Watching the internet determine what a 23-year-old woman’s body should look like is subtly draining. On August 3rd, Tate McRae stood on the Lollapalooza stage in Chicago’s Grant Park, her arms cutting through the stage light, her abs clearly visible, and a crowded audience that stretched farther back than most artists twice her age could pull. Somehow, online, people were still debating whether or not she looked too thin. It says less about her and more about the times we live in.
There was no announcement from Tate McRae’s camp to start the so-called 2026 Tate McRae weight loss debate. No interview. No caption on Instagram. A change is not subtly indicated by a gym brand partnership. It grew out of social media comparison culture, as these things always do: old pictures next to new ones, speculative comment sections, and Reddit threads analyzing her arms. If one were to look closely, the truth would be clear: she has been performing professionally since she was six years old. Hip-hop, ballet, and contemporary dance are forms of exercise that develop the body in ways that a gym membership could never.
If anything has changed, it’s her platform. Over the last two years, McRae’s world has grown significantly. She went from releasing music in a Los Angeles apartment to selling out arenas, headlining festivals, and traveling more miles on tour buses than most people do in a lifetime. Strength training, rigorous choreography rehearsals before each run, and high-energy stage performances every night are all woven into a schedule that hardly allows for the everyday rhythms of life. A body is shaped by that degree of physical output. It always does. It is not enigmatic.
And yet the rumors continued. A portion of it stems from a truly unsettling online trend that researchers and commentators have been monitoring this year, sometimes referred to as “SkinnyTok,” in which algorithmic loops on short-form video are normalizing extremely underweight bodies. Healthy athletic figures begin to read as something completely different when that becomes the subconscious baseline. After videos of McRae performing went viral with critical remarks attached, a mobility trainer named Rebecca Stewart stated unequivocally that toned arms and obvious abs aren’t warning signs. They are the result of regular, intense physical labor.
It’s difficult to ignore this historical resonance. An entertainment press that should have known better called Britney Spears “out of shape” during her 2007 VMA performance. Even tho the mechanism has changed over the past nearly 20 years—TikTok has replaced tabloids, and anonymous accounts have replaced entertainment journalists—the instinct remains the same. In public, a woman’s body becomes community property, subject to decision and consensus. Since Tate McRae hasn’t directly addressed any of it, it seems like the only reasonable thing she can do.
She has continued to work. After experiencing Knicks fever and going to playoff games with Hailey Bieber, the Variety profile that was released this summer found her in a New York photo studio, journaling through questions about identity and creative direction, considering which colors and references define who she is. She recently relocated to New York from Los Angeles, and she feels that the pace and anonymity that big cities provide, even to well-known individuals, suit her. In order to find herself in a field that has the power to destroy a person’s identity if they allow it, she talked about writing down her favorite songs, movies, and references.
According to her team and training partners, the exercise regimen that drives all of this is more about function than appearance. Strength training to maintain the body’s capacity for the demands of the stage, a high-protein diet balanced with the demands of touring, and regular hydration despite schedules that would make someone half as focused. It’s not a program for losing weight. It’s an athletic maintenance system designed to meet the demands of being one of the most physically expressive pop artists working today.
In another version of this story, all of that is irrelevant, and the internet simply keeps shifting the goalpost. However, it still seems important to state unequivocally that Tate McRae’s body is not a before-and-after. Standing under lights in Grant Park, it is a functional instrument that has been shaped by decades of dance and months of touring. During her most recent run, over a million people attended to watch it perform.
