To the women of skinnitok

Your weight loss methods are not innovative. There is nothing interesting about self hatred.

Over the last few weeks I have accidentally found myself on ‘skinnitok,’ a TikTok niche dedicated to using “hard truths” to motivate its viewers to lose weight. Quotes meant to encourage weight loss are a prominent aspect of skinnitok content. They are often shared around for being simultaneously entertaining and enlightening.

Here are a few:

“Hunger is your stomach applauding you.”

“Your weight is someone else's fear weight.”

“It’s okay to be a little hungry before bed, it’s the fat screaming for its life.”

While these quotes might seem eye-opening, any person who’s ever struggled with disordered eating likely cringed at these statements. As one of those people, I couldn't help but notice how eerily similar they were to the most infamous anorexia mantra of all time, “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”

None of what skinnitok espouses is particularly new. It’s all old body hatred and disordered eating rhetoric repackaged, all of which has been a cornerstone of women's self-talk since the inception of beauty standards.

Many well-meaning women have come forward and warned the women on skinnitok about what they’re doing. They say that glorifying thinness and hating your body into a smaller version is not only unproductive, it’s the fast track to eating disorders and depression.

The danger in what skinnitok preaches is blatantly obvious, yet that is seemingly still a point of question. Many members of skinnitok insist that motivational weight loss content is not disordered, it’s just the truth that no one wants to listen to. It makes it seem like the women who are warning against skinnitok are engaging in a moral panic. We’re accused of projecting eating disorders on women who are simply eating healthy and are utilizing some good ol’ fashioned tough love.

My theory is that skinnitok and its viewers are well aware that their motivation and weight loss methods are, at the very least, unhealthy. Hating your body into weight loss is the exact opposite of forming healthy habits and an enjoyable relationship with food. Often, the insistence that disordered eating is, in fact, not disordered eating is a function of disordered eating itself.

The disorder tries to camouflage its existence as a way of warding off unwanted concern, that way it can continue existing with as little oversight as possible.

When faced with the question of eating too much or eating too little, many women pick eating too little. It’s understood that both options are unhealthy, but when you grew up in a society that rewarded women on the basis of how much they can starve and shrink their bodies, it becomes easy to choose to go without food and gain the promised social validation that comes with thinness.

When it comes to skinnitok, I have found myself feeling quite pessimistic. I value the women trying to warn others about it, but I can’t help but feel that often this is a sort of problem that can only be solved once someone has been burned by the fire a few times.

For many women, the belief that thinness will be the solution to all of your problems is seen as almost biblical. A conviction that is held that strongly, and is constantly being affirmed by our society, will not be removed by some gentle warning and story-telling.

What I hope to do is to offer another perspective, regardless of if it’s taken or not. I want to speak to the part of these women that might be feeling lost. When I was anorexic, I knew that I was unhappy and I knew that contradicted the belief that weight loss would make me happy. That point of contradiction can be something those of us who have gone through recovery can target in other women.

My simple offer is this: peace does not have a price. Suffering so that you one day feel good about yourself is an oxymoron. There are beautiful women who hate themselves and there are unattractive ones that don’t. Beauty and thinness hold no guarantees in how it will make you feel about yourself.

I don’t expect beauty to stop being alluring but maybe through a repeated exposure to the experience of beauty being dissatisfying, may you see that there is really nothing there for you.

As a woman, giving up on beauty feels like the scariest thing you can do, but that’s only because it’s the most liberating. It’s free, it’s available, and unlike thinness, the promise of liberation is a guarantee.