Propaganda I’m Not Falling For (the Body Edition)

One of my favorite TikTok sounds is “you are under spells people”.

It's honestly applicable to so much. From the patriarchy convincing women that the only way to be whole and complete is marriage and motherhood to the wellness industrial complex trying to sell us their lies about what it means to be ‘healthy.’ Although I’m really into both of these ideas, today’s newsletter is focused on the latter.

Today I present to you, propaganda I’m not falling for (the body addition).

1) SkinnyTok, and more specifically, Liz Schmidt.

SkinnyTok, a subculture on TikTok that is, in my opinion, just walking people into eating disorders, is built on extreme restriction and exercise. It's reminiscent of the harmful extreme diet culture back in the Tumblr days, but worse because it’s in video format, readily available in the palm of our hands. According to a study conducted by The Center for Controlling Digital Hate, for users who watched videos about body image and mental health and liked them, within 8 minutes, TikTok served content related to eating disorders.

And the leader of the skinnytok gang, or former leader, because she was actually banned from TikTok is Liz Schmidt, a 23 year old influencer who encourages her subscriber only group members to eat as little as possible to get and remain skinny. And if you haven’t heard of her, count your blessings. The Cut did an entire expose on her outlying the dangers of her messaging and her platforms. Inside her group, the Skinni Societe, over 6,500 members encourage each other to continue engaging in disordered eating habits, all in the name of being skinny. And it’s important to note, it’s reported that Liz Schmidt is raking in over $130,000 a month from paid subscriptions.

Diet culture is profitable.

The entire industry is invested in telling us that we aren’t enough and that we need to change or fix ourselves to be worthy and deserving of love — even our own love. The more they can convince us of this, the more we continue to spend our money on the “solutions.” The weight-loss market alone is now valued at over $72 billion, and it’s predicated on us believing the propaganda – that being skinny is a marker of success.

So anytime anything even remotely SkinnyTok related comes across my newsfeed, I promptly block or mark ‘not interested.’

Because no, I will not be going to bed hungry. No, I will not be restricting my food intake. And no, I will not be bodyshaming myself as motivation to get skinny.

I don’t care how many videos cross my newsfeed, I will not make my body or my looks my personality. In fact, the way I look is the least interesting thing about me.

And finally, the obsession with thinness is 100% connected to the rise in facism and white nationalism (I will not be convinced otherwise), so I’m remaining thick as an act of resistance.

2) Thinness equals health.

Following up to number one is the idea that being in a thin body equals being in a healthy body.

Let me be crystal clear about one thing:

Size ≠ Health

“Health” is not about a number on the scale or the size of your body.

When I was in my leanest body, I had the worst mental health, the worst relationship with eating and exercise, and the worst relationship with body image.

And don’t even get me started on BMI, a system still used in the medical industry even though it’s inherently racist in nature. It was developed by a man named Adolphe Quetelet, who, believe it or not, wasn’t even a medical professional. He was an astronomer and mathematician, besides being a eugenicist. His entire equation was developed using height and weight data from only white European men, most of them middle-upper class, so it wasn’t at all representative of the general population. As such, it doesn’t account for gender, race, or body composition and therefore disproportionately impacts women and BIPOC. And while this is now common knowledge, BMI is still being widely used as an indicator of health. More propaganda.

However, the thing that is not propaganda is weight stigma. The consequences of weight stigma and having people make assumptions about our bodies and health simply because of our size does have psychological impacts. According to the National Association of Eating Disorders, weight stigma poses a significant threat to psychological and physical health. It has been documented as a significant risk factor for depression, body dissatisfaction, and low self-esteem. Those who experience weight-based stigmatization also:

• Engage in more frequent binge eating

• Are at an increased risk for eating disorder symptoms

• Are more likely to have a diagnosis for binge eating disorder

The size of our bodies isn’t an indicator of our health, our happiness, or our success but this is often easier said than done, even when we know the truth of the matter.

So here’s your weekly reminder:

It’s not the size or shape of your body that determines your worth. You are inherently worthy because you exist.

3) You need to walk a minimum of 10K steps every single day (20-30K if you want to be skinny).

For anyone close to me, it’s a known fact that I love a hot girl walk. I throw on a podcast, my Hokas, and get to stepping though my Brooklyn neighborhood. I love it. But one thing I won’t be doing, it’s forcing myself to walk 15K or 20K or 30K steps a day.

Did you know that the origins of the 10 thousand steps per day narrative goes back to 1965 when a Japanese company made a fitness tracker named Manpo-kei, which translates to “10,000 steps meter” and thus a marketing campaign began. Despite the fact that there is no scientific data to back this, it has become helplessly ingrained into our brains and is now one of the favorite principles of #skinnytok. Must walk a minimum of 10K steps a day.

However, actual research shows the following about the benefits of walking:

• Women who averaged 4,400 daily steps had a 41% reduction in mortality.

• Mortality rates progressively improved before leveling off at approximately 7,500 steps per day.

• There were about nine fewer deaths per 1000 people in the most active group compared with the least active group.

So if avoiding death and being healthy is your actual concern, you reap all the benefits of walking at even less than 10K steps a day.

And here’s the thing: Walking is good for you. Some of the benefits of walking include improved mood, reduced stress, increased creativity, increased melatonin levels which can lead to better sleep, improved mental clarity, increased heart health, lowered blood sugar levels, and reduced cortisol. All good things.

So by all means, walk if it’s accessible to you, but don’t get bogged down with dogma. Walk when you can and if you can and if you want to, whether it be 10 minutes or 100 minutes. Do what you can. All the steps, no matter how many, are doing your body good.

4) Clean eating, especially from the same influencers who get botox and drink alcohol

A decade ago, when I was in the throes of diet culture, I became obsessed with the idea of ‘clean’ eating. At first, I interpreted ‘clean eating’ to mean eating mostly fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Then someone on the internet said it also meant avoiding sugar, even from fruits. Then someone else said it meant avoiding anything with soy and anything prepackaged. Then someone said it also included meat and dairy that weren’t grass fed. Then someone added more. And before I knew it, the list of things I could eat was shrinking right before my eyes, and I was quickly becoming obsessed with healthy eating, a disorder I later learned was called orthorexia.

But at its core, clean eating it’s just a diet culture mechanism that attempts to add moral value to food. Because if some food is ‘clean’ then by default, other foods must be ‘dirty’ or ‘bad.’ Food isn’t good or bad. It’s just food. You’re not morally better or morally bankrupt, depending on your food choices.

While I think it’s all nonsense, nothing cracks me up more than the notion of ‘clean’ eating coming from an influencer who on one post is preaching about the importance of eating clean, grass-fed, toxic free foods and then the next day posting pictures out to drinks with friends or talking about the Botox injections they just got.

As a firm believer in bodily autonomy, there’s zero shade to anyone who uses botox or drinks alcohol. I have zero feelings about that. But I do have feelings about someone judging certain foods as ‘unclean’ while simultaneously injecting toxins into their forehead to prevent wrinkles. Make it make sense.

Just to be clear, I do care about my food being clean, meaning I generally avoid eating food I dropped on the ground (obviously the 5 second rule applies inside my own home) and I also wash my fruits and veggies before consuming them. But that’s the only kind of ‘clean eating’ I ascribe to.

5) Fruit is bad for you

During my ‘clean eating’ phase, I avoided eating bananas for a solid year, at least. Somewhere I fell into the belief that they were too high in sugar and should be avoided.

Even more, I limited my fruit intake solely to berries, and even then, only after a hard strength training workout.

Diet culture is a hell of a drug because in what world could fruits – the same things chocked full of fiber, vitamins, and minerals – be considered bad for you???

Take it from my friend and favorite dietician, Shana.

Unless you have specific health conditions that you are monitoring, like diabetes, for example, or perhaps if you have an allergy, please don’t be like me. Please eat the fruit. It’s delicious and the only fruit I refrain from now is fruit that I don’t enjoy the taste of.

6) Health outcomes are based solely on our individual choices.

The wellness industry would very much have us believe that we as individuals are solely responsible for health outcomes. If we just eat right and exercise and drink water, we are guaranteed ‘health.’

Unfortunately, there’s often little discussion about the social determinants of health. The economic and social conditions that influence individual and group health status – things like education level, income, and even your zip code.

We can’t adequately discuss health outcomes without discussing the myriad of barriers people face. Things like:

• Lack of access to affordable healthcare

• Chronic stress

• Racism and white supremacy

• Redlining and food apartheid

• Rising food costs

• Lack of affordable housing options

• Lack of affordable mental health resources

• Capitalism

• Unemployment and job security

You can’t eat or exercise your way out of systemic oppression. As a society, we have been indoctrinated to put the idea of health and being healthy on a pedestal and use it as a basis of morality. When we think of health and even body size as a personal choice, it’s easy to make judgments about those we don’t view as healthy, because it’s easy to fall into the line of thinking that they just didn’t take good care of themselves or make good choices, like it’s a personal moral failing.

Many of us all believe that if we eat well, exercise, and make good choices for ourselves, that we will never be sick, disabled, or chronically ill, and that’s simply not the case. In fact, the majority of us will deal with chronic illness or disability at some point in our lives, whether it be diabetes, heart disease, asthma, chronic pain, autoimmune disease, or depression, among other things.

There are societal, economic, and social implications that impact health and the choices that we as individuals have access to, and simply put, our health incomes are not based solely on our personal choices.

7) The infamous Kris Jenner facelift

I will not judge women for the choices they decide to make about their bodies because we all victims under a patriarchal society, however, I will not fall for the propaganda that at nearly 70 years old, I should be trying to look like I'm 40 or 50.

Aging is a gift. If we aren’t aging, we’re dead.

And god forbid, a woman just be at peace with herself.

I pray to God I’m not still worried about my body and my looks at 70.

I could go on all day, but that’s it for now. What’s the health/body propaganda you’re not falling for?

Also, if this resonated with you, then you would LOVE my book.

Thank you so much for reading The Liberation Collective. I’m eternally grateful to have you here. You can also follow along on Instagram and TikTok. And if you want to partner with me, you can email me at info@chrissyking.com

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