“Here’s what I eat in a day as a skinny influencer who hits their step count, tracks calories, follows ‘food rules,’ lives an active lifestyle but secretly takes a GLP-1, and poses with my tiny waist showing in front of the camera at the beginning of the video to keep my ‘legging legs,’ ‘looks-maxx’ to my full potential, and stay as dangerously small as I possibly can!”

Welcome back to the buzzword-filled unattainable body epidemic — if we ever truly even left it.

The beast of normalized eating disorders, encouraged body insecurities, “skinny culture,” and ’90s “heroin-chic thinspo” is rearing its ugly head. After a movement of body positivity and celebrating the prioritization of health over how little space your body can take up, our society has been slipping back down an incredibly damaging slope. Namely, social media has been glorifying the basis of self-worth on small waists and the Kate Moss body type. 

Society has seen this act before, and plenty of times at that. The thin ideal has long been valued, ingrained in many minds, and instilled in routines. However, a short-lived body positivity movement began to come into play in the late 2010s and early 2020s, encouraging people via social media that they are beautiful and to love themselves regardless of what their body looks like.

Recently, however, social media has been shoving body positivity out and replacing it with dwindling scale numbers — praising bone exposure and encouraging weight loss, even done unhealthily. 

“It seems like all of the online influencers and celebrities are suddenly showing off that they’re getting unhealthily thin or becoming even skinnier than they were before,” Aubrey Croatt, a UI second-year, said. “It’s definitely harming the way people view themselves and their bodies.”

Several online content creators, many of whom falsely label themselves as “fitness influencers” and “health gurus,” are pushing dangerous narratives with hashtags including “#skinnytok” or “#thinspiration.” Under this facade of health, examples of undereating and a lifestyle entirely based around staying extremely thin are multiplying.

Although this genre of content is prevalent on social media apps such as Instagram and the social platform X, TikTok is the common culprit. With a largely young audience and a calculating algorithm, the app makes it easy for influencers to spread their personal opinions, lifestyles, and goals, not an inherently harmful feature, yet one that supplements the ability to spread a “the thinner the better” agenda.

This skinny culture glorification inevitably plagues and misinforms the impressionable minds of our media-consuming society, warping what’s considered “healthy” and setting impossible standards to live up to. This misinformation and societal pressure work in tandem to contribute to a series of health issues, like eating disorders and malnourishment.

“Our culture holds thin bodies on these pedestals of health and beauty. The reality is that someone’s weight tells us very little about their health, and one’s relationship with their body has little to do with their weight,”  Susanna Kahnke, a clinical assistant professor in the University of Iowa Department of Psychiatry said. “You can love or hate your body at any size, and being underweight is usually more dangerous than being overweight.”

Kahnke, a licensed psychologist and health service provider at UI Health care, said with experience working with patients suffering from eating disorders in the age of social media, she acknowledges the effect online platforms can have on body image and mental health.

“These posts can directly normalize and teach eating disorder behaviors — following ‘food rules,’ weighing yourself often, counting calories, etcetera,” Kahnke said. “There’s also so much nutritional misinformation online, and that has a real impact on people’s eating behaviors and their relationships with food.”

With countless new diets, cleanses, fasts, “low-calorie” recipes, weight loss content, and dietary misinformation, social media has not only affected how we scroll and think online but also how we talk about our bodies and food on a day-to-day basis. 

Kahnke mentioned how harmful but common, it is to say “I’m so bad” when eating a dessert or incessantly praising someone’s appearance once they’ve lost weight. 

These social normalities have made themselves especially present on college campuses. While students are at an age where they’re going through a process of identity development and trying to figure out their values, they’re also constantly consuming social media.

“College students are figuring out who they are as people, and this is often a time when the need for social acceptance is at its peak,” Kahnke said. 

A significant aspect of social acceptance worshipped by teenagers and young adults — and society in general — is appearance, and the pressure this standard induces is widely shared across campus.

“It’s so easy to feel the need to look better, to be skinnier and prettier and all this,” UI first-year student Ella Smith said. “It’s so frustrating, and it feels impossible because there’s always a new insecurity that replaces the old ones.”

For as long as there’s been beauty standards, there’s been a need within society to have what’s unattainable. The thin-ideal has long been this, placing a crushing amount of value on skinny limbs and microscopic waists. 

Because of this inherent desire to fit in, to be praised and regarded highly in society, people tirelessly began chasing this “dream body.”

A new factor has stepped into play, however: the infamous GLP-1. 

Rachel Young, an associate professor at the UI’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, explains that the labor — exercise, diet, and constant body-image stress — is no longer the only big factor in maintaining a thin body. Appetite-suppressing medication makes thinness viable through means that haven’t been seen before. 

“Because it’s an option for some, the expectation we should all look this way is returning,” Young said. “But because of the high cost and shortages, not everyone can have access, which just creates another way we compare and feel poorly about ourselves.”

The drug, originally meant for managing diseases like type 2 diabetes, has exploded into a tool for aesthetic purposes. Not only does this result in increased difficulty of access to those who truly need it, it also perpetuates a standard now being set across social media. 

Young focuses her research on the complicated relationship between media and health, whether it’s mental or how people view themselves, body image, and emotions toward the media. She explained how celebrities and influencers, with their higher access to GLP-1s, have shifted social media to a hyper-thin ideal and a lack of diversity in bodies. 

“The media hugely perpetuates the thin ideal,” Young said. “It’s indisputable that GLP-1s on social media are a big contributor to these unattainable and damaging stereotypes.”

It certainly doesn’t help that GLP-1 transformations are largely seen, and sometimes even promoted, by celebrities. Singers, movie stars, comedians — everyone’s idol seems to be shrinking and flaunting their jutting collarbones and sunken cheeks.

Even Serena Williams, who has long been held up as a symbol of athletic power, strength, and body diversity, especially for women in sports, has promoted her use of Mounjaro, a GLP-1. While it’s unfair to fully place blame on her, this turn to a GLP-1 sends a message that even the strongest, most capable, most accomplished bodies are not enough, not perfect.

It just further proves that the perfect body truly isn’t real. Even the influencer you see online with every beauty standard met doesn’t look like that all the time, maybe not even at all. BetterHelp online therapy service suggests that social media is fake, even when it pretends not to be; filled with angles, filters, botox, butt lifts, and liposuction, there’s an endless amount of unreachable standards to constantly be met.

This nasty, misinformed mindset has been seen before, is being witnessed now, and will undoubtedly resurface in the future. Yet, time and time again, it’s proven that no one will feel they are thin enough, never perfectly proportioned, never satisfied if they keep buying into the skinny culture cycle. 

Social media preys on this cycle. 

All the algorithm cares about is what you’re paying attention to, which can be really damaging if it picks up on a vulnerable, personal topic.

“If you’re susceptible or sensitive or worried about your body, maybe just having a bad day or low self-esteem, the algorithm will pick up on that and just keep showing that stuff to you over and over again,” Young said. 

Young pointed out that a person’s algorithm is almost designed to hurt them, to insult and berate, and feed into whatever insecurity they have, as long as they keep engaging with it. 

When the person realize this, when they accept that there’s more to life than the next scroll and the tiniest waist and how a shirt makes their arms look, they will begin to be free. 

Gunderson Health System points out that not only does stepping on the scale every morning not help a person, but their weight should be, and is, the least interesting thing about them.

“My biggest hope for everyone stuck in this cycle and pulled into this mindset is that they eventually realize how thin isn’t equivalent to beautiful. If their weight isn’t causing serious health problems, it shouldn’t ever be something that people place this much importance on,” Olivia Williamson, a UI fourth-year student, said. 

Just because celebrities or influencers with mass amounts of followers and supporters may participate in things like skinny culture, GLP-1s, health misinformation, fad diets, and other “thinspiration,” it doesn’t mean it’s right, and it doesn’t mean anyone has to buy into it. 

Skinny culture is back. Maybe it never truly left. 

However, the body positivity movement is real and has made an impact on society over the last couple of years online, but there’s a long way to go, and it’s not a linear slope. 

It’s still here, especially if someone looks for it, and it will continue to be alive, well, and growing as long as society keeps working towards it.