Why Does Social Media Run on Comments About Weight? TikToker Shares How to "Block Out Any Noise"

Weight loss can be a sensitive subject for many, and for social media influencers, teetering on that fine line can be detrimental for their career. Even for people like Mark Gaetano, best known as @snarkymarky on TikTok to his millions of followers, who had the best intentions. 

“At the start of 2021 I decided to go on a weight-loss journey because I just wasn't really happy with how I was feeling,” Gaetano tells EatingWell. “That was my main motive, the way that I was feeling and my lack of physical ability. In fact, my epiphany was I was walking up a flight of stairs and I was just so out of breath that I thought, ‘I can't be living like this anymore.’

“I started losing weight, and I am a young man who was already overweight, so that's obviously going to hasten the weight-loss progress,” he explains. “And I started sharing that I was on a weight-loss journey because it was starting to become physically evident that I was losing weight.”

Through sharing his journey and expressing that his weight loss was the result of a low-calorie diet and exercise, his fans were mostly encouraging.

“Initially, everyone was very, very supportive and they were super happy for me,” Gaetano says. “They were glad that I was broadcasting this and sharing this healthy transformation with my audience.”

By December 2021, Gaetano had lost 125 pounds, so he decided to share this news with his followers.

“That was where the comments started to skew negatively because I had posted a video saying that I was no longer overweight,” he explains. “That was a metric that I was using based off of BMI, which now I know has its very many flaws, but that was my metric that I was using at the time.”

Gaetano is right in that body mass index, more commonly known as BMI, isn’t the best indicator of your overall health. But instead of the comments being informative about the problems with depending on BMI, they were more accusatory towards the influencer’s intentions.

“Most people were still very happy and celebratory, but there was still a corner of the internet that was not happy with me and was not happy with my tone and my rhetoric in celebrating my weight loss,” he says.

Despite this, Gaetano continued his health and wellness progress throughout 2022. In 2023, the TikTok star admitted to gaining back some weight, which resulted in the negative comments shifting. This caused Gaetano to make a response “get ready with me” video to address these comments, and the video has since gained over 670,000 views.

“As I’m making more videos, people are of course in the comments, ‘Oh, you gained weight,’ [and] ‘Oh, I knew that weight loss wasn’t going to be sustainable, I knew this was going to happen, I knew he was going to gain weight,’ which is so rude,” he says in his video response. “Why are you preying on someone’s body to change a certain way?”

If you think someone’s words can be dangerous and may be promoting negative aspects of diet culture, consider messaging them directly or leave an informative comment suggesting a change of language instead of an accusatory one. More often than not, their intentions stem from an innocent lack of understanding. As Gaetano continues to give updates on his health journey, it’s important to remember to never critique other people’s bodies, even if they are choosing to share their health updates, habits and routines. When EatingWell asked Gaetano for advice on how to handle unwarranted comments about weight loss and weight gain, he chose four simple words: “Block out any noise.”

“There are going to be people around you that will be happy to see you succeed, but there’s also going to be people around you preying on your downfall,” Gaetano further tells us. “At the end of the day, it’s important to focus solely on how you feel, and not anyone else.”