In this op-ed, Features Director Brittney McNamara explores the rise in explicit diet talk on social media, and how Liv Schmidt is only one part of a larger issue.
Diet used to be a dirty word, one we couched in more pleasant euphemisms like “going paleo” or “cutting out gluten to reduce bloat.” These wellness-adjacent efforts, many of us reasoned in the late 2010s, weren’t squarely to make us thinner (though that would be a nice side effect). They were to make us healthy. Unfortunately, healthy often meant thin, and these valiant efforts toward health were just thinly veiled diet culture. Now, in the age of Ozempic, thin is in again, and dieting isn’t only acceptable, it’s almost expected. And that’s where Liv Schmidt comes in.
TikTok recently banned content creator Liv Schmidt’s account where she’d gathered more than 650,000 followers, after a Wall Street Journalprofile of the creator detailed …