TikTok 'Diet' of the Week: The Ice Hack for Weight Loss Is an Ad for a Dumb Supplement

TikTok is full of weight loss "hacks," most of them misleading, overblown, just plain wrong, or recycled from misinformation of yore (or all of the above). The latest: something involving ice that helped the narrator's mother lose 72 pounds, or something. More info in the comments below! Except there's not. Act quick before "they" take down this video!

Here's a typical example. There's a brief clip of a fat person (unrelated to anything that comes after it), then a POV video where somebody mixes salt into a glass of ice water, tells you that their mother recently lost 63 pounds (the mother is not the same person as the one at the beginning of the clip), and then promises to show you the video where their mother learned how to do it. The hack has been on the news, yet has also been taken down because it is, "exposing the lies of the weight loss industry."

This raises questions. If the mother tried it after the narrator, why is it phrased as the video that helped the mother, not the narrator? Why don't we see the narrator's results? Why is the mother shown in a photo and not helping her son to make this video? Why does the video start with saying "2 tablespoons a day" and not tell us what it's 2 tablespoons of? If he wants to spread the word about this hack, why is it a "secret ingredient"? Why doesn't he just tell us?

Because it's just a dumb gimmick to sell a product, of course. The video has nothing to do with the product, for the same reason all those mini-headlines at the bottom of online articles use weird photos that have nothing to do with anything--the goal is to make you curious, so you click.

What are the ice hack videos trying to sell?

Usually the promised video is not, in fact, linked in the comments. There may not be an explanatory video at all. In one TikTok post, people who commented "yes" as instructed were told to check out "Modere Europe." This seems to be a company that sells skincare products.

In another, clicking the account's bio link sends you to a sales pitch for a "Mediterranean Ritual" that turns out to be a $69 bottle of pills. On the FAQ asking what's in the product (called Liv Pure), no ingredients are listed, just promises it contains a "liver purification complex" and a "liver fat-burning complex."

In another video, a woman dances in front of the camera and claims to have lost "20 pounds in 2 weeks drinking this for breakfast, lunch, and dinner." She is shown mixing ice cubes and water in a blender; the caption says "check the link ? in bio ??". The link in bio leads to a supplement website that wants to sell you a bottle of something called Alpilean ($59). That sales page claims that overweight people have too low an internal body temperature; how drinking ice water is supposed to help with that, we're never told. In fact, the Alpilean website does not say anything about drinking ice water at all. (I guess if you drink ice water in place of all your meals, you would lose weight, but that's hardly worth recommending.)

You get the idea. Sometimes the bio links go to a variety of scammy-looking products for unrelated health concerns--gum health, hearing loss, prostate issues. Click any of the links and you'll be sold a supplement. How about bottle of LeanBiome probiotics for $59? Sure, why not. (I'm kidding. Do not buy this.)

In other words, there is no "ice hack" or "ice water diet." There is a marketing trend in which TikTokers drive clicks toward various supplement companies by getting their videos to show up on the platform as weight loss hacks. That's it. There's no hack. There's no weight loss. Snopes even points out that the "mother" shown on a laptop screen in one of the Alpilean videos is in fact a woman who posted her weight loss journey on Facebook years before Alpilean even existed as a product.

So, there you have it: the ice hack for weight loss does not involve ice, a hack, or weight loss. Thanks, TikTok.