Photo courtesy of Nordskov Media (nordskovmedia.dk) via Flickr.
The short-form video content often found on TikTok can promote harmful ideas about weight loss.
By Tara Monastesse ’25
Managing Editor of Content
Saying that TikTok promotes an unhealthy standard for young women and their body image is about as uncontroversial a take as you can get. Between videos touting buccal fat removal surgery and recommending Botox™ injections for teenagers, the platform is rife with content that could leave even the most conventionally attractive person in shambles after just a cursory scroll of their For You page. However, a special kind of damage is dealt by a prolific genre of “glow-up” videos: ones that show people, nearly always women, in a “before” and “after” side-by-side of their weight loss journeys.
Let me say it now: Binge-watching these videos is as destructive for your body image as chain-smoking is for your lungs, or staring into the sun is for your eyes. They create a completely unrealistic idea of how weight loss works and of the time and effort it requires to alter one’s body so dramatically. Worst of all, they position overweight bodies — the “before” — as not just a body type but a starting point that people should celebrate eventually leaving behind.
This type of “body transformation” content is not limited to just TikTok. You can find it on Reddit forums like r/progresspics, for example, dedicated entirely to this type of before/after juxtaposition. However, I worry especially about TikTok due to its popularity among young people, who are most vulnerable to skewed ideas about how appearance and weight should define them. The answer is: It shouldn’t.
I know about these weight loss transformation TikToks because I consumed them endlessly throughout my own weight loss journey. In the same way that a small child gets addicted to toy unboxing videos on YouTube, I became addicted to the dopamine hit that accompanies seeing a person transform their body in the span of a 30-second video. I have experienced firsthand how addictive this type of content can become and also how quickly it can warp one’s own sense of how they should feel about their body or how the trajectory of their own weight loss should be going.
While TikTok is obviously not the sole cause of young people’s body image issues today, it is certainly a prevalent one. A recent Scientific American article describes how TikTok is rife with weight loss trends that can actively endanger one’s health. This is reflective of the larger problem that many social media platforms have when it comes to users promoting risky methods of weight loss.
TikTok can be a powerful tool when it comes to finding support for one’s fitness and nutrition goals, allowing users to access content such as exercise tutorials and healthy recipes. However, the proliferation of content that encourages dramatic weight loss can quickly veer into unhealthy territory.
The medium is the message when it comes to the aforementioned “before and after” videos. The editing of the two clips together — the “before” and the “after” — conceals everything that transpired between them. They do not show viewers the things that enable a dramatic weight loss to occur, like time investment or reliable access to nutritious foods and workout equipment. I worry that some weight loss may have been achieved through unhealthy means cropped out by the snappy editing of these videos. The totality of what goes into a dramatic weight loss is lost in short-form video content.
I don’t place complete blame on the creators of these videos. In a culture that rewards thinness and pressures people to aspire towards it, it is natural to seek approval by documenting your own weight loss and sharing it for the world to see. However, I hope that content creators become more thoughtful in how they choose to document their weight loss and portray it on social media, keeping in mind that viewers may try to model their own health decisions on them.
Online communities dedicated to weight loss have been a vital place of support for me in the past. However, searching for spaces dedicated to healthy and safe weight loss can lead one to stumble across content that depicts weight loss in an unrealistic way. In the future, social media should become a safe platform to discuss weight loss rather than perpetuating the harmful idea that a person’s worth is tied to their weight and appearance.