A Chinese eating-livestream star has died at just 24, days after telling her million-plus followers that stuffing herself on camera had wrecked her health.
Chen Ziyi, known to fans as Yingying or Ganfan Yingying, died on 17 August, her parents said in an obituary posted on 4 September. They did not give an official cause of death.
But the timing is brutal. On 14 August she uploaded what would be her final video from a hospital bed, showing needle marks on her hand and blood-test results that would make any doctor wince.Her potassium had crashed as low as 2.3 mmol/L. A healthy reading sits between about 3.5 and 5.5. Anything under 2.5 is classed as severe.
‘Although making money is important, health should always come first,’ she told viewers.
Three days later, she was gone.
‘Eat more, the stream does better’
Yingying built her fame the hard way: sitting in front of a camera and eating mountains of food. Cakes, desserts, and, in one promotional livestream, 60 to 70 preserved eggs in a single sitting.
She said the job was not the glossy feast it looks like on screen. Livestream sales rewarded the creators who kept going. Eat more, she said, and the broadcast performed better. Her body, she admitted, could not always keep up.
She also said she had a long-standing habit of making herself sick after filming — a way to keep producing content after swallowing far more than any ordinary meal. Doctors later warned that this kind of repeated vomiting can drain the body of potassium, the mineral that helps keep the heart beating in rhythm.
It was not her first hospital trip for the same problem.A person familiar with the case later told Chinese media her death was suspected to have been a cardiac arrest linked to long-term low potassium. That claim has not been confirmed by her family or by hospital authorities.
A warning that came too late
By the time platforms began taking down her accounts this week, the clip of her last message was already circulating far beyond China.
In it she looks tired, not theatrical. She explains why the livestreams had stopped. She points to the numbers on the test sheet. She tells fans not to copy the grind.DramaAlert’s video package, now spreading on X, intercuts those hospital remarks with the old eating clips: pastel cakes stacked like trophies, another bite, another smile for the camera. The contrast is what makes it so grim.
Yingying was born on 24 March 2002. She was 24 when she died. She leaves behind parents who announced their daughter’s passing without the usual celebrity gloss, just a date, a name, and a silence where the medical details should be.
Doctors quoted in Chinese coverage have been blunt since the news broke: binge eating on its own does not strip the body of potassium. The danger, they say, comes when extreme consumption is paired with purging, exhaustion and a career that treats the stomach as a sales tool.
Yingying had already said that out loud.Her followers just did not get to hear it for long.
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