Madelyn Furstenau ‘26, Lyonlife.org Editor-in-Chief
Two teenage girls are going viral on TikTok right now, but not for the reasons one might think. The increasingly controversial sister duo Izzy and Mary are best known for their food challenges on the platform, but one sister has primarily received most of the negative attention. They have extended their content over multiple accounts, but their most popular one has over 280,000 followers. Their mother manages their accounts, and you can typically hear her leading the challenges in the background, yet she rarely appears on camera.
Seventeen-year-old Izzy is the more disputed of the two, as she has become concerningly overweight from making this kind of content. The videos in which she is featured range from trying every menu item at a certain restaurant to competing with her sister in food related competitions. In these challenges, there is typically a wide array of unhealthy junk food laid out in front of the sisters, and whoever grabs the called-out item first gets to keep it. Because Izzy is significantly bigger than her sister, viewers have started to make fun of her publicly. In a recent video where she spends five and a half minutes eating multiple meals from Olive Garden, most of the comments were beyond negative: “they give u a free salad where is it,” “Why do you need so much,” “Chill bruh it’s all yours,” and “Bro you got all of garden,” were just some among thousands of remarks on her weight and this extremely unhealthy content.
While Mary has slightly taken a step back from a lot of these videos—presumably for maintaining her physical health—Izzy has created her own account where she posts solo eating videos. Knowing that their mother runs these accounts, you can assume that she sees all of this hate that has taken over the platform. TikTok users have started to make their own versions of the eating challenges, pretending to be the sisters, with the person playing Izzy stuffing pillows in their shirts to appear obese. Even so, Izzy and Mary continue to post multiple food videos a day, and the comments stay turned on. This is where we enter into something much darker: child exploitation on social media.
Although the sisters appear happy on camera, and it can certainly be fun to try a bunch of different foods at once, this is extremely unhealthy, especially considering Izzy’s young age and current state. This content is starting to reach concerningly odd levels. On March 4, the entire family took turns pricking their fingers to test their blood sugar after consuming Crumbl cookies. Of course, this was posted on TikTok with a warning over the video for sensitive content.
The unsettling nature of these videos and the utter exploitation of these teenage girls cannot go unnoticed. It is impossible to be completely oblivious to the hate Izzy receives online, so continuously subjecting her to the negativity is extremely irresponsible of her parents. We must protect young people on social media, as this hatred constantly being fired at them can lead to poor self esteem in the long run.
Lyon Life 