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Photo:Design elements: Getty Images. Collage: Cassie Basford.
Design elements: Getty Images. Collage: Cassie Basford.
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 TikTokto 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 tellsEatingWell. “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.”
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Through sharing his journey and expressing that his weight loss was the result of alow-calorie dietand 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.
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“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.
“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.”
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