🤳 Why I Support a TikTok Ban
It's not about data. It's about disorientation.
That routine you saw from an influencer or post you saw go viral
doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily worth trying or effective.
Understanding that social media algorithms favor entertainment and engagement over education and teaching is a great proxy for deciding which content on your channels is legit vs. attention-baiting.
Newsletter Summary:
My Client’s Tiktok Temptation and what I think the app does to our brains
Why a ban is better
What FitTok (and Instagram Reels) are guilty of in the fitness world
🤳 Why I Support a TikTok Ban
Last year, I had a client tell me that they saw on Tiktok that doing a 48-hour fast was a good idea for anyone trying to lose weight.
When I asked this client — who is trying to lose weight, of course — what made this video so interesting, they said “he lost 10 lbs in two days!”
While that’s a tremendous amount of weight to lose in such a short time, the creator of that video won’t tell you that all of that weight was water weight.
Roughly half of that will return to his body on his first meal breaking the fast.
Also, near-starvation is not sustainable.
While that might’ve worked in the short term, no one regularly fasts for two whole days. (If you know such a person, I’d love to speak with them).
What my client had to understand was that the path they are currently on — losing 1-2 lbs every two weeks — is a much healthier path to sustained weight loss.
My client ended up losing weight trying intermittent fasting, but he realized that that kind of behavior wasn’t sustainable, eventually having short tempers and bad days on his fasts.
What the Tiktok failed to provide in it’s short and sweet summary of fasting that fasts should be short, and they’re hardly ever sweet.
This missing nuance is not uncommon on Tiktok.
Many people hear and see things — to be done a variety of different ways, I might add — coming from that app and believe that these Tiktoks are unfalsifiably true.
Influencers speak with conviction.
Large follower counts somehow equal credibility.
And what happens is large swathes of people end up trying ridiculous things that lead them down a rabbit hole of disorientation.
The Real Reason TikTok Exists in the U.S.
China doesn’t want our data.
China can get that other ways.
Pivoting away from fitness for a second, consider this:
In China, they have a watered-down version of TikTok called Douyin.
Douyin is also owned by Bytedance, the owner of TikTok.
It functions similarly, except for two key differences.
Douyin is used mainly for commerce and small businesses, not “dance challenges, DIY hacks, or mukbang videos” meant to distract us and (quite literally) shorten our attention spans and shrink our brains.
In 2021, the Chinese government imposed a 40-minute daily limit for users under the age of 14 for the app. In other words, it’s not for kids.
Authoritarian as that move might be, it begs the question…
Why would China have such a different app but be alright with Americans (and American kids) draining their brains on the low-IQ version of their app?
How come the type of content is different?
Could it be that maybe they actually want their app — Douyin — to meaningfully contribute to their economy and not lead to an over-proliferation of selfish “influencers?”
Maybe there’s something to the idea that this disorienting amount of content — 170 million users and more than half of them blasting out “brainrot” and clawing for likes and engagement — could be a tactic to keep Americans distracted from real issues: politics, work and career advancement, and self-development.*
*The italics imply sarcasm, for those not catching on.
These are the reasons why I think Tiktok should stay banned.
Beyond being a terrible resource for fitness and health, it is an absolute corruption to our mental health, and the data proves that.
Yet, most of you rejoiced on Sunday when it returned…
TikTok and Instagram’s Shortcut Trap
Even if you stay on Tiktok, realize that social media is full of shortcuts.
Don’t look for shortcuts before you solve the easy fixes.
“You can’t cold plunge your way out of a half-bottle of Jack Daniels per night.”
— Evan Hafer
The only thing that is true of shortcuts — like “lose 30 lbs in 30 days or your money back,” “speed up your recovery with this supplement,” or “learn to become an elite athlete in 60 days” — is that the energy spent on taking them could be more fruitfully applied to the actual task that needs doing.
When you buy into a shortcut, you’re fueling your brain’s impatience.
This is why Tiktok is booming and will continue to.
It feeds on impatience, short attention spans, and quick low-ticket offers.
While it’s not impossible to come across real information on these sites, the work required to find the right kind takes effort.
Now, don’t go getting rabbit-holed into fitness accounts for hours at a time.
Instead, train your brain to learn the archaic, long-form way.
Books, newsletters (like this one), and long-form Youtube videos from transparent and credentialed people are good places to start.
Happy Friday. See you next week.
Fasting as a muscle, you build it up, just like any other muscle, by incrementally increasing your fast. I have done a two day fast and more, and I would agree you’re not doing that every week.
Of course, the benefits from fasting aren’t in weight loss per se, they are in what it does to the mechanisms in your body and how autophagy turns on.