When Jo hit play on a Good Morning America clip in early December, she gasped. Tieghan Gerard, creator of the popular food blog Half Baked Harvest, was on the show to promote her new cookbook and looked worryingly thin. As Gerard made her crème brûlée French toast, the camera zoomed in on the hollowed-out spaces under her cheekbones. Jo, a 57-year-old science professor from Los Angeles, had followed Gerard’s career for years, but she was too uncomfortable to keep watching. She turned off the clip and wrote a letter of complaint to GMA: “On today’s show, Ms. Gerard appeared extremely thin and unwell on camera. Broadcasting someone who appears that underweight in such a glamorized, upbeat context raises serious concerns about the message it sends to viewers, especially young women and girls.” When we spoke, Jo was more blunt. “I’m watching somebody dying in real time,” she says. “It does not feel right.”
Jo — who, like most other people in this story, asked to use a pseudonym — wasn’t the only fan who noticed Gerard’s appearance. Shocking photos of her at other book-tour events last month made the rounds in group chats, showed up in TikToks, and were dissected in a sub-Reddit called r/Foodiesnark. When Gerard canceled her remaining December dates (“The stores are just too busy during the holiday rush,” she said), it only fueled further speculation about her health. (Gerard didn’t respond to a request to speak to us for this story.)
Since Ozempic came on the scene, it has become routine to see celebrities drop a few dress sizes out of nowhere. But more recently, celebrities don’t just look thinner than their former selves. They look emaciated. It’s not just the stars of a newly released blockbuster who have shocked fans with their protruding collarbones. In September, online commenters noticed an actress’s hip bones jutting out of her sequined two-piece at New York Fashion Week. At the premiere of Stranger Things season five in mid-November, one of its stars appeared in a drapey red dress that displayed her bony shoulders. Two weeks later, Kelly Osbourne looked unrecognizable at a designer’s launch party, dressed in a powder-pink halter dress that highlighted her sunken clavicle and cheeks. (Afterward, she filmed herself telling critics to “fuck off” and said that she was grieving her father’s death.) Even outside of Hollywood, the trend of sickly-thin bodies feels inescapable. Scroll through Instagram and it doesn’t take long to see a micro-influencer peddling her wellness hacks despite looking noticeably unwell, or stumble on an old friend or colleague who has suddenly become unrecognizable.
This is a hard moment to talk about. It feels wrong to criticize another woman’s body. And since none of these celebrities have admitted to actively struggling with eating disorders, it’s impossible to know what’s really going on. Their silence creates a pressure to pretend their weight loss is normal and brush aside any shock and worry. But recently, we’ve reached a tipping point where more and more people are deciding it’s better to name the problem than ignore it entirely.
The internet is now filled with TikTok and Instagram videos, threads on Reddit and X, and think pieces trying to make sense of how emaciated bodies have become a red-carpet fixture. Substack essays start with lines like “Extreme thinness is everywhere, and it’s impossible to avoid,” and there are countless posts in which a woman tells the camera that “Hollywood is shrinking” or that “I am sick of watching every celebrity get stick-thin and everyone acting like it’s normal.”
Fights are erupting in the comment sections of celebrities’ Instagram feeds as followers debate what is and isn’t okay to say about someone else’s body. And while some messages are genuinely trollish and unhelpful, many people are really trying to navigate this moment in good faith. Laura, a Massachusetts-based nurse, recently recorded a series of videos about public figures, including Gerard, who look dangerously thin. “I will be damned if my kids, who are all in elementary school right now, grow up in 2.0 skinny culture of the 2000s,” she says. While making the videos, she was careful not to demonize anyone’s specific features and to make it clear that she wants anyone struggling with an eating disorder to get help. Even still, she got pushback. “Let’s stop commenting on women’s bodies please,” one person said, while another accused her of making a “big assumption.” Laura says she is worried about a “mass bystander effect” in which people stay silent about Gerard’s dramatic weight loss out of discomfort. “I’m not bringing this up to be a mean girl,” she tells me. “We have to discuss it because she doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s so different when you have a platform and 5 million followers.”
Almost every client Heidi Hartig has seen over the past months has brought up Wicked. The eating-disorder therapist says her younger patients tend to view the stars’ bodies as “thinspo,” and a few have even relapsed after watching the movie or seeing the press tour. Another therapist told me that one of her clients has decided not to watch Emily in Paris after seeing star Lily Collins promoting the show’s new season. (Collins has talked about her struggles with disordered eating in the past.) The woman, who is in recovery, recently got rid of clothing that is too small for her and doesn’t want to see her “sick body” glamorized onscreen.
Even children are noticing that celebrities look too thin. Jenny, a 26-year-old stay-at-home mom, decided to stop showing Half Baked Harvest videos to her 4-year-old son earlier this year after he noticed that Gerard’s face looked “sharp.” “I understood what he meant,” she says. Jenny told him that “everybody’s faces are different” and “maybe she just needs to take better care of herself.” But he loves her videos, especially the one where she makes sugar cookies shaped like the Grinch, and has been begging her to watch them now that it’s Christmastime. “He says, ‘Please, please, I want to see the Grinch one,’” she tells me. “And then I just say, “Mommy doesn’t like her recipes anymore.”
It’s much harder to shield teenagers from viral videos and big theatrical releases. Erin, another mother I spoke with, has a 15-year-old who has been battling anorexia for the past year; still, she’s constantly scrolling online and idolizing K-pop stars, many of whom are notoriously thin and open about their disordered eating. When Erin took her to see Wicked: For Good, she didn’t realize how thin the movie’s actresses were until the movie started playing. But as they sat in the theater, she was particularly horrified by one star’s visible chest bones and the gemstones decorating her shoulders. “It brings attention to that carved-out space” under the collarbone, she says. “For my daughter, that’s a desirable trait.” When she asked her daughter what she thought of the actress’s figure, she responded, “Body goals.” Now, Erin feels guilty for bringing her daughter to the movie. She had recently relapsed after coming back from a treatment center, and Erin worries that seeing Wicked has set her back. “How can it not?” she asks. “It’s right in her face.”
That kind of ripple effect is exactly why one parent, who I’ll call Morgan, had banned their 14-year-old daughter from seeing Wicked. But a friend’s mom took her on opening night without permission, and since then, Morgan’s daughter has expressed a desire to drop from a size medium to extra-small. She’s also not eating very much, including at Thanksgiving, which is usually her favorite holiday. “She was a normal kid just a few weeks ago,” Morgan says. “Now I fear that she could be celebrating her 15th birthday in therapy for an ED.”
Of course, you can’t know for sure that a teenager developed an eating disorder after watching a movie — or seeing the newest Netflix release, or photos of A-listers from the latest awards show, or an influencer’s Instagram reel about how to feel full with fewer calories. There’s not just one culprit. And once the algorithm takes hold, anyone can find themself stuck in an echo chamber where skeletal bodies begin to look not only normal but desirable. But as these images increasingly fill our feeds, so does a chorus of voices who are finding ways — cautiously and passionately and imperfectly — to talk about this moment.
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