Can you shame yourself skinny?

❗ Trigger Warning❗Eating disorders and #skinnytok

As a woman in her 30’s who thrived during the height of body positivity movement, I can safely say the body-unpositivity movement is in the room with us. Whether it’s Pete Davidson removing all of his tattoos, the lack of clothes beyond a size 10/12, or the influx in #skinnytok content, the wave of shaming yourself into a glow up is undeniably ✨ in✨ .

I felt the skinny wave happening when my favorite plus size influencers, like La'Tecia Thomas, Sonny Turner, and na0__ had noticeably gotten smaller. And while I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to lose weight, I think there’s a clear difference between wanting to be a healthier weight and wanting to be thin.

Let’s talk about the difference, how it’s impacted my own relationship with my body, and where to draw the line.

Unpacking my own relationship with my body

It’s summer of 2024 and I tore my ACL again, a longstanding issue from my time as a competitive teenage athlete. I saw the doctor, received an MRI, and am waiting on the results to schedule surgery.

Yay - a new message from the doctor.

I log into my health chart and see “obese” next to my name and weight.

The walls close in on me and I cry. I slander myself and my body, my eating habits, my fatness. I tell my husband and want him to join in on my fat slander, but he won’t.

I feel worthless, and call myself horrible things. I try to reason with the numbers, try to explain myself to the nurse.

I consider going to the toilet to revisit my disordered behavior from my teenage years. My adult brain steps in and reminds me how horrible those days were, and how unhealthy that behavior is, that it won’t sustain long-term change.

All I want to do is lose the max amount of weight I can as quickly as possible.

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I was 235 lbs at 5’8” and wasn’t totally happy with my body. My workout routines were inconsistent, and I wasn’t going on walks like I needed to. I was eating fast food a couple days a week, and eating dinner until I was stuffed most nights. Some of this was from poverty-driven food insecurity, and living off the food pantry for the last few years. Some was a disconnection with my body. I was somewhere in between knowing the BMI system of western medicine wasn’t a universal truth, but not wanting to make excuses for how out of shape I was. I had a lot of unpacking to do.

After taking time to process, I reminded myself that weight loss was a good step to preserving my knee, building better habits, feeling better in my skin, and preventing generational curses. Losing weight through consistent exercise, healthy portions, and better eating habits was the only way to do this, not by purging, starving myself, or beating myself up at the gym.

In my own family, I’ve seen people I love struggle with weight-affected conditions, especially knee pain which has led to the inability to get up, walk, or move.

It felt awful, but sometimes the harsh reality can be helpful. But to be clear, my motivation to lose weight didn’t come from the shame of seeing “obese” in my chart, it came from hope, self-compassion, and believing in myself to make a positive change.

The ups and downs of #skinnytok

If you haven’t heard or been to #skinnytok, buckle up buttercup cause it’s a bumpy ride. #Skinnytok is like 2008 Tumblr’s #Thinspo, but more sinister.

Yes, it’s about tips on how to stay thin from thin women but it’s also driven by shame and volatility. It’s mostly pushing white European beauty standards that are narrow-minded and focused on thinness over health. It taps into the sick side of your brain conditioned by society’s beauty standards and affirms it. I don’t feel inspired or motivated by #skinnytok, but I do feel small and ashamed.

If you’re considering going to #skinnytok, don’t. I’ve gathered the most helpful tips from it, so that you don’t have to:

• Walk daily

• Follow serving sizes

• Drink lots of water

• Eat half of your meal and save the rest for later

• Order kid-sized meals from fast food places

• Stop eating before you’re full

• Use smaller bowls and plates to decrease your portions

• High protein meals keep you fuller longer

• Caloric deficits

What’s hard is once I heard a bit of good advice, the algorithm started giving me more and more, and it gets toxic FAST. It got to a point where I was trying to balance all the strict advice I’d received from #skinnytok and then noticed I was dabbling in ED behavior from my past.

Another difficult part about #skinnytok is they talk about over-eating, but not about undereating, because, to them, you can’t undereat. Advice like the “3 bite rule” and “put the fork down” may seem like harmless “advice,” but can quickly become go-to starvation and shame tactics that grow out of control.

This advice ignores the dangers of not getting enough food and cheats you out of the journey of finding a healthy relationship that lies somewhere in between eating too much and eating too little.

#Skinnytok equates thinness with health, and ignores that these two things can be at odds with each other. It prioritizes thinness before anything else, and insinuates a lack of self worth when hunger, a biological need, overrides the desire to be thin.

So, can you shame yourself skinny?

Anyone who’s read a Brene Brown book knows that shame can’t sustain long-term change. As someone who’s 10 months sober from alcohol, the shame and embarrassment of being an alcoholic isn’t enough to make you stop (trust me).

Shame doesn’t have enough momentum to have long-lasting effects because it makes you feel like shit and, even if you can withstand it for a while, it’s in our nature to avoid that feeling.

Behavior changes come from a place of education, hope, love, willingness to change, and the excitement to become someone you didn’t think you could.

If you’re consuming #skinnytok, please stop. It’s just as unhealthy as overeating and can lead to disordered eating, unhealthy relationships with working out, and poor mental health. I firmly believe that if you want to make a change, it must come from a place of empowerment to do something new and the excitement to see what’s on the other side of a new, healthy decision.