Last year, Emma, a 37-year-old teacher, broke up with her boyfriend. He had often taunted her for her weight, leaving snarky Post-it notes on her clothes and telling her she needed to eat better. "He told me I was so fat that no one else would ever love me," she said. After they broke up, his words still haunted Emma (who asked to use a pseudonym for privacy). She spent a lot of time scrolling through #SkinnyTok, a growing community of weight-loss influencers, where she found Liv Schmidt.
A 23-year-old model in New York City, Schmidt encourages her followers to "live the Skinni Girl lifestyle" by following her weight-loss advice. When Emma stumbled on her TikTok, Schmidt had more than 600,000 followers. She was shocked by some of the things Schmidt said -- in one video, she mocks women who wear sundresses to hide their "puffy face and bloated bodies," and she once reposted a TikTok with the caption "girls be 300 pounds saying 'I'm a snack.' No megatron you're the fkn vending machine." Emma was intrigued. "I just figured, Okay, if she was able to get that thin, she could help me lose that last 15 pounds," she told me. Emma signed up for the Skinni Société, Schmidt's subscription-only Instagram group. For $20 a month, members gain access to exclusive content on Schmidt's Instagram page, including recipes, workout videos, and diaries of everything she eats in a day. They're also added to a group DM thread on the platform, where they share their weight-loss goals and progress. When Emma joined, she saw members posting their step counts, meal plans, and before-and-after photos. She couldn't help but notice many were quite young; some appeared to be in college or high school, posting about graduation or sharing prom pics. "I felt like I was old enough to be their mother," she said.
During her time in the Skinni Société, Emma's life became dominated by a single obsession: food -- and how to avoid eating it. She frequently felt weak and exhausted. At one point, she said, she had been on the treadmill at the gym for a minute when she had to get off; she was lightheaded and drenched in sweat. Every time she opened the app, she saw a new video or message from Schmidt urging her followers to "eat clean, feel light" or to chug water or green tea to trick their bodies into ignoring hunger cues. Her subscribers couldn't get enough. "They're all so obsessive, so it's hard to not become obsessive too," Emma said. "It's, like, this little cult of being skinny."
In interviews, Schmidt -- who didn't respond to requests for comment -- has claimed she merely offers common-sense weight-loss advice. The goal of the Skinni Société, she says, is to hold members accountable and support their goals. But where is the line between embracing diet culture and promoting eating disorders? Inside the group, members post ridiculously high step counts and commiserate over the side effects of their low-calorie diets, like hair loss and dizziness. Though the group is technically closed to those under 18, when I joined I found more than a dozen members who are high-school students, one of whom is a freshman.
Last fall, Schmidt was kicked off TikTok after The Wall Street Journal asked the platform for comment on a story about her. Her fans rallied to her defense, and she made the ban part of her brand, arguing that she's the victim of censorship. In April, the conservative women's magazine Evie featured her in a glowing profile with the headline "Banned for Being Honest?" Now she's more popular than ever and has quadrupled her follower count on Instagram. Air Mail recently estimated that Schmidt makes $130,000 a month from the 6,500 members in the Skinni Société. She takes the influencer playbook a step further, directly profiting from a little club of followers who encourage one another to eat, drink, and live just like Liv Schmidt. In March, she reposted a message from a follower who wrote a school paper about how much she looks up to Schmidt. "Her content has helped and continues to help so many young girls form a healthy relationship with food and exercise," this fan wrote. "She truly exemplifies the values of what a role model should be."
In Schmidt's videos, she's usually clutching a tea or a green juice and wearing a slinky black athleisure set, her lips glossed and her long blonde hair pulled back from her face as she demonstrates her five-minute ab workout or posts behind-the-scenes content from modeling photo shoots. She comes across as a knowing older-sister type, the sorority big who has her shit together and can get you into all the best parties. "I'm going to hold your hand when I say this: You're doing everything right except this one thing," Schmidt says in one recent video about why you're not losing weight. "You're a smart girl. You just need to stop overeating and eat less." Her subscriber-only grid features glamorous black-and-white stock photos of svelte models on yachts or in Italian piazzas, sipping coffee or demurely slipping on designer sunglasses, with captions like "What to Do When People Comment On Your Food" and "How I Stay Silent, Skinny, and Unbothered." In Schmidt's world, thinness isn't just a physical state but the basis of an entire luxury lifestyle.
Schmidt is capitalizing on a cultural moment when extreme thinness has become more acceptable. Though she has the largest following of the SkinnyTok influencers, there's also Amanda Dobler, a "fat loss and mindset coach" who makes videos enumerating "things you're doing that are keeping you stuck and fat," and Mandana Zarghami, a Miami-based influencer with almost 350,000 TikTok followers who lectures followers who are "built like a buffalo big back" or "a little linebacker." These women exhort their followers in a blunt, tell-it-like-it-is tone to ignore the impulse to eat and focus on self-discipline and control. Dobler told me SkinnyTok isn't about promoting eating disorders but about "showing women they're allowed to want more for themselves." "Tracking your food doesn't mean you're obsessive," she said. "It means you're informed."
Both TikTok and Meta, Instagram's parent company, have policies against encouraging eating disorders. But if you search skinny or SkinnyTok on TikTok and Instagram, in addition to a warning and a list of resources for people struggling with eating disorders, you'll also see thousands of videos of very thin women showing off their extremely low-calorie diets. Meta's policies, a spokesperson told me, attempt to strike a balance between removing potentially dangerous pro-anorexia content and providing a space for people to talk openly about recovery. The company's attitude toward ED content seems to be "We know it when we see it."
Still, Schmidt is careful. She uses language that frames choosing not to eat as empowering, even feminist. "Eat like you're the main character. Because you are," she writes in one post. "Eat like your highest self is watching. Eat like your next weigh-in is tomorrow." She doesn't advocate for a specific diet or tell her followers to avoid specific foods, which differentiates her from most weight-loss influencers. Her rule of thumb is simple: Eat whatever you want -- just eat as little as possible. "You're not restricting. You're 'regulating.' It's chic," she says in another post, next to a photo of a woman in a scarf and sunglasses in front of the Eiffel Tower.
As someone who spent a lot of time on ED Tumblr as a teenager, obsessively reblogging images of Calvin Klein-era Kate Moss and Cassie from Skins, I understood Schmidt's appeal. This community aestheticized the brutal, private experience of slowly starving myself, rendering it both visible and communal; I wanted to know if the Skinni Société served the same purpose for Schmidt's fans. When I signed up, I got access to her subscriber-only content and main group chat, the Skinni Société Secrets. There are also 21 different group threads, which have about 220 members each; other than a chat for moms and one specifically for Europeans, they're otherwise indistinguishable, and I chose one at random.
I knew that my history of disordered eating could make me vulnerable to Schmidt's advice, but I also hoped that nearly a decade of therapy would protect me. It didn't. I thought about Schmidt and the thread basically every waking moment. I did her arm exercises while making breakfast for my toddler. I swapped out my morning bagel for a protein shake, my lunch for a bag of popcorn and a LaCroix. I added her recommended fiber supplements to my morning coffee so I would feel fuller sooner. I checked my step count religiously, and every time I was hungry for a snack in the middle of the night -- which was quite often, considering how few calories I was consuming -- I told myself, The kitchen is closed, one of Schmidt's mantras. It was like a dormant part of my brain had been switched on: All I could think about was being skinny, because that was all everyone in my DMs was thinking about, too. Schmidt hadn't eliminated any "food noise." She had turned up the volume to the point that it was deafening.
"It feels like everyone is enabling each other's eating disorders," Annie, a 20-year-old former member of the group, told me. She joined the Skinni Société because she had gained a little bit of weight in recovery from anorexia, and Schmidt's advice seemed simple and straightforward enough: Eat less and walk more. It didn't take long, however, for Annie to realize that there was something wrong. "It was extremely competitive -- who could eat less, who weighed less, who was living the most 'skinni' lifestyle," she said. One member, Annie said, had a history of binge-eating and would regularly post photos of her meals, which consisted solely of vegetables. "The girls would praise her and support her," she said. "No one thought to advise her toward possibly seeking professional help."
Some former members I spoke with said the women in their chat would regularly discuss experiencing dizziness, fatigue, and brain fog. Emma told me that people often talked about their periods becoming irregular or experiencing hair loss, two common side effects of disordered eating. "None of the members in the group said, 'Maybe you should chill out,'" she said. "They just recommended hair vitamins to each other." Another woman, who joined the Skinni Société to lose weight after giving birth, told me she saw some members eating less than 1,000 calories a day (going against Schmidt's guidelines to not post meal plans less than 1,200 calories). I also saw women exchanging tips: One said she puts on mouth tape after dinner to deter nighttime snacking, while another said she used prunes as laxatives whenever she feels "heavy." One woman posted a screenshot showing she'd taken 27,000 steps in one day. Five other members hearted it. "Congratulations," one wrote alongside balloon and Champagne-bottle emoji.
Periodically, I'd leave one Skinni Société group chat and join another so I could get a representative sample. And this was the case in virtually every chat I joined: The members didn't treat it as a weight-loss "accountability" group, as Schmidt refers to it, but as an opportunity to one-up each other. They congratulated one another for making it through social events without eating too much or berated themselves for having a few bites of cupcake.
Schmidt doesn't appear to monitor the private group chats, only occasionally posting copy-paste prompts ("how is everyone staying Skinni this weekend?"), though she reminds members that she's not qualified to treat eating disorders. In a message on the Skinni Société Secrets main thread last month, she wrote that the group is "not a binge eating recovery community, nor is it a starvation or extreme diet community," and that those struggling with disordered eating should seek professional help.
Is she responsible for what they do? The Skinni Société is a weight-loss group, and those who join it know what they're signing up for. As Schmidt writes in her community guidelines, "You will be eating less than normal if your goal is weight loss. That's science." Still, it's one thing to build a community for adults to encourage one another to starve themselves; it's another to let in teenagers. Though Schmidt says the group is open only to "biological girls" over the age of 18, she didn't verify my age when I joined, and three people told me they noticed members in the group chat whom they believed to be in high school because they referred to homework. I easily found at least 12 members who listed their high schools in their bios, and I confirmed their ages by cross-referencing with their other social-media profiles. A member in one thread recently mentioned that she was graduating high school that day. "Congrats," another member wrote. "You'll be the skinniest girl at your graduation :)."
When I reached out to Meta to share my reporting on the group -- including screenshots showing extremely low-calorie food diaries and Schmidt's advice on chugging water and tea to stay full -- a spokesperson said that the company has "taken action on several pieces of content from this account for breaking our rules" but did not specify what content had been removed. "If we find repeated violations we'll take further action, which could include removing the account completely," the spokesperson said.
Schmidt says she has never had an eating disorder. Her own exercise and meal diaries show she does at least one workout and walks a minimum of 15,000 steps a day. Her meals include "electrolytes, green tea, honey, Greek yogurt" for breakfast and "a green salad, a few almonds and mustard, two cups of mint tea and honey" for lunch. "It's a very low-calorie eating plan, obviously," Melainie Rogers, a certified dietitian and nutritionist told me when I showed her some of Schmidt's food diaries. "What she's eating is not enough to sustain her even without activity." Recommending such a plan to her followers is dangerous for those at risk of developing eating disorders, Rogers said.
I get Schmidt's all-consuming obsession with thinness. Eating disorders are one of the deadliest and most difficult illnesses to treat. Once you start hearing a little voice whispering in your ear, telling you to restrict or binge or purge or go on the treadmill or go for a walk, it's incredibly hard to stop listening to it.
Perhaps that explains, at least in part, why the group-chat members are so loyal to Schmidt. She often reposts DMs she receives from followers thanking her for changing their lives. "People idolized her," Emma said. "They would kind of beat themselves up over their food diaries because they wanted theirs to look just like hers, and maybe they had, like, nine extra calories that day." Emma ultimately left the group, allowing her subscription to lapse when she realized how little Schmidt was eating. "I was like, Dang, a child eats more than this," she said.
Alison, a 28-year-old with a history of binge-eating, also left the Skinni Société just a few months after she joined. Like others in the group, she started experiencing physical side effects like dizziness and fatigue. "Liv would say this is normal, as your body is adapting to losing weight," she said. More than anything else during her time in the group, Alison was struck by just how much Schmidt inculcated her followers with a deep obsession with food, despite claiming that she would teach people to think about it less. "All she ever spoke about was food," she said. "She would talk about being hungry, how she's looking forward to her next meal, how the amount of time she put into being skinny was suffocating. It's actually pretty sad."
Alison now regularly posts about Schmidt on Reddit snark pages, urging those who have signed up for the Skinni Société to ask Instagram for refunds. Schmidt has started threatening followers with legal action if they leak outside the group. "Please don't join my subscription, consume the content, and then dispute it. If you don't like it, just leave," she wrote in one message.
In a bid to increase her engagement, Schmidt recently announced a "Skinni Société Ambassador program," which includes access to exclusive events with her, like a "candlelit Pilates experience," as well as gift cards and free products, like under-eye patches from the skin-care brand NūFace. Ambassadors are selected based on how frequently they promote the Skinni Société on their accounts, including by posting meals, step counts, and walking videos with Schmidt's new hashtag #NotFatToday.
I'm still trying to find ways to tune out Schmidt's voice. I've muted her on Instagram and deleted the Skinni Société thread. But one of the scariest things about having an eating disorder is knowing that you'll have to fight it the rest of your life. Those I spoke to felt the same way. "Since the age of 13, I've been tracking calories and always striving to be skinny," Annie said. "After joining this group, I realized that I don't see this thought process ending anytime soon." She said there were women "as old as 28" in her group thread who were obsessed with being thin. "I fear my life will be the same," she said. As someone who is much older than 28, I wanted to tell her honestly that there are more important things in life than being thin. What I couldn't tell her honestly is that the noise will ever stop.