Copyright The New York Times
Every time I sit down to eat, I hear a woman’s voice in my head. Sometimes she is from New York City, sometimes Los Angeles. She has an impressive vocal fry and a lifestyle that revolves around taking 10,000 steps a day. She makes her living online, posting videos that tell other women how to eat. At breakfast, as I drink a protein shake, I hear her reminders that starting each meal with protein promotes satiety. At lunch, chewing kale or quinoa, I imagine her talking about staying lean and light. Looking at a cocktail menu, I can sense her pointing out which drinks are just liquid desserts with a shot of alcohol. And when the cheesecake arrives, I cannot escape her advice to take only three bites — one to taste, one to savor, one to reflect. She is any of countless “skinny influencers,” who wear that title with pride. For Liv Schmidt, the first commandment is to “drop all the food rules.” In one video, she lifts a box of doughnuts and then sets it down in frustration. “I’m so sick and tired of people overcomplicating things,” she says. “Get it together, ladies. It’s choosing big versus small.” In another, she gestures at a buffet table and then down at her own meager plate: “Tiny, curated portions. Two bites that look amazing. And then guess what? I’m done.” Her “living slim on vacation” advice is to be the first one to order when dining out, setting the tone of the meal as a “light-girls trip” and not “stuffing face.” It’s not about “no sugar, no carbs,” Schmidt says, because in that arrangement, food still “holds the power.” Brooke Molyneaux, another skinny influencer, has a similar philosophy: Food, she says, shouldn’t be your boss, telling you what to do or how to feel. The same goes for Amanda Dobler, a “fat-loss and mind-set coach” whose goal is to “teach women how to stop obsessing over food” without, as she advertises on her website, “overthinking every meal” or “tracking every bite.” You can hear something similar from plenty of other women, all found nibbling pastries and pushing pasta around their plates, telling you with affectless calm to eat whatever you want — just not that much of it. This is a strange departure from every other era of thinness influencing I have known. Gone are the videos about basal metabolic rates and calorie deficits, with their scientific promise that meticulously monitoring your food intake will make you lose weight. Gone, too, are the Tumblr-era food diarists who documented the various restrictive diets they were white-knuckling through, inventing an entire vocabulary that orbited neurotically around CW (current weight) and OMAD (one meal a day). Those young women were transparent in their self-destruction: Their bowls of hard-boiled eggs and handfuls of berries were on display for an audience that reveled in shared hunger. The modern-day skinny influencer aims at something else. She presents herself as self-possessed — maddeningly, unfathomably self-possessed — around food. What she sells is no longer just thinness but a transcendent level of self-regulation. She eats whatever she wants. And when she puts down her fork, mysteriously satisfied after three delicate bites, that is her most enviable selling point, her real allure: the ability to enjoy a tiny spoonful of dessert and then swan indifferently onward. Is it possible to lose weight while maintaining a normal relationship with food? Weight loss is, notoriously, one of the most difficult projects of the body, so much so that people refer to it as a “journey.” But the nature of that journey has been fundamentally destabilized by the advent of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. Many users of medications like Ozempic, Mounjaro and Wegovy reported that the medications seemed to turn off the internal “food noise” that had made hunger and eating an unrelenting fixation; suddenly they didn’t much dwell on food at all. Amy Kane, a flag-bearer among online Ozempic influencers, emphasizes that the grand improvement in her life wasn’t losing half her body weight — it was finally being able to “eat like a normal person.” What made the difference was not, in the end, some herculean display of will. Mere chemicals could erase whatever inner drive had changed food from sustenance into something adversarial. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
