As the era of self-love comes to end, image-obsessed language reminiscent of early 2000s diet culture is taking its place. And it’s spreading further than ever before.
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When Mina Rad was 20 years old, she had, to her knowledge, successfully beaten her eating disorder.
For six years, Rad had struggled with a cycle of binging and restricting. Initially, Rad was binge eating, but after a friend made fun of her recent weight gain, she started restricting her food intake as a form of self-harm.
As she got older, it felt like a competition to be the skinniest girl in school. Rad grew up watching “The Biggest Loser,” a popular weight-loss competition television show, where whoever lost the highest percentage of body fat won a cash prize. Weight loss was a contest, and she wanted to win.
Shortly after her 20th birthday, Rad had thought she put the competition behind her, so when she first encountered Liv Schmidt’s advice on staying skinny, she thought nothing of it. Schmidt, a popular but controversial wellness influencer, posted portion-control “life hacks” and reminders to viewers to get their 10,000 steps in each day.
Schmidt also ran a subscribers-only group chat called The Skinni Société. Whoever was interested just had to pay Schmidt $20 a month, and they would have access to exclusive tips from Schmidt and a network of other women, who were hoping to improve the discipline surrounding food. Hoping to work on her own portion control, Rad signed up.
Rad stayed silent in the chat, but took in all Schmidt and her disciples had to offer. She enjoyed Schmidt’s tips and appreciated her honesty. According to Rad, Schmidt said it was okay to want to be thin, as long as you weren’t obsessive over it.
Rad connected with the sentiment. She didn’t understand why, at that time, Schmidt’s content was being heavily criticized on TikTok. Schmidt’s content was helpful, and even if the girls in her Instagram group chat were a bit competitive, everyone was still supportive. It wasn’t until she stumbled across a post of Schmidt’s titled “Why I Don’t Eat Like a Tourist” that Rad started to get the bigger picture.
“I’m not here to try the food. I’m here to look sculpted on the beach,” Schmidt said in the post.
“My memories don’t come from meals. They come from how flat my stomach was.”
Quickly after that, Rad unfollowed Schmidt and cancelled her subscription. She started to look at Schmidt’s content with more skepticism, including Schmidt’s controversies, which stemmed from all sorts of small comments, ranging from animal emojis to the color of someone’s workout set.
“I can’t believe I didn’t see this before,” Rad recalled. “She basically said that if you are overweight you can’t wear the color blue unless you’re skinny or else it’s gonna make you look like a whale.”
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Schmidt’s post about staying thin on vacation was what prompted Rad to cancel her subscription. Photo courtesy of @livsschmidt on Instagram.
While Schmidt and her followers are loud, and growing increasingly louder, as her following has now reached over 300,000 on Instagram (her original TikTok with over 600,000 followers was deleted), they’re not the only ones promoting this mindset.
In 2009, super-model Kate Moss popularized the phrase “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” a mantra she picked up from her modeling friends. She initially faced backlash, and later distanced herself from the statement. But Moss’s mantra is nothing compared to Schmidt’s degrading statements. Posts like “Don’t reward yourself with food, you’re not a dog” are becoming more and more prevalent on the internet alongside Schmidt’s tips. According to a Reddit post, Schmidt’s Skinni Société’s page uploaded a post that read; “Being a true girls girl who wants everyone to get skinni is giving obese people wrong directions so they walk more.”
Schmidt isn’t the only influencer who posts content like this, but she is considered one of the many leading faces of this strange cultural moment. In a TikTok video posted by user Abbey Sharpe, a registered dietician, Sharpe claims that Schmidt makes six figures off her subscribers-only chat, which implies that the group is growing in numbers. Rhetoric like Schmidt’s, which health experts warn is eating disorder motivation disguised as wellness advice, has been sneaking into public conversation for the last few years. It’s not just on TikTok. Marketing campaigns, television, and online conversation on other platforms have gotten more and more obsessed with keeping women’s bodies thin.
This is a stark change from recent years. In the 2010s, body positivity, a movement dedicated to promoting love for all bodies, was sweeping America. Clothing brands were becoming more inclusive and plus-size models were getting more work. At the same time, anti-fat jokes and stereotypes were no longer as acceptable in film and television. While Moss initially faced backlash for her repeated mantra, it wasn’t until the body positivity movement really hit mainstream that Moss admitted she regretted the statement.
But since the movement’s peak, the body mindset has since been pushed aside in favor of “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” meaner younger sister. Those interviewed for this story said it’s now normal on social media, and in real life, for people to take a page from Schmidt’s book and refer to others as whales, dogs and pigs. Brands are scaling back their in-store sizing, according to TikTok users and CNBC, and actress Elle Fanning is now considered plus-size. Everything has added protein in it, everyone is on a wellness journey, and ads with Serena Williams and Mike Tyson that hawk weight loss medications are everywhere.
Williams, the 23-time Grand Slam-winning tennis player, partnered with wellness brand Ro to promote their telehealth weightloss program in 2025. She faced backlash for the campaign, and continued to face it after Roe launched a SuperBowl Commercial with Williams at the front of it. This campaign has been inescapable, and some individuals are tired.
“It’s being shoved down our throats,” said Marielle Greguski, a plus-size influencer. “I can’t get on a subway without looking and seeing Serena Williams with that thing in her arm.”
While all of this isn’t exactly new, the body positivity movement hoped to end negative discourse surrounding women’s bodies, and muffled the noise as best as it could. Instead, the movement only made the discourse quieter, without making any major systemic changes.
Rad, who has been in recovery for one year, has been staying away from any content related to body image. But the algorithms, she said, can be relentless. While she isn’t seeing content like Schmidt’s, extremely thin women still flood her feed. For Rad, the online environment fostered by influencers like Schmidt and others, is bleeding into everyday conversation, making women feel increasingly unsafe in their own skin.
“They brand themselves as making community for people, but it’s really to fuel each other’s eating disorders,” said Rad. “There’s really nothing positive about it.”
Diet culture as we know it has existed longer than people might think. In 1860s England, William Banting, an obese mortician wanting to lose weight, met physician William Harvey. Harvey prescribed Banting a low-carbohydrate diet, and diet culture was born.
Initially, dieting was more common for men, as people believed women lacked men’s “leanness and self- control.” It wasn’t until the 1890s that dieting language began appearing in women’s culture magazines. Alongside it came racist pseudoscience. The ideal body — which, at that point, was on the curvier side, more commonly seen in Black women — was shifting. According to authors Sabrina Strings and Lindo Bacon in their article “The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity” for Scientific American, 19th century Black women were seen as having an “inability to control their animal appetites,” which pushed white women away from the curvier body that was once in fashion.
As a response to World War I, the 1920s had women rationing food and counting calories. Years later, in the 1940s, as the concept of the ideal housewife was becoming more and more prevalent, “slenderizing salons” began to pop up with machines designed to make the average woman more slender. While fad slimming technology and early diets were on the rise, diet culture was still in development. It wasn’t until the obesity epidemic that the diet industry really took off.
Obesity is a medical condition defined by the World Health Organization as “abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that presents a risk to health.” In order to classify as obese, an individual must have a body mass index of 30. Body mass index (BMI) is calculated by dividing weight in kilograms by the square of height in meters.
The ongoing obesity epidemic is often cited to have begun in the 1980s, after obesity rates in American adults rose from 15% in 1976–1980 to 23.3% in 1988–1994. In actuality, the American obesity epidemic first emerged in the 1950s, after insurance agencies began looking into the causes of heart disease, which at the time was the leading cause of death for Americans. In the 1950s, obesity was labeled by the US Public Health Services as “the greatest problem in preventative medicine in the USA” according to Nicolas Rasmussen’s book “Fat in the Fifties.” Originally, obesity was considered a mental illness, and amphetamines were used to treat it.
The epidemic largely disappeared from the public eye by the 1960s, until obesity rates rose in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Obesity rates have continued to rise ever since, and the adult obesity rate currently sits at 40.3%. There is no concrete reason as to why the rates have risen, but the increase of processed foods and decline of physical activity are possible factors.
In response to the rising obesity rates of the ’70s and ’80s, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, in partnership with the United States Department of Agriculture and Health and Human Services, released a set of seven guidelines in early 1980. These guidelines include tips like “eat a variety of food,” “maintain ideal weight,” and drink alcohol “in moderation.” The guide also informed readers to avoid too much fat, sugar, sodium, saturated fat and cholesterol.
Diet culture was thriving, just under a different name. According to a 1994 chart from Weight Watchers International, terms like “diet” and “calorie counting” were out, and terms like “healthful eating” and “portion control” were in. At the same time, thinness was being used as a fashion statement.
Heroin chic, a popular fashion aesthetic from the 1990s, emulated the visual style of heroin junkies. Under this aesthetic, models were extremely thin, with very gaunt features and dark eye bags. At the same time, actress Kate Winslet was considered fat, with director James Cameron allegedly nicknaming her “Kate Weighs-a-Lot” on the set of “Titanic.” In the film “Bridget Jones Diary,” main character Bridget Jones, played by Renee Zellweger, was considered fat as well, but Bridget Jones weighed roughly 136 pounds.
This attitude continued well into the 2000s and 2010s, around the time Moss popularized the mantra “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” Thin was in, and the media was all over it. Popstar Britney Spears and actress Charlize Theron graced the covers of several tabloids for having visible cellulite.
Mainstream pop culture was pushing unrealistic beauty standards onto the Hollywood elite and onto the average individual. Freelance culture writer Sophie Vershbow, age 36, remembers what it was like growing up in this era. When she was a senior in high school, Vershbow went on a community service trip in Ecuador where she ended up losing about 10 pounds. When she returned a month later, her weight loss was praised at every turn. Vershbow, who was already struggling with disordered eating habits, took the praise to heart and developed anorexia.
She struggled for years, but what helped her recover was the body positivity movement. “It would be dumb to think that me and all my friends don’t have some sort of body hangups,” said Vershbow. “But we’re not sitting around criticizing our bodies too much at this point…I learned so much from body positivity activists on this.”
In the 1960s, a social justice movement, called Fat Liberation, staged a sit-in as a form of protest against anti-fat bias. The Fat Liberation movement continued to speak out against anti-fat structures, alongside another activist group, the Fat Underground. Body positivity, an online social media campaign, stems from that time, but spends less time focused on systemic change like the Fat Liberation movement once did.
In the early 2000s, fat activists began to find each other on platforms like Tumblr and MySpace. And in the 2010s, fat activists and plus-size models began posting “outfit of the day” pictures onto burgeoning social media networks like Facebook and Instagram as a form of activism. The trend quickly took off with influencers promoting self-love and body acceptance across the web.
Stores began carrying larger sizes and fashion brands increased the amount of plus-size models. Songs like “All About that Bass” promoted self-confidence with lyrics like, “You know I won’t be no stick-figure, silicone Barbie doll. So, if that’s what you’re into, then go ahead and move along.” Trainor’s body positive anthem was at the top of the charts for eight consecutive weeks.
Lizzo, a plus-size singer, rapper and flautist, also rose to fame during this era. Her songs like “Juice” and “Tempo ” promoted body acceptance through her own confidence. Fat suits to portray plus-size characters were no longer acceptable in film and television, and plus-size women like Aidy Bryant were given opportunities to create and star in their own shows. It seemed like, for the first time, everyone loved their bodies.
“When I was a preteen and a teenager, Jessica Simpson was the fattest person in the world, ’cause she’s a size four,” Vershbow recalled. “Compared to that…It just felt like we were making progress.”
Trend cycles are like boomerangs. In the 90s, heroin chic became the go-to aesthetic because of the cultural atmosphere. According to The Swaddle, consumers turned to nihilism and embraced the deadly aesthetic during the time of recession. While heroin chic went away, the 2000s were still full of gaunt women, which was also a response to economic turmoil. But the body positivity movement was a result of backlash for the first two moments.
“One of the reasons that millennials had some first big body positive wave was because we didn’t like how we grew up,” said Vershbow, a born and raised 90s kid. “We wanted to make it different.”
While this current era of diet culture doesn’t have an exact start date, it does have multiple catalysts for its beginning. The internet, creation of Ozempic, and the body positivity movements failure to ignite actual social change play a big part in it. But similar to body positivity, backlash has had a role to play in the culture shift.
“Anytime you have a really successful movement, you’re always going to see some degree of a backlash movement,” said Riley Martinez, political reporter. “Sometimes it’s not very potent, but other times it is. And this one seems to be really pretty potent.”
But Martinez sensed something a bit deeper than just a contradictory point to a social movement. “It would be naive to say that it is not related to Donald Trump and the rise of really, really conservative politics that we’re seeing ever since, basically, 2016,” said Martinez. “Femininity, prettiness…It’s all kind of related to a very specific ideal of what women should look like.”
Juliana Tucciarone was 23 years old when she realized that something was wrong with her body. After gaining an alarming amount of weight in a short period of time, Tucciarone was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), a chronic illness that can cause hormone imbalance and ovarian cysts. Rapid weight gain is a common side effect.
To manage her symptoms, her doctor suggested that she go on a Glucagon-like Peptide-1 (GLP-1) antagonist, but the doctor wouldn’t prescribe it to Tucciarone because she didn’t have any active cysts. Desperate to feel her best, Tucciarone sought out alternatives. Instead of getting her medicine in her home state of California, she reached out to an Idaho Medical Spa her grandfather found. Medical Spas combine spa-like treatments with non-surgical aesthetic services, like GLP-1 medications. After several telehealth calls, Tucciarone was put on a compounded semaglutide medication, which is not the same as Ozempic and is not always regulated by the FDA.
”If my primary care physician would have prescribed me legit Ozempic, I would have done that,” said Tucciarone. “And I would have felt better about doing that.”
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Tucciarone uses GLP-1 medication as a way to manage symptoms of her condition, but these drugs have gone mainstream in America. According to a November 2025 poll from Kaiser Family Foundation, one in eight adults are currently on a GLP-1 medication and one in five adults have been on a GLP-1 medication at some point in time.
Ozempic, which is the most well-known GLP-1 medication, was originally designed as a treatment for Type-2 diabetics, but it also caused weight loss as a side effect. Medications like Wegovy and Zepound were developed later, specifically for weight management. These medications fall under the GLP-1 or “semaglutide” umbrella.
According to that same Kaiser poll, only 45% of GLP-1 users are actually diabetic, while the rest are using the drugs for other chronic illnesses or just solely weight management. Health officials often remind the public that Ozempic was not designed to be a weight loss drug, but its side effects, which include quieting food noise and sometimes rapid weight loss, have made it a household name. In fact, countless users are upfront about wanting to lose weight fast, which undercuts the lasting change the body positivity movement hoped to purport.
However, many people like Tucciarone are finding success with these medications. And at Dr. Allison Lucchesi’s family medical practice, it’s changed people’s lives. “I’ve seen it really help people that have struggled their whole life,” she said.
But GLP-1 medications have become a divisive topic with some people arguing that their users are ‘lazy’ and ‘cheaters.’ Celebrities like Lizzo and Oprah received backlash for allegedly using the drugs. Lizzo, once a body positive icon, was accused of turning her back on the plus-size community. Others believe that everyone needs to be on them and go so far as to promote them on TikTok Live or sell “GLP-1 Patches” on TikTok Shop.
In mid-2024, Dr. Lucchesi, was bombarded with requests for Ozempic and other GLP-1 medications. Demand was high, and Dr. Lucchesi had to do a lot of research while handing out prescriptions. “I started prescribing, and basically let the insurance companies decide who it was covered for and who it wasn’t covered for,” said Dr. Lucchesi. “It was a steep learning curve.”
Without insurance, a month of Ozempic can total about $1000 and requires significant efforts to obtain. For Ozempic and other FDA approved weight loss drugs, a patient would need a doctor’s visit and a weight pre-authorization from their insurance company, which can take up to three weeks. Many patients of Dr. Lucchesi had their insurance companies refuse to cover GLP-1 medications for weight loss, simply because the drug was too expensive as the craze continued on.
But the government is taking steps to make these medications cheaper. In November 2025, the Whitehouse announced that a few name brand GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy, would drop to $350 a month when purchased through “TrumpRX,” a government owned prescription website. Additionally, a Wegovy pill was approved in December 2025, and costs $150 a month without insurance.
At one point towards the beginning of the craze, Dr Lucchesi refused to prescribe the medication as she waited for more research to become available. But similar to Tucciarone, patients were desperate for the miracle drug to either lose those last five pounds or to majorly change their lives. They were doing whatever they could to get their hands on it.
Medical Spas and online pharmaceutical companies became a popular spot to get GLP-1 medications for a more affordable price and an easier process. But with this new accessibility, came more medications on the market. Some Medical Spas, like the one Tucciarone uses, sell uncompounded GLP-1 medications, which means that the drug is not FDA approved. “I don’t think it’s safe, and I don’t recommend it to my patients,” said Dr. Lucchesi.
But people are using it anyway. Dr. Lucchesi’s hairdresser has been using uncompounded medication for two years. “She just gives it to herself,” Dr. Lucchesi said. “Nobody’s weighing her, nobody’s checking her blood work, nobody’s doing anything.”
Not only are some of these medications unsafe, but also, they have also sparked a widening cultural debate.“I do see [them] as the beginning stages of an eradication campaign,” said comedian and activist McKenna Moore, who received flack online for a now deleted TikTok where she compared Ozempic and other GLP-1’s to genocide. In her original video, Moore stated, “When are we going to understand it’s all the same thing…They want to get rid of us.”
Since GLP-1s were shrinking the individuals using it, Moore believed that the medication was trying to eradicate fat people. Moore later elaborated that Ozempic on its own is not genocidal but that it “goes with capitalism’s goals of constraining and constricting people,” Moore said in an interview.
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“I don’t think it is inherently evil to lose weight or to want to lose weight,” said Moore. “But I think that the vast majority of people who want to lose weight are not doing it for their health.”
Still, she is concerned with this rise of thinness that has been occurring on social media that has impacted real life. “You are rewarded in this world for every pound you are smaller,” said Moore.
At the same time, since GLP-1’s have become mainstream, adult obesity rates in the United States have declined to 37.0% in 2025 from 39.9% in 2022, according to Gallup. At the same time, the percentage of adults who take GLP-1s for weight loss has increased to 12.4%, compared to 5.8% in February 2024.
TikTok has played a big part in the current atmosphere regarding Ozempic. Weight loss influencers use the app to garner support and encouragement on their own weight loss journeys, interacting without filter with the everyday user. The content is centered around weight loss, like Schmidt’s Skinni Société, but approaches it from a more polite angle.
Morgan Marie (@mylifefriday) has accumulated over 60,000 followers on TikTok over the course of about two years. She joined the platform as a creator when she noticed how encouraging people were about weight loss journeys. She was looking for a community, and a way to make a bit of extra money.
At the beginning of her journey, Marie decided to lose weight “naturally,” or without medical intervention. But after being stuck at a weight loss plateau for several months, she felt it was time to try something new — a GLP-1 medication.
So far, it’s been a success, but it took a long time to get to this moment. “There’s that feeling out there right now that if you’re not doing it the natural way, you’re cheating,” said Marie.
Online, weight loss is a competition. Natural weight loss is often deemed superior when compared to weight loss with medical intervention. Marie received many compliments praising her diet and exercise, while simultaneously criticizing medically induced weight loss.
Marie initially got her GLP-1 medication through her doctor, but after being approached by an online pharmacy, she took up a sponsorship to make getting the drug a little easier. Later, a follower reached out to Marie, saying how upset they were that she was working with an online pharmacy in an age where it seems like every weight loss influencer is trying to sell you to a different GLP-1 company. “I had to reflect and be like, ‘Am I becoming the thing I swore I’d never be?’” Marie said.
Partnerships like Marie’s are becoming more and more common, though GLP-1 medications cannot directly be sold on TikTok Shop, as per the website’s rules and regulations. Overweight Americans are benefiting from these drugs, but online pharmaceutical companies are attempting to capitalize on non-overweight citizens with ads that target more insecure individuals.
An ad belonging to online weight loss company Willow, has been circulating social media, but for all the wrong reasons. Written on a cake, it says “PSA for the girls: you don’t need to be obese to start a GLP-1.” Another company, Eterna Beauty and Wellness, posted basically the same ad on Facebook.
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Tana Mongeau, a popular lifestyle influencer, has been open about her on-again-off-again relationship with popular weight loss drug Mounjaro. “I know, and everyone in L.A. knows, that I can go to this place in Beverly Hills, and then all my jeans fit again,” said Mongeau in a TikTok video. By most medical standards, Mongeau is not considered obese.
“If she feels like she needs it, I guess, who am I to say?” said Marie. “But it’s just as weird when these normal, average people take it so they can get skinny. I’m taking it so I don’t have health problems.”
People like Mongeau, who are using these drugs when they might not need to, continue to complicate the world’s relationship with weight. Why is the average person clamoring for these miracle weight loss drugs?
Regardless, at the end of the day Marie understands the appeal. “If you feel shitty about yourself and unlovable for being overweight,” Marie said, “you’re going to want to do anything to not be fat anymore.”
Outside of targeted GLP-1 ads, the new diet culture is seeping into everything we consume, even our drinks. For example, everyone in Bobbi Miller’s circle is obsessed with Diet Coke. Even though Addison Rae wrote a hit pop song about Diet Pepsi, Diet Coke is still considered the drink of the “It Girl.” Owala, a popular drink-ware brand, recently launched a line of Diet Coke water bottles and cups. Popular wellness influencer Samantha Milton (@smallersam_pcos), who says the phrase “And a Diet Coke for the haters,” in almost every one of her videos, sells Diet Coke-themed merchandise.
With a cult-like following, Diet Coke is becoming its own brand, outside of the Coca-Cola company. Miller, a pop culture analyst who grew up in Atlanta drinking Coke products, wanted to find out what made Diet Coke so important. Diet Coke has been on the market since 1982, but its cult-like status came after.
Through her research, Miller discovered a simple branding tactic. Backstage at fashion shows and other high profile events, the zero calorie, zero sugar drink was waiting in the wings for models and celebrities to take a sip. “Everyone that you know who’s hot…they’re not drinking a Coca-Cola, because that’s a little bit too indulgent,” said Miller. ”They’re drinking a Diet Coke. So they’re still fun, but they’re conscious of their look.”
Even as the diet industry repackaged itself into wellness culture, Diet Coke has still prevailed. While it’s still the “It Girl” drink, a new kind of soda has been making its way into the minds of what Miller calls “the beautiful people.” Prebiotic and probiotic “healthy” sodas, like OliPop, Poppi and Culture Pop, have been making big strides in the mainstream soda market. In 2025, after increasing brand growth, Poppi was sold to PepsiCo for $2 billion. Culture Pop released a soda with acclaimed folk singer Noah Kahan, and OliPop partnered with Barbie and Spongebob to create exclusive packaging to promote their new films.
These drinks, which are typically 50 calories or less, promote gut-health. But like Diet Coke, there is a certain kind of attitude that comes with drinking them. “Oh, you’re not trying to lose weight. You’re just trying to heal your gut,” said Miller. “But oftentimes, what is the end goal of healing your gut?”
Miller, host of The Afternoon Special podcast, is not immune to diet culture, even with all of her pop culture expertise. At one of her first red carpets, Miller experienced what it was like to be a different body type in the entertainment industry.
“It’s such a humiliation ritual to walk a carpet and the photographers put their cameras down,” Miller recalled. “And it’s at those events that you realize, how tiny everyone is and how their bodies look a certain way. Everyone’s body is optimized to look the best for content.”
Meg Ruocco, a 29-year-old creative producer, who has been plus-size her entire life, is no stranger to the war between a woman’s mind and body. Though she’s never had an eating disorder, Ruocco has been struggling with her own image from a very early age.
“The first time that I was made aware of it, I was six,” said Ruocco. “And it was when my mother told me that I didn’t have the body to wear a two piece on a vacation in Mexico.”
And instead of causing a scene or scolding her mother for speaking to her in that way, Ruocco just took it. “It was just something that I accepted as fact,” Ruocco said. “I would be so pretty if I lost weight.”
Ruocco grew up in an era where it was more socially acceptable to comment on women’s bodies. Tabloids were hyperfocused on women’s weight with covers like “The Weight Debate; Fat or Curvy?” and “Jessica’s Diet Disaster!” gracing the shelves.
For years, Ruocco tried different diets to lose weight. Her doctor would always give her a clean bill of health, but consistently told her to lose weight. It would take almost 15 years for her to break out of that toxic cycle. After a messy breakup, Ruocco started working with a Health at Every Size (HAES) nutritionist. HAES sprung from the body positivity movement as a means of removing weight bias in the medical industry. Ruocco sought out her nutritionist to untangle her complicated relationship with her body and food.
This was when the body positivity movement was becoming mainstream in pop culture, and Ruocco was improving because of it. “It was really exciting for me to see just people embracing themselves and embracing their bodies,” she said.
With the help of her nutritionist, and the body positivity movement, Ruocco was able to get to a much better place, where her weight didn’t define her as much as it used to.
“I grew up thinking that I wouldn’t be able to have certain things because of my fatness. I wouldn’t be able to find love, or I wouldn’t be able to get the job that I wanted,” said Ruocco. “Now I have the life that I wanted, and it’s better than I thought it could be. And I’m still fat.”
So when Ruocco was watching the 2026 Oscars red carpet coverage with her friends, she was taken aback by how skinny everyone looked. The coverage was so jarring, and her friends picked up on it, too. According to Ruocco, most of the attendees looked “emaciated.” Ruocco took to social media to discuss her concerns.
“Yes! The Oscars were so fun.” said Ruocco in her TikTok Video. “Quick question: Was I supposed to see that many people’s bones?”
And she wasn’t the only person who noticed. Ruocco’s video gained 5.6 million views, and other creators began to speak up as well.
Riley Martinez, a 29-year-old political reporter who uses her TikTok to post business casual fashion tips, did not watch the entirety of 98th Academy Awards. But the attendees she had seen shook her to her core. According to Martinez, the women were incredibly gaunt. “It was like one of those moments where I was just like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ Like I knew it was bad,” said Martinez, “but I didn’t realize it was this bad.”
Martinez was so upset that she posted a TikTok calling out the spectacle. “We need to talk about women’s bodies because if we don’t, they’re going to die,” said Martinez in the video. “And by women, I mean all of us and also the next generation of women who is looking and seeing that this is now fucking normalized.”
Martinez’s video, similarly to Ruocco’s, earned 5.9 million views, prompting additional online discourse. But after the tabloid culture of the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, many are unsure if the internet is even the right place to be discussing women’s bodies, even if they look sick or “emaciated.”
According to Martinez and Ruocco, it’s perfectly fine, with some caveats. What makes the discussion so problematic is going after the individual instead of the whole. “We need to talk about this as a systemic problem, which is what it is, not go after individual women and comment on their Instagram,” said Martinez. Both women made sure not to name anyone specific in their TikTok videos. Ruocco didn’t even use the word “women” in her post.
“What we are talking about isn’t necessarily some random lady that you see in the grocery store, and you’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, she could lose a few,’” said Ruocco. “That’s a completely different scenario than me talking about someone who is incredibly wealthy and is flaunting their thinness as a symbol of elitism and power.”
Bella Diaz, a fashion TikToker, has always been aware of the way people with her body type are portrayed on screen. Typically plus-size characters fall into one of two categories: the villain (Ursula from “The Little Mermaid”) or the funny best friend (Sookie from “Gilmore Girls”). And often this character is very focused on their weight.
Which is why, when season three of “Bridgerton” came out, she was cautiously optimistic for Penelope Featherington’s season. “Bridgerton,” a four-season Netflix original based on the regency-romance series by Julia Quinn, is known for its steamy romance scenes, and Diaz, like many others, expected Netflix to keep up the heat for season three. Each season focuses on a separate couple, lining up with each book in Quinn’s series.
Penelope is written as plus-size and a fan favorite amongst plus-size girls for not obsessing about her image. But when Diaz tuned in, she found herself disappointed. She felt as if the majority of the screentime, which was supposed to be on Penelope, was unevenly split between the many other characters. And what’s worse, Penelope was falling into the tropes that plagued the plus-size characters that came before her, like the villain and funny best friend. “It’s a lost opportunity,” said Diaz.
Though Diaz turned to her for representation, Penelope might not even be plus-size. Penelope’s actress, Nicola Coughlan, is often labeled and praised for being a plus-size actress. She is a UK size 10, and during filming of season three wore a UK size 8 corset. In an interview with Elle UK, Coughlan revealed her shock that she was considered plus-size, even after losing weight while working on “Bridgerton.” “People talked about how I was plus size and I was like, “How fucked are we that I am the biggest woman you want to see on screen?”’ Coughlan said in the interview.
The perception of who is considered plus-size or “not on Ozempic” seems to get more skewed by the day. After the 2026 Golden Globes ceremony, one Twitter user wrote, “women are getting bigger,” in response to a video of actress Elle Fanning. It wasn’t just a one-off comment. In the comments of a TikTok video, one user wrote that Fanning was not skinny. A different user replied with a picture of Fanning, asking, “This isn’t skinny to you?” The initial commenter replied, “No, Nicole. It’s not. And it never ever will be.”
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The Internet can be a toxic place. Even if you try your best to avoid Schmidt and her screaming fans, diet culture will still find a way to your phone screen, whether that be through low-calorie, high-protein dinner recipes, ads for Pepsi’s new 30-calorie probiotic cola, or a video about how size small jeans aren’t actually that small anymore. Because of this, some, like Laura Gibofsky, a pediatric and surgical nutritionist, avoid social media entirely.
Gibofsky has been working in nutrition for about 15 years and primarily works with children. Her job entails providing patients with dietary instructions so they can meet healthy nutritional levels, but she is not a therapist and cannot help patients improve their relationship with food. Recently, Gibofsky encountered a patient, a young girl, who was self-restricting food intake against Gibofsky’s nutritional advice.
“She got on the phone and talked about how much she hated her body… She knew that I was there and that I was on her team, but that she couldn’t stand to talk about food,” said Gibofsky. “She couldn’t look at her body. She had a lot of negative self thoughts, and I basically was very clear to the mom that I was like, ‘This is no longer something that I can do because she’s not following the nutrition interventions. This is something that a mental health professional has to deal with.’”
Gibofsky sees this behavior most frequently with women, but she’s also encountered it with men more recently. While there are numerous factors that can contribute to disordered eating habits, like at-home environments, and bullying from peers, Gibofsky noted that the internet might be the biggest factor of them all.
“Everybody thinks that they’re an expert,” said Gibofsky. “Everybody thinks that they should comment on what people are eating, and it’s a frustrating place to be as a professional to make sure that you can spread correct information rather than misinformation.”
There are plenty of nutritionists and dieticians on the internet. But the difference between them and Gibofsky is that credentials can often be shaky. While Gibofsky refers to herself as a nutritionist, she is also a registered dietician, having completed a rigorous training program. Some internet nutritionists are unable to say the same. While intentions may be good, according to Gibofsky, they are spreading misinformation that can be challenging to correct.
Take Schmidt, for example, who at one point claimed that tomatoes make people fat. Her Skinni Société is thriving. According to an Instagram story posted by Schmidt, the Société receives anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 applicants each month, but only 150 girls are accepted into what is now a four-month program.
Schmidt is not qualified to give dietary advice, but she does it anyway. Across her social media pages, her ‘skinni’ hacks range from something as simple as cutting portion sizes (to quote Schmidt, “eat small = you get small” and “eat big = you get big”), to something a little more complicated, like Schmidt’s recent post, where she orders a matcha made of skim milk and water, puts on salted caramel lip gloss, and chews a piece of gum to beat the afternoon “snack attack.”
In other realms of the weight loss internet, GLP-1 weight loss accounts are also subtly promoting eating less. While it may not be intentional, GLP-1 users posting “What I Eat in a Day” videos with small amounts of food — smaller than a recommended calorie deficit — are also perpetuating Schmidt’s diet culture. GLP-1 medications mess with hunger cues and silence “food noise,” which is a constant stream of thoughts focused solely on food. Food noise is a genuine concern for those struggling with food addiction and is a welcome side effect of these medications.
Marielle Greguski (@mariellegreguski), a plus-size body neutral influencer, posts her own “What I Eat in a Day” videos to demonstrate what a normal, balanced day of eating looks like for someone not on a GLP-1 or a weight loss journey. Greguski is not a fan of Schmidt, but tries to stay neutral about the weight loss community. Her issues with Schmidt and other weight loss influencers, especially those that were formerly plus-size influencers, start when they get mean.
“You can lose weight. But don’t be an asshole about it,” Greguski said. “Stick up for your old self and human beings that have a right to exist in the same space as you.”
Greguski, who posts fashion and dating content in addition to her “What I Eat in a Day” videos, started posting more about food when she noticed an uptick of “ragebait” content from the plus-size community. She followed one user who posted normal eating habits, but changed their content because of outrage from fatphobic trolls.
“She was eating high protein buffalo chicken dip with peppers. And people were still mean to her. And when she would eat something ‘bad’ like a Reese’s peanut butter cup or fries, people would engage way more.” Greguski recalled. “ And all she’s done since that started happening is just feed into that.”
Greguski hasn’t experienced a ton of hate, which she credits to her being more of a “mid-sized” woman, which is someone who is not exactly thin, but doesn’t appear morbidly obese. The internet is weird about food, and it’s weird about plus-size people. Even outside of the internet, this kind of language is inescapable.
Greguski, like many others, has struggled with her body and fueling it for years. She went on her first diet at age 10 and after a lot of work, is finally at a place where hating her body isn’t the only thing she thinks about. The increase of GLP-1’s is complicating her progress.
“The whole point of it is that it makes you not want to eat,” said Greguski. “And what is the point of life if I can’t sit here and have this really delicious chocolaty mocha, if I can’t have my mom’s homemade mac and cheese?”
Diet culture is not going away anytime soon. It’s too ingrained into pop culture to fade without any systemic changes. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t trying to fight it. Many women with platforms have been using their audiences in order to combat diet culture, like Greguski.
“I just want to be the representation I never saw as a little girl,” said Greguski. “ I just want to exist in this body and have young girls look and go, ‘I want to look like her, I want to be like her.’”
In order for young girls to emulate Greguski, they must adopt her mindset. Greguski and other influencers, like Riley Martinez, are starting to push the term ‘body neutrality’ to their followers. Body neutrality is exactly what it is called — viewing your own body, along with other people’s bodies, neutrally. The issue with body positivity was that it placed unrealistic standards on women and, according to Gereguski, did not allow them to dislike themselves.
Greguski and Martinez actually prefer body neutrality. Not only does it give people the space to dislike their bodies for a few days, it also allows for people to view their bodies for what they are. Body positivity was an overcorrection for the diet culture of the past, this new era is following similar tracks. But body neutrality might be the thing to stop it.
“I like the idea of looking at our bodies as tools for the rest of our life,” said Martinez. “And seeing them for what they can do for us, but not as like, we’re constantly thinking about them and how they look.”