When SkinnyTok Came for Me

The Atlantic

21-06-2025

The bride had to do just one last thing before she walked down the aisle. 'I currently am in the bathroom in my wedding dress I asked everyone for just a few mins alone so that I could message you this.' Was she writing to an estranged friend? An old lover—the one that got away?
At the beginning of her 'journey,' the bride weighed 134 pounds. 'My goal was to just lose 5lbs,' she wrote, but she had somehow dropped down to 110. 'I'm crying writing this because I have never felt so healthy and confident. THANK YOU!!!' The message was accompanied by two photos—a before and an after. The first shows a thin woman who looks to be a size 2 or 4. In the second, the woman's bones are visible beneath her skin, and her leggings sag. She owed all of this to Liv Schmidt, a 23-year-old influencer known for her harsh, no-bullshit approach to staying thin. 'You feel like a best friend and sister to me,' the bride wrote to Schmidt, who shared the message on Instagram.
Schmidt is the queen of SkinnyTok—a corner of the internet where thin, mostly white women try to make America skinny again. Her 'what I eat in a day to stay skinny' videos thrust her into virality about a year ago. There she is with her mint tea—which she always drinks before eating anything, to check if she's really hungry or just bored—or a mile-high ice-cream sundae that she'll take three bites of before tossing. She's very clear: She stays skinny by not eating much. Many find this refreshingly honest. Others think she's promoting eating disorders.
Influencers have condemned her; magazines have published scathing critiques. Last month, Meta removed her ability to sell subscriptions ($20 a month for access to private content and a group chat called the 'Skinni Société') on Instagram, and this month, TikTok banned the SkinnyTok hashtag worldwide, saying it was 'linked to unhealthy weight loss content.' And in response, the right has championed Schmidt. She has been canceled, and she may be more powerful than ever.
I didn't mean to join the legions of young women on SkinnyTok. It happened fast. I liked an Instagram reel about an 'Easy High Protein, Low Calorie Breakfast.' What I got next, I didn't ask for. Within hours, my Instagram 'explore' page was flooded with videos of conventionally pretty, thin women preaching one message: Stop eating. Phrases such as 'You're not a dog, don't treat yourself with food' and the Kate Moss classic, 'Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,' began to flood my feed—and my subconscious.
At lunch with a friend one Saturday, I didn't finish my salad. 'Do you know Liv Schmidt?' I asked.
'The three-bite rule? Of course I do. She's kind of a genius.'
I realized I wasn't down this rabbit hole alone.
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'I know the advice I'm getting from these women is not healthy,' another friend said, but 'everything I want is on the other side of being skinny, and these women are going to help me get there.'
'I like SkinnyTok. It helps me to not eat 'the extra thing' I don't need. Don't like it? Don't follow it.'
'It's internalized misogynistic brainwash!'
'I love that skinny bitch.'
Where had Schmidt come from, and what had happened to the 'body positivity' movement that had been so loudly touted through the past decade?
You can form a community around anything online. When I was a kid in the 2000s, teenage girls with eating disorders were gathering on 'thinspiration' websites, where they could exchange tips. Tabloids sold copies off body shaming—one day Britney Spears was too fat; the next, Lindsay Lohan was too skinny—and my friends and I were going around with 100-calorie Chips Ahoy! packs in our lunchboxes. By the time I was a teenager, the body-positivity movement had arrived, promising to change the culture. Plus-size models started appearing in ad campaigns. The problem wasn't women's bodies, activists argued, but women feeling bad about their bodies.
Yet when people tried to force society to embrace new body norms, society lashed out, bringing to the surface a lot of underlying hatred. 'Body positivity didn't resonate with a lot of people, because it felt like lying,' Maalvika Bhat, a 25-year-old TikTok influencer who is getting a doctorate in computer science and communication at Northwestern University, told me. Many felt that the movement was in denial about both the practical health risks of being overweight and America's willingness to put its engrained fat phobia aside.
Ozempic has accelerated that backlash against body positivity. Many of the plus-size leaders of the body-positivity movement shut up and shrunk down. Their followers noticed that they were using a weight-loss drug. Apparently you didn't have to love yourself as you were—and you didn't have to suffer to change, either. You just had to have a prescription and enough money to pay for it.
But what about those pesky last 10 pounds, the difference between being a size 6 and a size 2? Although some healthy-weight women with no medical reason to take GLP-1 drugs have nonetheless found work-arounds to get their hands on the medication, most aren't going to those lengths. How would they keep up now that skinny was back? For some, the answer was SkinnyTok.
You don't need a prescription to be ultrathin. You just need a bad relationship with food, fueled by a skinny stranger yelling mean-girl mantras at you. In the end, the body-positivity movement's lasting effect may have been to prove the validity of the very message it was trying to combat—that thinner people are treated better. At least, many women feel, SkinnyTok is telling them the truth. As one SkinnyTok influencer put it, 'Don't sugarcoat that or you'll eat that too.'
I started listening more closely to the SkinnyTok videos. They weren't just about self-deprivation. They were about being classy. They were about being a lady—the right kind of woman, one that men drool over. They were, most importantly, about being small.
In one of Schmidt's videos, she's approached by a man in a black car during a photo shoot. The caption reads: 'This is the treatment Skinni gets you. Was just taking pics … Then a Rolls-Royce rolled up begging for my number like I'm on the menu mid photo. He saw clavicle he swerved. He saw cheekbones lost composure.'
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SkinnyTok influencers basically never talk in their videos about politics. They aren't preaching about Donald Trump—let alone about issues such as abortion or immigration. And yet everything they talk about—the emphasis on girls and how girls need to behave and how small they need to be—is, of course, political.
A few days after my Instagram feed surrendered to the SkinnyTok takeover, the tradwife content began to sneak in. Beautiful women baking bread in linen dresses spoke to me about embracing my divine femininity. I should consider 'softer living' and 'embracing my natural role.' All of a sudden, I wondered whether I, a single woman in her late 20s living in Manhattan, should trade it all in to become a mother of 10 on a farm in Montana.
Watch a few more of these videos, and soon you'll be directed to the anti-vax moms, or the Turning Point USA sweetheart Alex Clark's wellness podcast, Cultural Apothecary, or the full-on conspiratorial alt-right universe. This is just how the internet works. Eviane Leidig, the author of The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization, sees a connection between SkinnyTok and tradwives in their 'very strong visual representation of femininity.' Whether they mean to be or not, they have become part of the same pipeline. Algorithms grab your attention with lighter, relatable content while exposing you to more extremist viewpoints. The alt-right, she said, is great at making aspirational and seemingly apolitical content that viewers relate to. 'This is a deliberate strategy that the conservative space has been employing over the last several years to capitalize on cultural issues as a gateway to radicalize audiences into more extreme viewpoints.'
Two months ago, Evie Magazine, a right-wing publication that promotes traditional femininity, ran a profile of Schmidt: 'Banned for Being Honest? Meet Liv Schmidt, the Girl Who Made 'Skinny' Go Viral.' The magazine had one of the biggest tradwife influencers, Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, on its cover back in November. The article about Schmidt focused on her being canceled and banned on a number of platforms for promoting thinness. 'I don't owe the internet a version of me that's palatable,' Schmidt told the magazine. 'If a girl bigger than me posted what I eat in a day, no one would care. But when I do, it becomes controversial. Why? Because I'm blonde, thin, young, and unapologetic.' Last year, Evie profiled Amanda Dobler, another SkinnyTok figurehead, whom it described as 'TikTok's skinny queen'—'both brutally honest and surprisingly sweet.'
The more the left has attacked Schmidt, the more the right has celebrated her. Bhat, who describes herself as progressive, said, 'I think the left is deeply, deeply exclusive.' On the right, 'you're allowed to make dozens of mistakes and not be shunned. They say, 'If the left doesn't welcome you, we will.' And they always do.'
You can't deduce a political manifesto from someone's Instagram followers, but it seems worth noting that Schmidt follows conservative figureheads including RFK Jr., Candace Owens, and Brett Cooper. When she posted about losing the paid-subscription feature on her Instagram, through which she had been making nearly $130,000 a month, according to AirMail, she tagged Joe Rogan. 'She's clearly trying to get her foot in the door with the alternatives,' Ali Ambrose, an influencer who critiques SkinnyTok, told me. (Ambrose struggled with an eating disorder for years, and says Schmidt's content pushed her back into unhealthy habits.)
Schmidt's appeal does cross party lines, though. When I polled a politically diverse group of my own friends, my most conservative friends loved SkinnyTok. A number of my progressive friends did too; they just felt like they shouldn't say so out loud.
Schmidt has written that the Skinni Société is not 'a starvation or extreme diet community.' She didn't respond to multiple requests for an interview, but I spoke with Amanda Dobler, another SkinnyTok influencer. She remains on TikTok, though she has twice been temporarily barred from its Creator Rewards Program, through which she made some money for her videos, for not abiding by 'community guidelines.' Dobler is almost 10 years older than Schmidt, so she attracts a slightly different demographic. I asked her if she considered herself a political person, or her content politically charged. She responded with a decisive no. 'I'm up at 4 a.m. working my ass off, so I would say I'm the opposite of a tradwife,' she told me. 'If people relate it to right wing, to left wing,' she said, 'there's only so much of the narrative that I can control.'
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Dobler is known for her directness. If anything, she's even harsher online than Schmidt is. Right before our call, I scrolled through her TikTok profile: 'You are killing yourself with the shit you eat. It's disgusting. And you should feel shameful.' I briefly wondered if she'd be able to detect my own insecurities through the phone. But the Dobler I spoke with was approachable and friendly. I instantly liked her. I even opened up to her about the things I wish I could change about my body. 'There's nothing wrong with wanting to look a little better,' she said.
Unlike a number of SkinnyTok influencers who only just entered the field, Dobler has been a fat-loss and mindset coach for six years. She talks about the importance of getting your nutrients instead of exclusively practicing restraint. She also pushes for a consistent workout routine, while others focus exclusively on their step count to burn calories and avoid bulking at the gym (SkinnyTok is a spectrum).
I brought up the criticism that SkinnyTok content encourages young people to adopt disordered-eating habits. Dobler said that she doesn't coach children, and that the majority of her clients are in their 30s through 50s. 'I get it. It's hard if you're a parent seeing stuff online,' she told me. 'But at the same time, there's porn online; there's a bunch of weird crap. I think that there is a lot of other censorship that should be going on.'
When I asked why she was so harsh in her videos, she told me, 'That's the type of talk that I need. I wouldn't say that I'm mean. I'm just blunt.' She added, 'I've been in all of the situations that I'm talking through. So it's not like I'm just up here scolding people.'
This echoed something Bhat had said to me: SkinnyTok's ruthless tone rings true to many women because they're already being so ruthless toward themselves. I'd be kidding myself if I said a woman's body size doesn't affect her prospects for dating, and even jobs. I would be lying if I said I did not desperately want to be slightly thinner—that I hadn't wanted that from the moment I first watched my mother critique her own body in her bedroom mirror. I hesitate to admit that I've lost four pounds since I saw my first SkinnyTok video. I have not walked 40,000 steps a day, nor have I stopped eating after three bites. I've just stopped eating when I'm full, which, as silly as it sounds, I did learn from SkinnyTok.
Still, I think it's time to unsubscribe. The body of my dreams isn't worth risking my health for. I have two nieces, ages 3 and 6. I hate the idea that somebody might one day tell them to shrink themselves. To them, a swimsuit is nothing but a promise that they'll spend the afternoon running through the sprinkler. They're perfect, and they dream of being bigger, faster, stronger—not smaller.