of the creators who are pushing it, like,
I don't think that they would say, oh, this is
pro eating disorder content or whatever. Sometimes they'll even say, well,
(12:25):
I'm just being honest. You know the culture that you
just described where people who are thinner report like or
if if you lose a lot of weight, you report,
you know, being treated nicer by at work, being treated
nicer by the staff at a restaurant, all of that.
What some of these creators are saying is I'm just
not sugarcoating it. I'm being honest with you. I'm giving
you the truth. What do you say to that.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
You know, that's a great point.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
And this content does really fall on a spectrum because
you have like the most extreme content that really is
like explicitly glorifying and advocating for disordered eating, and then
you have this content like you just described that isn't
saying like you should be you should be having an
Eightian sort or it isn't saying you should be inter
exit or you should be binging and purging. So when
(13:08):
you have these women and it is overwhelmingly women, like
you see it with some male influencers too, and I
think that's really interesting and also concerning, but overwhelmingly like
the skinny Talk influencer, the archetype is this is a
woman who is blonde, white, extremely thin, conventionally attractive. She
(13:29):
lives in a beautiful apartment in New York City or
another big city, and she's sitting there and she's telling you, like,
this is your path to winning and succeeding at life,
and it starts with you having a lot of times
it's framed as self control or being healthy, and as
long as you reach this sort of sin ideal, then
other opportunities will open up for you and you'll be
(13:50):
happier and you'll be healthier and you'll be freer. And
they may be starting at a point where like there's
a kernel of truth to this, which is that then
people are treated better in society, But rather than confront
that or seek to push back against that status quo,
what they're doing is they're really reinforcing and perpetuating that
(14:12):
status quo and saying that it's the right thing to do.
And a lot of times, the way that you see
this in the rhetoric that they share is they'll talk
about how, over the past decade or so, there has
been a social movement to push back against the beauty
standard and thinness and disordered eating, and a lot of
times that's called the body positivity movement or the body
(14:34):
neutrality movement, or health at every size is another one
of these movements. And these skinny talk influencers will actually
attack and undermine these movements directly, and they'll say, like,
it is unhealthy to be it is unhealthy to be obese.
These movements are promoting obesity, they're promoting negative health outcomes,
(14:54):
and that's not true. Like this carries into a misinformation
disinformation territory in which a lot of these creators are
actively spreading very dangerous information around health. Because it is
true that you can be healthy at any size. It
is true that you don't need to adhere to the
ultra thin ideal to be healthy or happy, and in fact,
(15:17):
if you go too far along that pathway of losing weight,
you are unhealthy. It's sort of like this conversation and
this reframing of thinness and health completely loses out on
the fact that eating disorders are incredibly dangerous and efforts
to lose weight and maintain that extreme thinness that these
influencers are selling. For most people, that's actually going to
(15:39):
be much more unhealthy and lead to worse outcomes than
if they maintained like their average weight or the weight
that they feel most comfortable at.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Is it the mortality rate for eating disorders, It's the
second highest of any mental issue you can experience.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yes, after drug abuse and drug addiction like heroin.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Wow, let's take a quick break at our back.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
An adults can survive on just five hundred calories a day.
Restrictive diets are healthy, there's clean food and dirty food.
Having fat on your body is always unhealthy. These are
all lies that I see online all the time. They're
medical misinformation, plain and simple. But because we live in
a deeply fat phobic society, this kind of misinformation is
(16:41):
often tolerated, even normalized. It rarely gets treated with the
same urgency or scrutiny as other kinds of false health claims,
and that is a very serious problem. A lot of
my work is grounded in the mis and disinformation space,
and when it comes to health information specifically, so often
it's like the conversation gets boiled down to like vaccine
(17:03):
disinformation and things things that seem things that they are,
things that are kind of you can talk about them
from a certain specific kind of black white lens. I
feel less often are we talking about the way that
content that glorifies extreme thinness and disorder eating is just
like genuinely health miss and disinformation, right, Yes, the idea
(17:24):
that a grown adult could could have their caloric intake
be like eight hundred or nine hundred calories what a
child would eat, that's not true. There's just like less
unless you are in some rare situation where you are
working with a doctor for them. For the majority of people,
that's simply false. And if you are getting online and
(17:45):
spreading a false message about people's health on the internet,
I don't understand why we don't see that as a
clear cut miss and disinformation issues the way that you
do with other kinds of health miss and disinformation. Does
that make sense? Absolutely?
Speaker 2 (17:58):
And one thing that's Froen really helpful for me over
my reporting has been talking to nutritionists about what the
truth really is. And I think you have kind of
like a collapsing different degrees of failure ups lay here
because there is sort of a lack of communication about
what healthy eating and what a healthy body type is.
(18:19):
Generally speaking. I think most people in the public who
are on platforms like TikTok, or aren't even on platforms
like TikTok, have sort of a misguided understanding of what
health and diet and exercise and beauty mean because for
so many of us, for the vast majority of us,
our knowledge of these topics is based on what we
(18:40):
hear from other people in our lives and what we
hear through mass media, and those formats spread misinformation and disinformation.
I look at how a lot of these, like dieting
and exercising tips, they are passed down from women to
women through generations. You hear it from your mother, you
hear it from your grandmother. You have the exacting s
slogans going viral on skinny Talk today that were diet
(19:03):
slogans being advertised to women in the eighties decades ago.
It's just constantly recycling this same old messaging over and
over again, and ideally, social media platforms could be used
to take real information coming from people like nutritionists and
scientists and eating disorder of providers, and you could take
(19:24):
that and enshare that with the world. And I do
think we're starting to see a little bit of that
turn when it comes to content that glorifies disordered eating.
Platforms like TikTok can be a double edged sword. On
the one hand, they can surface harmful content to users
who might not have sought it out, but they can
also be a source of support, a place where people
(19:46):
struggling can find connection, resources, and real hope. Creators like
registered dietitian Michelle Pilipitch use TikTok to share accessible, judgment
free content about building a sustainable, healthy lifestyle, no diets
or restriction required.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Welcome back to my series From Bad to Balance, where
I take the foods you think are bad and make
them into a balanced meal. In your piece, you spoke
to creators like Michelle Pilipitch, who's a registered dietitian who
makes kind of anti skinny talk content almost sort of
to retrain folks as brains against that kind of thinking.
Do you see social media platforms almost as this double
(20:23):
edged sword where there are folks showing up to use
the platform to glorify disordered eating and extreme fitness, and
also folks there who are using those same platforms to
sort of retrain folks to say like, hey, actually this
isn't healthy, Actually this is misinformation. Here's a better way
to be thinking about.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
It, exactly. And I think that a lot of times.
And you see this with eating disorders in particular. There's
a lot of legislation and a lot of activism happening
right now that's against social media, and oftentimes issues like
eating disorders will be framed within this anti social media
activism as like, we shouldn't let kids use social media
because eating disorders are rising at a scary rate among teenagers,
(21:05):
and we think it's because of social media. So the
answer here is to just never let them use TikTok.
But I really disagree with this because the way that
I see it is that social media is a double
edged sword. In the same way that it's been weaponized
against progress, it could.
Speaker 4 (21:20):
In fact be used for progress.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
And you see that with creators like Michelle who, like
you said, she's a nutritionist who I interviewed, and she
is so great and She's such a good example of
this because she what she did is she listened to
her patients who were telling her about this messaging that
they were hearing on platforms like TikTok, and she went
on TikTok and she started creating viral messaging in the
(21:42):
opposite direction that was actually informing people about what healthy
eating looks like, what health looks like, encouraging people to
share things that helped them recover from eating disorders instead
of what encouraged them to go down this path. And
her success, as well as other creators doing the same thing,
looking at their success, the way that I see it
(22:03):
is that we should actually be encouraging more speech around
these topics on social media rather than looking at how
we can limit this sort of speech. I think that
putting more of it out there, giving people the information
where they already are, reaching people where they are, I
think is the way forward here. And the flip side
of sort of these attempts to censor social media or
(22:27):
moderate social media is that time and time again, platforms
like Tumbler, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, all of them, they've all
made attempts to just ban pro eating disorder content they've
banned specific influencers, they've banned entire communities, they've targeted types
of rhetoric. And what we've always seen happen is that
(22:49):
it just migrates to another platform or just shape shifts
so that it can create a new form. So these
efforts to stop this content in its tracks have not
been successful. What we are seeing some success with I've
spoken to some people who are young, who are on
the pathway to recovery from eating disorders who found this
content on social media that actually helped them.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Trying to get social media platforms to curb this kind
of content used to be my job. We compile examples
to paint a bigger portrait, essentially saying you all are
not doing a good enough job keeping content that glorifies
disordered eating off of your platform. But what the leadership
at these platforms often seem to hear was just take
down these specific bad posts. They rarely engage with a
(23:34):
deeper issue of why this kind of content keep showing
up in the first place, or how to stop that
long term. It was incredibly frustrating, So I want to
talk about that a little bit. In a former life,
I worked in the sort of platform, advocacy space, and
so skinny talk. I personally met with leaders from TikTok
to bring corners of skinny talk to their attention. And
(23:57):
what it's interesting is I agree with you. I think
that the leaders at these platforms at least did tell
me like, oh, we're interested in stamping out this kind
of content. It goes against our terms of service. They
would ban the hashtag skinny talk. Sometimes within hours it
would be like skinny talk but spelled out with ones
or something, or like like the way that creators would
(24:21):
find a way around whatever kind of ban or whatever
kind of moderation these platforms would roll out. It made
me think, I don't know if this is actually something
that they can that they can eradicate from their platforms.
And you're saying that, like, well, maybe they shouldn't even
be focusing on that. Instead, they should be focusing on
bringing people who are able to make content around the
(24:42):
other side of like what you know, what actually is
healthy eating and like thinking about things a little bit
differently that actually might be more effective.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
I think so, and I think that you can have
a little bit of both. When I've done this reporting
on these really extreme pro eating disorder communities on platforms
like Acts. I do think that there absolutely is a
line where you do need to be moderating these communities.
And I think it's a good thing that in response
to some of my previous reporting, like x came in
(25:09):
and shut down some of these communities and they popped
back up again and they started growing again.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
But I do think that shutting down that.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Community that really toxic space, it was helpful because it
did at least stop the growth of some of these
massive communities in their tracks. So I don't think it
is a complete like a net negative or positive in
one direction or the other. I do think some moderation
that still needs to happen. But I think looking at
sort of the longer term issue, it's clear that we
(25:38):
cannot solve this problem just by like trying to ignore
it or stamp it out or censor it. We have
got to address it head on, and we have to
make that connection between what is happening in these online
spaces and what happens offline, because offline, the messaging is
all too familiar. When you are walking down the street
(25:58):
in New York City and you see the billboards and
you see the people around you, you begin to understand
that thinness and the types of things that are preached
about on skinny Talk are not just an online issue.
This is a reflection and a mirror distortion of the
world that we live in and have honestly lived in
for quite some time.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
We can't really talk about skinny Talk without talking about
Live Schmidt. Before she was banned, Live built a massive
following with TikTok videos that kind of looked like wellness,
you know, pastel smoothies, four im workouts, tiny meals in
perfect lighting. But beneath that esthetic was something darker, a
steady stream of content that promoted disordered eating and a
(26:42):
toxic obsession with thinness. She became the poster child for
a certain kind of that girl content, the kind the
algorithm devours, and she took it even further by creating
a paid subscriber only platform called Skinny Society, where women
and girls as young as high schoolers traded restrictive eating
tips and competed over restrictive eating practices. When the backlash came,
(27:06):
it wasn't the platform that stepped in first. It was
the users, calling out how content like lives pushed harmful
ideals to millions, especially young women and girls. After a
critical piece in The Cut, Live's TikTok page was banned,
so she moved to Instagram, where her content has been demonetized.
Her account may be gone from TikTok, but her influence,
(27:28):
well that's still everywhere. I know that's come tarsh, but
it's just you're in charge of your lifestyle and it shows.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
And so, yeah, being skinny is like the literal new Burkin.
So do you want to be a Burkin or do
you want to be a thrift store back?
Speaker 1 (27:48):
What do you make of the fact that people are
able to monetize this, make a business out of this?
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Yes, this to me is a really concerning sort of
evolution of like the pro eating disorder space, is the
ability for influencers to build these monetizable followings, because that's
something that you didn't necessarily see on Tumblr in like
the late aughts or the early twenty tens. Over the
past ten years, as social media has become so much
(28:18):
more all encompassing, as more people have spend more time
on social media, as it's wormed its way into every
facet of our lives, you've also seen the ability to
make money from social media grow exponentially, and so it's
not a surprising trend that you're seeing this in the
eating disorder space. But I find these communities to be
like particularly concerning because when you're paying for something and
(28:43):
when you're being put in these now like more private
spaces with like minded people, that is such a strong
conduit for more and more and more extreme thought. And
as a result of that reporting in the cut, Instagram
demonetized Liveschmidt's like sort of pain. But every time I
go on Instagram, every time I go on Instagram reels,
(29:04):
which is like a button on your page that you're
gonna hit accidentally, even if you don't mean to go
to it, I am bombarded with Live Schmidt's content.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
To this day, every daubt.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
And it's just like I it's inavoidable, it's inescapable, and
there's something very compelling about the what she does where
it's like I find myself almost unable to look away.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
More.
Speaker 5 (29:29):
After a quick break, let's get right back into it.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Well, something that you said that really reminded me of
Live is how when folks are kicked off of one
platform who are making this kind of content or demonetized
or moderated in some way. It's like she will say
things like, oh, I was a banned from talk for
spreading the truth about you know, but they don't want
you to know, like I'm just being honest and people
(30:05):
can't handle it. She has made being moderated off of
TikTok and having to like pop up on Instagram and
then being demonetized there almost like a like a branding
thing of like, don't you want to know what I'm saying?
That it's too real for the Instagram sensors.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yes, And it is like that kind of rhetoric is
unmistakably like similar to what you see from like the
alt right and what you see from conservatives who have
similarly mastered these online landscapes. They all use really similar rhetoric.
And I think that part of the larger picture here
that I also think has been kind of unexplored, is
(30:44):
that it's no coincidence that you see rising conservatism dominating
online spaces and the offline world, you see rising authoritarianism
around the globe at the same time that you see
this massive resurgence of pro eating just and just content
that glorifies extreme thinness for women. These movements are connected,
(31:05):
and Michelle Pilovich, the nutritionist, actually recently did a post
about this where she was like, if you are against
Trump like and you are a woman, and you are
a posor of the modern conservative party, you should be
nourishing your body. You should be eating enough food because
the ultimate goal of these sort of conservative, very misogynistic
spaces is that they want.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Women to be small.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
They want women to take up less space, They want
them to be frail, unable to help themselves, and they
want them to be very preoccupied with their own appearance,
because it becomes an obsession that distracts from you being
able to participate in democracy to the fullest extent. It's
a distraction that prevents women from being able to occupy
the same positions that men do. So this sort of
(31:49):
pro eating disorder content is part of this larger picture
of women's oppression. And it's just no coincidence that, like
the influencers in the alt right spaces and the influencers
in the Skinese faces are using the exact same types
of strategies.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
So I clock this all the time on social media,
and I feel like whenever someone says it out loud,
just the comments are like what are you talking about?
You're crazy da da da, And I mean I'll see
content that's like, you know, glorifying. It's not just being thin,
it's thin, blonde, rich, partnered sometimes like quiet and subservient.
(32:26):
Like it's just like like when you pull apart, the
kind of things that they're saying goes along with with
like the good life in scare quotes that will become
available to you if you are first thin. It really
is like it becomes very clear that this is about
a very oppressive vision of the future where women are quiet, frail,
(32:46):
not really participating fully in public and civic life. Like
it's it all goes together. It does.
Speaker 4 (32:52):
It does.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
And a lot of times when you have these skinny
Talk influencers, they will talk about like like LUs Schmidt
talks about this, She's like, you need to be having fun,
you need to be living like a full, fulfilling lifestyle.
But what she's modeling and what she's showing as the
example of that is that she is like a model.
So she's telling women that they should aspire to their
(33:13):
currency and their worth and their value being their appearance.
And part of the flip side of this that's very unfortunate,
both for live Schmidt as an individual and for all
of the women and girls who she's influencing, is that
no matter how skinny you are, no matter how much
you are able to adhere to this beauty standard in
your youth, you will age out.
Speaker 4 (33:32):
There is no future for you.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
If your entire worth and being is rooted in how
you look as a young, conventionally attractive person. And that
is really unfortunate because I think that along the way,
women and girls are going to learn that these types
of expectations and these types of standards are built purposefully
to be something that can never be truly met and
(33:55):
never truly last.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Is this such a productive way to think about what
we were put on this planet to do? Yeah, Like
obsess about our weight and are the way that we look? Yes? Yes.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
And you see this sort of rhetoric carryover into the
obsession around anti aging, and you have like billionaires who
are investing so much of their time and energy and
money into trying to literally stop the passage of time.
And it's like it's all connected because the modern conservative
movement is rhetoric that is about making a return to
(34:30):
what America was quote unquote great making your turn to
your childhood to sort of the American idealisms that never
truly existed, but you can just pretend that it was
in the past and it's something that we can go
back to. And the beauty standard in this ideal of
thinness fits into that so perfectly because it's something that's
sold as an attainable ideal, but you can never actually
(34:52):
truly get there when you go down this path of
self optimization or trying to stop aging, or trying to
constantly fit the ever shifting beauty standard. It's not something
you can win.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
No, absolutely not. And yeah, I agree with you. I
don't think it's a surprise that we have these rising
influencers saying the best thing you can be is hot, rich,
thin and mean. And the rise of this I concerned
this new conservative ideology.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Yes, yes, And people want to create this distinction, this
differentiation between what they view as like capital pe politics,
very serious, like what's happening in Congress, what are the
actual policies, what's the bill of the the text of
the law. But in reality, what the vast majority of
people are interested in is not capital pe politics, but
(35:43):
rather capital c culture and people on the right understand this.
I think it was Steve Bannon who said that politics
is downstream of culture, and that was part of the
key to unlocking Trump's wide stream like a wider appeal,
was creating this like cultural image around him that then
became a totem that his voters could project their desires onto.
(36:05):
And you see the same thing happening within the influencer space,
within the social media space, is that conservatism it doesn't
have as much should do with who's in office or
what they are doing in their position as elected officials,
as it has to do with what is the dominating culture,
what is everyone spending their time doing, what is the
what are the goals and the aspirations of the public.
(36:28):
And this has a powerful political connotation, and it's not
frivolous at all. It translates over to how people show
up and how they vote in the ballot box at elections.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
Things like patriarchy and rigid gender roles don't just harm
women and girls, they hurt everyone. Online, young men are
also being said pretty toxic messages about how they need
to look to be successful. Many are being pushed into
a practice known as looks maxing, a movement that encourages
extreme physical self optimization in the name of attractiveness. For
(37:02):
folks who have never heard that word before, what is
looks maxing?
Speaker 2 (37:05):
So looks maxing is kind of like the male version
of this that I alluded to a little bit earlier.
And I find this really interesting and it's really sad.
I spoke to this young man named Steven Iima who
is a college student in Texas, and he's this young
black man who has since pivoted his content into like
anti looks baxing and anti eating disorders, but he initially
(37:28):
fell down the rabbit hole. And so what looks maxing
is is it's a beauty standard for men that is
being sold again as this like attainable thing where if
you just do these like facial exercises and if you
just copy all of these like tips and tricks, then
you will be able to fit the male beauty ideal.
Speaker 4 (37:48):
You will be muscular, you will.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
Have very defined like jawline and cheek bones. And it
looks really bizarre on the surface to people who aren't
familiar with this subculture, and it gets mocked and made.
Speaker 4 (38:01):
Fun of a lot because it will literally.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
Be like you have to suck in your cheeks so
that you can have like the most pronounced cheekbones possible,
or like there was an article about how some of
the people in the looks maxxine communicate in the Looks
Maxing community were advocating like hammering your face into the
position that you wanted it to be in. It's alarming,
and so what's concerning about it to me also is
(38:25):
that you see the exact same sort of behaviors within
the extreme pro eating disorder spaces, like the extreme calorie deficits.
That's a mirror happening for boys and young men, or
for boys and men. And what I talked to Steven,
one thing that he told me is like this community
sold this like bake promise to him that if he
(38:47):
just did all of these things, he would have more
success with women, and he would be happier and his
life would be better. But when he got into that
community as a young black man, he realized that it
was incredibly racist. And this was ultimately the thing that
broke him out of it was he was like, there's
no place for me within this community if I'm not white,
(39:07):
And that understanding unlocked kind of like a new perspective
where he was like, this whole thing is built on
lies and fabrications, and it's just about harming yourself ultimately.
I think eating disorders are kind of a form of
self harm. And so within the looks maxing community and
within other parts of this online culture, you see this
desire to control and restrict and hurt yourself, and that's
(39:31):
sold to you as like how your life becomes better,
how you become more disciplined, how you experience more success.
Speaker 4 (39:36):
But for the people who are trapped.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Within these communities, it is a very toxic cycle of
actually beating down their self worth and actually feeling worse
about how they look. And maybe using you fixed some
part of how you look, but now you've identified all
of the other things that need fixing. So it's really
bad for self esteem.
Speaker 4 (39:55):
And I think it also.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Over time produces worse outcomes in terms of healthy living.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Do you see all of this getting better or getting worse?
Speaker 2 (40:06):
What we often see when we pick up on these
like big cultural shifts is that things get a little worse,
but then ultimately they do get better. Like I think
things we're on the pathway for things to continue getting
worse as of right now. But the fact that you
have people picking up on this and realizing it is
a sign that the pendulum will swing back. And I
(40:26):
do believe that the pendulum will swing back, but I
think that it takes within this platform environment that these
social media companies have created for us to exist within.
You have to build up so much momentum for the
algorithm to redirect itself in any new direction, and right now,
all of that momentum is being built up behind things
like skinning Talk. So it's going to take a lot
(40:48):
of people speaking out against this and making content and
opposition for this before the major platform landscapes begin to
reflect sort of the opposition. But I do have fake
that we'll get there.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
Yeah. I just recently decided I started weightlifting for the
first time a couple of years, a couple of months ago,
and just like again, I'm not I'm not interested in
losing way, I'm not interested. I'm just interested in learning
about weightlifting as a beginner weightlifter. The way that my
none of my algorithms will ever be the same. Like
like the stuff that the stuff that Instagram now is
(41:22):
convinced that I want to see simply because I am
interested in weightlifting is like, oh, certainly you're anti vax
I'm like, wait, what, like like the way, like my
algorithm will never be the same.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
I know, I know, I'm in the exact same boat.
I've spent so many months reporting on like eating disorders
that every social media platform is now convinced that I
am part of this like rabbit hole cycle. And that
is worrying to me because although the average social media
user is not a journalist studying these things for months
at a time, I feel like I'm living what someone
(41:54):
who's being on the pathway to being radicalized is seeing
on their social media feeds. And it's this is what
a lot of people are seeing on their social media feeds.
That's so concerning because there's just nothing healthy about being
bombarded with hours worth of this content on a daily basis.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
And as we were talking about before, if we are
looking at this content with a critical eye, like and like,
it still gets me. I have to like catch myself saying, actually,
you don't want your body to look like this, or like, actually,
that's not a reasonable amount of calories for an adult
woman to be eating. I come on, if that's if
that's how it's hitting me as somebody who was looking
at this from a critical eye, imagine somebody who was
(42:32):
just scrolling, or somebody who was very young.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
Yes, yes, if I I can't even imagine having a
kid in this like social media landscape. But if I did,
I feel like if I were parent, I would want
to be having honestly, like daily conversations like with my
child about this to try to push back against some
of the narratives that they will inevitably be hearing not
(42:54):
only online but in their classrooms, among their friends and
their peers, for older relatives, or from people in their community.
Like these messages around thinness and weight and health and
beauty are so pervasive and it takes so much work
to even be into breaks through on a personal level and.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Fight back against them. Is that what you would suggest
parents should be doing, like really having conversations intentionally with
the young people in their life and maybe doing some
internal recalibration of the way that they internally think about
these issues.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
Yes, one million percent. I think one of the biggest
things is that when you are in a position of
influencing someone else, whether you're a parent, whether you're someone
who does have a big social media following, or even
just in the way you interact with everyone around you.
It's like you do have to do that self introspection
to be like, what sort of negative and toxic and
harmful ideologies do I have to work on? And what
(43:50):
am I projecting to the people around me? What am
I modeling to the people around me. This can be
something as simple as when you grow up and your
mom looks in the mirror and is like, I hate
this about myself, or when your mother or when your
parental figure is constantly talking about because Dad's due this too,
constantly talking about like I need to lose weight.
Speaker 4 (44:08):
I need to go on a diet.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
I hate the way that I look you're modeling to
your kids and to the people who look up to
you and who are around you. That you should constantly
be self critical and then you should constantly be in
the state of working on yourself. And I think that
that is one of the most insidious aspects of diet culture,
is that it occupies so much of our time, energy, attention, money,
(44:30):
and lifestyle to trying to reach this unattainable ideal. So
I think that's something that we can all do, is
sort of do that introspection about the ways that we
carry diet culture into our lives and how that might
be affecting the people around us.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
If someone out there listening needs help with all of this,
what can I do?
Speaker 2 (44:48):
If you are struggling with this or if this content
has been having an effect on you, There are lots
of resources out there. There are more mental health professionals
and supports out there than ever, so never think that
you won't be able to get help or that it's
too late for you. There are always resources and things
that you can do to make things better.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
If you're looking for support, check out Project Heal, an
organization with the mission to break down systemic healthcare and
financial barriers to eating disorder healing. Check them out the
Project hel dot org. Got a story about an interesting
thing in tech, or just want to say hi, You
can reach us at Hello at tegody dot com. You
(45:30):
can also find transcripts for today's episode at tenggody dot com.
There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by
me Bridget Toad. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed.
Creative Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is
our producer and sound engineer. Michael Almado is our contributing producer.
I'm your host, bridget Toad. If you want to help
us grow, rate and review.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
Us on Apple podcasts.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts A heart
Then he lived.
Speaker 3 (46:04):
Long, He lived
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