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“There’s lots of chat at the moment about #SkinnyTok,” Jenny Stevens, the Guardian’s deputy features editor, tells Helen Pidd. “The TikTok influencers, TikTok users, who are documenting their extreme weight-loss journeys.
“I’ve looked through that hashtag and I think, wow, some of these people are really, really unwell. And I think that there is a profit-seeking algorithm that is pushing that content into the feeds of young users.”
Stevens explains why she is worried about the rise in weight-loss drugs, as someone who suffered from an eating disorder.
“I worry about them. And the wider media context, and their absolute fixation on who’s taking them, who isn’t, who’s lost the weight, how they’ve lost the weight. Look at their bones jutting out … I worry about the effects of it on vulnerable people who are already suffering with disordered eating.”
Also, we ask what a renewed fixation on thinness means for plus-size women?
Gina Tonic, the author of Greedy Guts: Notes From an Insatiable Woman, talks about the origins of the body positivity movement and why it feels less visible than it did.
“I think Covid put health into the forefront of society’s point of view as something that we really needed to prioritise for ourselves and also for our communities. And obviously, the first people to suffer under that kind of logic is people who are disabled, but also people who are seen as unhealthy, I guess, or willingly unhealthy.
“And fatness is automatically associated with being unhealthy and has been for decades. So it just feels like a natural follow-on with a public obsession with health, and the perception that thinness is health, thinness becomes the priority again for so many people,” says Tonic.
You can listen to Jenny Stevens’s Today in Focus episode on her own experiences, recorded in 2021, here. Gina Tonic’s story on being trolled can be found here: A moment that changed me: I found out the identity of my troll – and it shook me
Support the Guardian today: theguardian.com/todayinfocuspod
