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Forty-eight billion people across the globe are on social media. That is 59.9% of the world’s population and a whopping 92.7% of all internet users. With this many people, there is content for anyone and anything.

A particular corner of the internet has been on the rise recently, SkinnyTok, which is a community of people on TikTok sharing their weight loss tips, including diet and exercise advice. But none of the advice is good or healthy.

I don’t doubt that there are people online sharing good, healthy advice for leading a healthy life. SkinnyTok is not where you find those people. Instead, it is where you find people giving the most toe-curling, horrid advice on the internet.

SkinnyTok is mostly made up of young women, and there is a concerning number of girls in their teens engaging with this content. Most of SkinnyTok is only doing two things: encouraging gross, anti-fat bias toward themselves and the people around them, and promoting eating disorders as a means of losing weight.

“Dieting does irreversible damage to your metabolism, making it even harder to sustain weight loss. Dieting teaches unhealthy relationships with food, assigning arbitrary positive and negative connotations to food without acknowledging that all food has to do is give you energy. Diet culture outlines unattainable goals and tries to pretend all your problems will be fixed when; you will become hungry.”

TikTok user @toughlovelindsey said, “Who wants to give their husband a fat wife?”

This implies two things: one is that fat people are ugly, and the other is that fat people are unlovable, neither of which is true. But by putting these ideas out on the internet, these people spread anti-fat bias like wildfire. They also end up creating an echo chamber of their own hatred of fatness and fat people.

Many people on SkinnyTok treat dieting as the only way to lose weight. “It’s not genetic; it’s eating habits,” said user @thedanioctober. This is blatantly untrue; genetics plays a large part in size and weight, just like any other physical trait. Genetics impact metabolism, satiety, appetite, body fat distribution and many other factors in weight gain and loss.

One SkinnyTok poster, @laurenmeredithpowell, posted a video going through what she ate in a day. Doing the math, the calories she ate in a day come out to about 1,200 calories, when the average woman needs around 2,000 calories.

People in comment sections brag about weight loss, user @katinthehat312 commented, bragging about losing five pounds in nine days. However, you should be losing one to two pounds a week for healthy and manageable weight loss.

There are even a few people who combine the two. TikTok user @marismith__ said, “If you can’t control what you put in your mouth, what else can you control?” This is a very prevalent idea in the world: Fat people cannot be trusted to take care of themselves because they are fat, which stems from the idea that fat people must have screwed up in order to become fat. This idea is so prevalent that it shows up in doctors’ offices. Many healthcare practitioners think their patients are undisciplined.

My biggest takeaway from SkinnyTok is that these people sound miserable and mean. Especially people like @toughlovelindsey who just spew anti-fat rhetoric like it makes them a good person.

These people talk about losing weight like fat people have never thought to do that. They pretend they have it so much harder because people tell them they are being unhealthy, and that it is “insane people tell us not to lose too much but never said anything about us getting too fat,” as @Dottiesworld13 said in a comment on @ashleywaraday’s post, which is insane. Every fat person will tell you that someone has told them to lose weight and not get fat. In fact, that is exactly what SkinnyTok does.

What SkinnyTok seems to forget is that aggressive and repetitive dieting is also bad for you. Dieting does irreversible damage to your metabolism, making it even harder to sustain weight loss. Dieting teaches unhealthy relationships with food, assigning arbitrary positive and negative connotations to food without acknowledging that all food has to do is give you energy. Diet culture outlines unattainable goals and tries to pretend all your problems will be fixed when; you will become hungry.

Reach Audrey Weishaar at letters@collegian.com or on Twitter @CSUCollegian.