TikTok: Where Overeating Is Entertainment And Dieting Is Dangerous

SkinnyTok is a diverse content ecosystem featuring all kinds of creators, from the martyred Liv Schmidt, who was recently banned from the app for “promoting disordered eating,” to trained weight loss coaches and formerly obese women who have lost over 100 pounds.

I’ve browsed the content on SkinnyTok and the overwhelming impression I’ve gotten from it over the past few months is that it’s been unfairly demonized, misunderstood, and targeted by those projecting their fraught pasts with over-restriction. On the one hand, it’s understandable that TikTok is wary of the content that young people are consuming. Though the majority of TikTok users and content creators are adults, 25% of the app’s active user accounts are between the ages of 10 and 19. I don’t disagree with TikTok on the issue of accessibility to potentially harmful online content. But is the best solution to this problem really to implement overzealous policies that result in censorship of incredibly helpful and educational information rather than parental responsibility to monitor what their children are watching or have access to? 

The way SkinnyTok has been characterized by anti-diet dieticians, news articles, and on social media, you’d think it was a glorified pro-ana (pro anorexia) forum. In fact, it’s been blatantly caricatured as exactly that. But is that even true? Or are we getting overcompensatory backlash from a particularly vocal crowd of easily triggered women, whose responsibility to know what content is useful or harmful to their specific eating histories is their own? 

Evidently, they’ll take whatever draconian measures are at their disposal to ensure that straightforward advice like “it’s not about what you eat, but how much you eat” is censored, while pro obesity and binge-eating content on TikTok thrive. It’s no wonder that the American obesity rate is so high when we keep making what used to be common sense approaches to diet and fitness forbidden, censored knowledge. 

Is SkinnyTok the best place for someone with a history of disordered eating to be? Probably not. But in the same vein, women who are actively struggling with their weight and trying to escape the culture of over-indulgence all around them can hardly find respite anywhere else on TikTok. Everywhere you look, content creators are binge eating in mukbangs, showing you what they eat in a day “as a fat person who doesn’t want to lose weight,” reviewing Crumbl Cookie flavors (which are up to 1,000 calories a cookie, by the way), participating in 10,000 calorie challenges, and don’t get me started on the “eat whatever you want” affirmations that dominate the platform. It seems that the only permissible attitude towards food and exercise is to embrace hedonism, reject self-discipline, and bask in victimhood when in the presence of self-improvement.

Content creators like Minazalie, a stay-at-home Slavic-American mom whose account recently started taking off after she shared her weight loss journey and other lifestyle content, like fitness tips, have been penalized by TikTok’s harsh crackdown on “pro-skinny” and weight loss content. They recently banned controversial TikToker Liv Schmidt for “promoting restriction” and posting thinspo content, but it’s curious that someone like Minazalie, whose content is so uncontroversial, tempered, and uninflammatory, would be targeted by TikTok’s policies. 

In a recent video, Minazalie explained why she no longer uploads "What I Eat in a Day" videos, sharing that because of TikTok’s harsher rules concerning any content that mentions weight loss or can be interpreted as such, she received two strikes on her account in a single day, and feared she’d lose the account she spent the past year building an audience from the ground up, now boasting 1.4 million followers. “Ever since TikTok made that new change—the new rules, you literally cannot talk about anything weight loss on here because it’s going to flag your video,” she said. After receiving the strikes on her account, she says she got so scared that she even retroactively started deleting her old "What I Eat in a Day" videos, just in case. 

To no avail, her videos continue to get removed and receive community guideline violations for innocuous content like promoting hot girl walks and wanting to look your best. Venting her frustrations on her second account, she was taken aback that another video of hers received a violation despite not discussing anything about weight loss. “This is getting crazy. I didn’t even say anything in this video about weight loss or anything. I was just being motivating. You literally can’t say anything about your body unless you’re body positivity or mukbang stuffing your face with food.” In another video, she frustratedly admits to her followers she doesn’t know what to post anymore because “you can’t post anything about weight loss, about walking, What I Eat in a Day, none of that, I don’t know what to post and I feel like a lot of my followers follow me for that content and now that I can’t post it, I literally feel heart broken.”

When you take a look at Mina’s "What I Eat in a Day" videos, they’re not only incredibly balanced, satiating, nutrient-dense meals; they’re insightful and empowering. She doesn’t lead people astray with misinformation; she makes nutritional information easy to understand and simple to implement in a way that is life-changing for people with minimal dietary insight. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met full-grown adults who fundamentally don’t know how weight loss works. So when she keeps it real with “Yeah, this is healthy, but it still has calories,” it helps them understand where they’re going wrong. That they’re not some special lost cause for whom weight loss doesn’t work; they just had their priorities out of order.

And it’s no wonder why they don’t, when you have anti-diet culture dietitians and commentators ready to lunge down your throat for the most innocuous of insights, like “if you want to be small, you have to eat small,” which was divorced from its context of portion control and mischaracterized as endorsement of over restriction by the ever-disingenuous trigger-happy Abbey Sharp. Mina’s followers believe the backlash to her videos as a result of the drama between her and Sharp is the reason her videos are being targeted, possibly because of mass-reporting, or because the algorithm is picking up on self-improvement framing of fitness. Again, the platform punishes self-discipline while celebrating hedonism.

Cora Lakey has a different perspective. She argues that influencers often misrepresent how much they actually eat in “What I Eat in a Day” videos, creating unrealistic expectations that people can eat large quantities of food that they themselves aren’t even eating and achieve their physique. After living with a model and influencer herself, Lakey realized they frequently showed themselves dining out but only consumed half or even a quarter of the food depicted. She considers this dishonesty far more harmful than the controversial “SkinnyTok” content, which presents the importance of portion control transparently. She captioned the video “@minazalie is one of the only ppl being honest let’s bffr.”

Mina’s content doesn’t encourage over restriction, obsession with calorie counting, or over-exercising. Her content is uplifting, motivational, and illuminating for so many women who come from polar opposite worlds than the eating disorder recovery community. These women are learning to rein in excessive snacking, high-calorie meals full of calorie-dense, low-nutrient foods, and they learn a thing or two about low-effort ways that they can exercise self-restraint. 

Mina didn’t say “be skinny at all costs,” she encourages women who want to glow up to have standards, that they can eat what they want so long as they’re mindful of their portions, and provides them with affirmations for those who can handle it. She reminds women that they don’t need to constantly snack, and that it’s okay to be a little hungry sometimes (you’re bound to be if you’re in a weight loss phase). And for a lot of women, that message isn’t dangerous. It’s liberating.

These women aren’t learning to starve themselves; many of them are learning to eat in moderation for the first time in their lives; to make a step count goal for themselves so they can become more active with accessible exercise. This information isn’t toxic or restrictive; it’s the sort of information that’s been overcomplicated and made inaccessible thanks to fat activism and body positivity movements that insist on silencing common sense health and fitness, recharacterizing it as body shaming, and enforcing unrealistic beauty standards. Mina’s comments are flooded with positive comments, thanking her for helping them break free from food noise and finally achieve their dream body. 

The “eat like a Slavic girl” to get skinny trend has taken off on TikTok, but Mina, who’s actually Slavic, shuts it down: there’s no secret. “It’s not the buckwheat,” she says, “it’s how much we eat.” She blames American portion sizes and calorie ignorance, urging women to skip the money-wasting gimmicks—no trainer or e-books needed, just walk, track, and be mindful. 

But don’t get it twisted; she doesn’t encourage skimping out on nutrition. “Yes, it is all about calories, but you should still be focusing on nutrition because I never focused on nutrition up until this year, I’ll be honest but now I’m making a conscious effort to eat healthier as a family and I feel so much better,” adding that the reason she started prioritizing nutrition is because everyone keeps getting sick with mysterious illnesses and food is medicine, “if you eat really good, it will help you stay healthier.”

Ashley Waraday made the perfect response video for SkinnyTok haters, and the message is basically that the girls who get it, get it, and the girls who don’t, don’t. If you want to lose weight and be skinny, you cannot listen to these girls who have been naturally skinny their whole life, telling you not to worry about the numbers and not to worry about your step count. They quite literally don’t get it. They may be able to be blasé with their food intake and their activity level but those of us who have experienced being overweight know how easily weight can creep back up when you start slipping—when you work a desk job and don’t get any other activity without a step goal—when you sit at your computer all day and become possessed by the boredom snack monster. 

In Mina’s videos, she notes that she doesn’t personally track her calories, and that she’s maintained her 30-pound weight loss for two years by eating intuitively. But unlike typical intuitive eating advocates who encourage honoring every hunger cue without consequence or deluding people that eating with reckless abandon is self-care that your body won’t respond in kind with additional pounds, Mina posits a balanced, no-BS approach. Her style is transparent and like a warm nudge to make better choices. 

She avoids abrasive or overly rigid messaging that would border on “type A bodybuilder yelling at you on The Biggest Loser,” vibes, but she also doesn’t feed your delusions, either. She acknowledges that intuitive eating is a delicate balancing act for weight management: “Sometimes when you intuitively eat, since I’m not tracking my calories, I will sometimes go over, and I will slowly gain weight.” 

She explains that she catches herself when this happens and makes adjustments to get back on track. She doesn’t catastrophize about a couple of pounds or suggest an obsessive weight loss protocol. During a recent illness, she ate more and moved less, leading to mild weight gain. Her solution isn’t a crash diet or fasting, but to simply eat a little less until she gets back to her maintenance. 

She also cites a few comments she’s gotten suggesting she must have a fast metabolism and clarifies that she doesn’t, she just watches what she eats, and that her body is absolutely subject to weight gain if she starts slipping. “Last month’s diet is this month’s body,” she explains. The few pounds of weight gain aren’t a medical mystery. You get what you put in. If her sickness caused her to eat more and move less, then, of course, the food was going to go somewhere.

Mina encourages women to rebuild a healthy relationship with food by easing into portion control and intuitive eating through small, manageable steps. She shares a relatable story: how kids often insist they’re still hungry, only to lose interest once more food is served five to ten minutes later. Her point is that adults’ hunger cues work the same way—we often want to keep eating out of habit or stimulation-seeking, not true hunger. Her advice: start by leaving a small portion of your meal uneaten, then gradually scale back over time. “You will be astonished how, if you’re eating, you take a break, and you come back, you’re not going to want the rest of the food. Maybe at the beginning it might be hard. Mentally, your mind is going to be like, no, you want it, it’s really good—but physically, your stomach and your brain will be like, no, you’re full, you’re not hungry, don’t eat it.” 

People ask her all the time how she healed her relationship with food and began eating intuitively for weight management. Her answer: “Like that. I would just eat less and less and less. If you eat little, you’re going to be little. If you eat big, you’re going to be big.” That might sound like common sense, but to many, it’s not. Many need a reminder that the amount you eat is what matters for weight loss. It’s this easily digestible, broken-down for a layman understanding approach that has made her so popular on TikTok, but so loathed by diet-avoidant projectors who are insistent on pathologizing any form of self-discipline.

Sharp’s “additive” approach may be helpful for women recovering from restrictive EDs, but it’s delusional to pretend that overconsumption isn’t a massive problem for many women who’ve never had a disordered history.

Sharp comes from an eating disorder background, she explains, so her target audience is those who have restricted themselves to an unhealthy point. “If someone is restricting to an unhealthy point, you need to encourage them to eat,” she grants. But on the other hand, “if someone eats with reckless abandon whenever they want, why ever they want, whatever they want, they need a little structure. They need a little tough love. I am one of they.” She asks people to remember that neither is right, wrong, or toxic; they’re just for different audiences, and if you’re not someone’s target audience, and you’re finding poor results with them, it’s not for you; just keep scrolling.

Even in her most motivational content, Mina directs her message to women ready to level up, urging them to stop making excuses and take accountability for the life they want. “You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do,” she says, encouraging women to follow through on their goals because if they put in the work, they’ll reap the rewards. “Making excuses is not hot,” she warns, “it makes you look weak, undisciplined, unmotivated. It’s 2025, we’re glowing up. We’re done with excuses.” But she doesn’t go full David Goggins. She qualifies her motivational videos with the fact that this is for women who want the push. “Again, this message is only for the ones that want to hear it. If this is not you, keep scrolling; this doesn’t apply to you. But I can tell you right now, when you start doing tasks you don’t want to do, you become powerful. You become unstoppable.” Is the toxicity in the room with us?

What’s even more dishonest is Sharp’s dismissal of the many commenters who’ve said Mina helped them heal their food relationship, not through orthorexic micromanaging, but by offering sane, down-to-earth strategies that encourage self-respect, especially for moms who feel like they’ve lost themselves after having a baby. The message from body positivity and anti-diet creators is to bask in mediocrity; let the disappointment swallow you. Mina offers a counter-message: you deserve to be the best version of yourself, because you are worthy and you can do it. 

Claiming “SkinnyTok” is universally harmful because it’s not for everyone is pure narcissism disguised as professional concern. The truth is, people like Abbey Sharp are stuck in a world that no longer exists: they see pro-skinny culture everywhere, while we’re all wading through a swamp of junk food glorification, over-eating, and fat activism that pathologizes any form of self-discipline. 

By censoring harmless, informative, and motivational content creators like Minazalie, TikTok is sending a message—they want us to be fat, sick, and helpless. SkinnyTok is a beacon of light for those who demand more for themselves than the bare minimum: who want to prove to themselves that they can do what they set out to do, that they can do hard things, and that hard work pays off. If that’s toxic? I don’t want to be cured.