Clips from TV shows in the 2000s suggesting women would be dumped if they gained weight have resurfaced after a TikToker shared how they impacted her

• A TikToker has resurfaced clips from 2000s TV shows that discuss women's weight.
• She said she felt that the shows suggested people needed to be "fit" to access love.

Like lots of people who grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, 29-year-old Lucie Vallée finds comfort in rewatching episodes from TV shows that were popular while she was growing up, like "Friends" and "How I Met Your Mother."

But over time, as Vallée made her way through these old episodes, she noticed several problematic comments relating to the way these shows discussed women's bodies that she felt was out of place in the present day.

"Robin, I want to marry you no matter what, assuming you don't turn into a big fat fatty," says Kevin, a character played by Kal Penn on "How I Met Your Mother," in a clip from a season seven episode which originally aired in 2012 that Vallée recorded and included in a TikTok she posted on April 25.

Vallée, who is based in Berlin, also compiled a number of similar clips from other 2000s TV shows and films, sharing her thoughts on the way women's weight was discussed in this era. In one, the cast of "Friends" can be seen laughing at the idea that Chandler would still date Monica if she were "still fat," part of a recurring gag on the show about the character, who was played by Courteney Cox, having been overweight as a child.

"What strikes me the most in those sequences is how being fit is depicted as a requirement to access love," Vallée said.

Her video received 847,000 views, becoming her most-viewed TikTok to date, and it elicited emotional responses from commenters who said they think that watching these shows as they were growing up subconsciously affected their relationships with their bodies.

"All that internalized fatphobia made me think I didn't deserve love and I settled into such unhappiness it hurts," one top commenter wrote.

Vallée told Insider she was able to empathize with a lot of the experiences and testimonies shared in her comment section, as she developed anorexia and bulimia in her teens, which she lived with for around 10 years.

The TikToker said that while pop culture and television shows like the ones she recorded in her video often presented comments on weight in the form of jokes and irony, she remembers taking them seriously as a young person viewing them.

"When I saw that as a kid it just like hit me straight in the heart," she said, adding, "They had this idea planted in your head that you have an expiry date somehow and that your body's going to decay and your value is going to decay."

The collective response to Vallée's video demonstrates how culture can influence everyone and sometimes work to create a "toxic environment" that affects us, even if we don't always realize it, the TikToker told Insider.

Nostalgia-based resurfacing of TV has become common on TikTok and other social-media platforms, often going viral and sparking new discussions, sometimes with users pointing out problematic moments that they do not believe would be considered acceptable today.

Vallée told Insider that she thinks nostalgic content like this picks up on the nuanced emotions that many people have when rewatching old shows.

"You can have both love and respect for this deep attachment you have for something and at the same time see that it was problematic," she told Insider, saying that watching shows like "Friends" taught her so much about relationships and friendships, but at the same time, "jokes" about women's bodies and weight remind her of the darkness she felt as a teenager dealing with eating disorders.

The TikToker said she hopes that as more people use social media to commentate on culture and how society has changed, it will work to make people more aware of how they've been influenced by it. She herself has continued to make videos commentating on diet culture and the influences surrounding body image issues.

"If you have problems with your body, it's not you in your little corner," she told Insider, adding, "We all have the same collective trauma."

Representatives for Bays & Thomas Productions, 20th Century Fox Television, and Warner Bros. Television, the production companies involved in the making of "Friends" and "How I Met Your Mother," did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

For more stories like this, check out coverage from Insider's Digital Culture team here.