Creator Liv Schmidt's TikTok Ban Follows a Problematic Rise in Explicit Diet Talk Online
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In this op-ed, Features Director Brittney McNamara explores the rise in explicit diet talk on social media, and how Liv Schmidt is only one part of a larger issue.
Diet used to be a dirty word, one we couched in more pleasant euphemisms like “going paleo” or “cutting out gluten to reduce bloat.” These wellness-adjacent efforts, many of us reasoned in the late 2010s, weren’t squarely to make us thinner (though that would be a nice side effect). They were to make us healthy. Unfortunately, healthy often meant thin, and these valiant efforts toward health were just thinly veiled diet culture. Now, in the age of Ozempic, thin is in again, and dieting isn’t only acceptable, it’s almost expected. And that’s where Liv Schmidt comes in.
TikTok recently banned content creator Liv Schmidt’s account where she’d gathered more than 650,000 followers, after a Wall Street Journal profile of the creator detailed her instructions on how to be skinny — which made up nearly all of Schmidt’s content. (A TikTok spokesperson declined to tell Teen Vogue exactly why the app banned Schmidt’s account, only noting that she violated the site’s Community Guidelines. Those guidelines specifically prohibit “promoting disordered eating and dangerous weight loss behaviors.”) Many of her posts openly uphold thinness as the ideal. “I’m not naturally thin, I didn’t get those genetics, unfortunately,” she says in a September 14 video (she later posted photos of her natural frame before her extreme efforts to stay thinner. She is also thin in her “before” photos). Though her account was banned, Schmidt created a new one promptly, where she posted this. “That’s why I talk about, this is very, very hard work because…I’m not genetically blessed…. I’ll forever die on this hill that I’m promoting healthy and that it’s ok to want to look a certain aesthetic.” Teen Vogue reached out to Schmidt for comment but has not heard back.
And these aren’t the most problematic of her posts. Some are, in my opinion, too triggering to repeat here. Schmidt vehemently denies accusations that she has an eating disorder, and says she would never promote disordered behavior. Still, it’s undeniable that much of her content is specifically instructive on how to get and stay thin, a mindset that, for some, can lead to disordered eating.
But Schmidt is only a symptom of a larger issue. Weight loss and dieting content is apparently rising on social media platforms like TikTok, likely driven, at least in part, by the surge in popularity of drugs used for weight loss like Wegovy and Ozempic. The prevalence of those medications has also ushered in a shift in how we talk about weight, now naming it as an easily solvable problem rather than grappling with the anti-fat bias that informs our flawed understanding of weight and health. Disorder eating and pro-ana (short for pro-anorexia) content has always been prevalent on social media, and in the Ozempic era, people’s content that promotes thinness — sometimes to an unhealthy level — seems to be coming out of the shadows.
A 2022 study looked at how much weight loss content appeared in TikTok videos under searches like #whatIeatinaday, #mealprep, #bodypositvity, #nutrition, and other more weight-specific hashtags. Researchers found that even the hashtags that they expected to be weight neutral often perpetuated the idea that you must be thin to be healthy, which can “reinforce to viewers the belief that weight is an important indicator of health status and overall self-worth.” We know that these kinds of ideas and their prevalence on social media can also contribute to eating disorders, serious and potentially deadly mental and physical disorders that are influenced by a combination of factors, including cultural ones. These findings, in my opinion, underscore not just the ubiquity of potentially harmful weight loss content on social media, but the overall cultural ideals that we all operate under.
From TikTok to doctors offices, from television to errant comments from a family member, the idea that being thin is the only way to be healthy and the only way to be beautiful is everywhere. Creators like Schmidt and others who openly glorify thinness rather than shrouding it in ideals around health or wellness are simply an indicator, I believe, of a societal settling; of an acceptance of the diet culture that, for a few years, we vaguely tried to eschew for body acceptance, or at least neutrality. We were never successful in that attempt and the drive toward thinness never really stopped. But instead of masking our diet culture in easier to digest words like “health journey” and “wellness,” many are now just saying the truth: they want to be skinny, and it doesn’t much matter what they lose along with the weight.
In an interview with the New York Times about Schmidt’s account being banned on TikTok, Emmeline Clein, the author of Dead Weight, highlighted that this is an issue larger than any one creator.
“Just as we did then when the pro-ana forums were banned from Tumblr, we’re just demonizing specific teens and early-20s women as though they invented it,” Clein said. “When we make Liv the villain of the story rather than Instagram or TikTok, all that does is bully a woman, while making space for the next one.”
Social media platforms do bear some responsibility for the perpetuation of diet culture. As the 2022 study found, weight loss content that can fuel eating disorders abounds on TikTok, and social media platforms across the board have the potential to contribute to disordered eating among teens. And, Ozempic’s off-label use as a weight loss method rose to popularity on TikTok, helping to usher in the current climate around weight talk. A TikTok representative told Teen Vogue that the app implemented new rules around weight loss content earlier this year, cracking down on posts that the app deems potentially harmful. In addition to removing content that may violate community guidelines around weight loss, the app makes potentially harmful weight management posts ineligible for the For You Page, and doesn’t allow teens under 18 to see those posts at all. The TikTok representative said the app also has an eating disorder resources guide, and offers resources when people search certain topics. Still, pro-ana communities and other disordered eating and unhealthy weight loss discussions have been finding ways to avoid moderation since they proliferated on Tumblr.
These apps serve partially as tools of diet culture, used in this way to perpetuate the larger diet industrial complex. Until we collectively divorce our ideas of health and beauty from thinness, we are, as Clein said, inevitably making space for the next iteration of thin-is-in. Instead of wellness influencers whose self-love journeys involve losing 30 pounds to be “healthy,” we now have a thin, blonde woman whose best outfit accessory is “flat stomach” telling us, “in a world where u can be anything be skinni” [sic]. Maybe they’re two sides of the same coin.
If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, the NEDA helpline is here to help at 1-800-931-2237. NEDA's helpline volunteers offer support and basic information, locate treatment options in your area, and can help you find answers to any questions you may have.
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
