“There’s lots of chat at the moment about #SkinnyTok,” Jenny Stevens, the Guardian’s deputy options 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 concerned about the upward push in weight-loss medicine, as any person who suffered from an consuming dysfunction.
“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 manner for plus-size ladies?
Gina Tonic, the writer of Greedy Guts: Notes From an Insatiable Woman, talks in regards to the origins of the frame positivity motion and why it feels much less visual 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 concentrate to Jenny Stevens’s Today in Focus episode on her personal reports, recorded in 2021, right here. Gina Tonic’s tale on being trolled will also be discovered right here: A second that modified me: I discovered the identification of my troll – and it shook me
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