I saw a magazine cover at Publix recently with the cast of “Friends” from maybe season one or two. I can’t say for sure, but it was definitely from the season where Rachel gets the haircut. You know the one because either you, your sister or your mom legitimately walked into a salon at some point holding a picture of Jennifer Aniston and asked your hairstylist for “the Rachel.” That cover brought me right back to being a young girl wanting perfect layers and a body so tiny and thin that if I stood sideways my friends would jokingly say, “Where’d she go?!”
This stroll down memory lane wasn’t a particularly fond one, which is why I regret to inform everyone who survived the ’90s and early 2000s that apparently skinny is back. And somehow, I think this time it might be even more dangerous. Thank you, social media.
A few weeks ago, when I started seeing memes about “Cyclospora Skinny,” I wanted to simultaneously cry and scream for all the young people who might be desperate enough to wonder if it would work. Cyclospora is a parasite that can cause prolonged watery diarrhea, stomach cramps, nausea, fatigue and weight loss.
Somehow the internet looked at an actual intestinal illness and managed to turn it into the “diarrhea diet.” We have lost the plot.
Because somewhere there is a 14-year-old girl looking at that meme who doesn’t think it’s funny. She’s wondering if a week or two of being sick could finally be the ticket to accepting her own body or, maybe even worse, feeling accepted by her friend group.
TikTok deserves some credit here. Last year the platform actually blocked searches for “SkinnyTok” after the hashtag became associated with unhealthy weight loss content. Unfortunately, the basic content didn’t disappear. It just got smarter. It migrated into “what I eat in a day” videos, portion control advice, low-calorie recipes, body checking, transformation videos and plenty of other content that can look an awful lot like wellness when you’re scrolling quickly enough.
But this is actually bigger than one dumb diet trend.
I don’t want to exclude boys and men from this conversation either, because eating disorders are not a female problem. They affect boys and men too, and adolescence and young adulthood are particularly vulnerable years. Research specifically looking at males with eating disorders has even found onset peaking around age 14 in one clinical population. That matters not only because of the boys watching this content, but because of the fathers, brothers, coaches, teachers and every other man who has a young person watching what he says about his own body, food and everyone else’s body.
Kids are listening, and they are also scrolling day after day after day.
You know, they say history repeats itself, and so far I’ve seen that happen with politics, policies and fashion trends. But I truly thought the Skinny Era wasn’t going to be one of them. How silly of me.
I grew up during the era of fat-free everything, tiny bodies, diet foods and women being congratulated for taking up as little physical space as possible. I watched girls around me do things to their bodies that I didn’t fully understand at the time. Several girls on my high school lacrosse team ate paper dipped in mustard because somehow we had collectively decided that eating actual food was more frightening than eating office supplies. Yes, paper. With mustard.
And we didn’t have TikTok. We didn’t have an algorithm studying exactly which insecurity would keep us staring at a screen for another 45 minutes. We didn’t have thousands of strangers showing us their bodies, meals, calories and morning weigh-ins before we even got out of bed. We still managed to hurt ourselves trying to be skinny. Now imagine giving the same insecurities we had at 14 years old a smartphone, unlimited internet access and an algorithm that never sleeps.
So instead of being sad about its return or furious that we apparently learned nothing, I’m going to educate. I am going to make it part of my mission as a wellness professional in this community to remind people that there is an enormous difference between being naturally thin and deliberately starving yourself to become skinny.
I am not talking about people with naturally smaller bodies, high metabolisms or medical conditions that affect body weight. I’m talking about the skinny that requires purposeful non-eating days, pretending you already ate, eating normally in front of everyone else and purging in the bathroom afterward, or having your entire day revolve around how little food you can get away with eating. That isn’t wellness.
And wanting to lose weight isn’t automatically unhealthy either. I want to be very clear about that because we have become terrible at allowing two things to be true at the same time. You are allowed to want to lose body fat. You are allowed to want your clothes to fit differently. You are allowed to have aesthetic goals for your own body. But there is a canyon between wanting to improve your body composition and wanting to make yourself as small as humanly possible.
Your body needs food. It needs protein, carbohydrates and fat. It needs vitamins and minerals. It needs enough energy to build muscle, maintain bone, produce hormones, think clearly, exercise, recover, keep your heart functioning and get you through your life. Chronic severe restriction can take those things away. Eating disorders can damage the heart, bones, digestive system and other organs. They can destroy muscle, affect fertility, disrupt hormones and cognition, and yes, eating disorders can kill.
Skinny is not a health goal. Strong can be. Capable can be. Healthy can be. Having enough muscle and bone to get yourself off the toilet when you’re 85 absolutely can be. But skinny? We’ve done this already, and we know where it goes.
So to the teenagers seeing this content, the parents raising them and the rest of us who survived the first round, I want us to recognize this trend for what it is before another generation spends years trying to undo the damage. Women’s bodies are not fashion trends. Men’s bodies aren’t either.
We don’t need another Skinny Era. We need to stop making people’s bodies an era at all.
