Elizabeth Zaks built her career on being seen. She’s been a fitness and lifestyle creator for more than a decade, posting workouts on YouTube and her own face into the feed since back when none of this was really a job. So it’s a particular kind of irony that the part of her life she protects most now is the part that isn’t online.
“I don’t spend much time on social media anymore,” she says. “Even if I want to look through Instagram, I’m not going to, because I know it’s going to remind me of work, and then it’s 2 AM and I’m still reeling about something.”
That distance is a deliberate part of how she’s redefined the job. Confidence, when she first started, was tied to likes, to whether a photo turned out after a thousand attempts, to all the externals. Now it looks different. “Confidence isn’t just thinking you’re the best. It’s being comfortable knowing you’re the best version of yourself, not necessarily the best at everything in comparison to someone else.” She’ll scroll past a woman on Instagram, clock that she looks good, and feel exactly zero ways about it. “She can look that way, and I can look this way, and that is perfectly fine. I’m not trying to make my life so drastically different to achieve some drastic body. I like having my nights in coloring on a coloring book.”
She’s done the math on the industry, too. Fitness creators are leaning back into a kind of 90s heroin chic right now, sometimes with the help of Ozempic. She feels the pressure to follow. She also knows it isn’t sustainable for her. “I know myself well enough to know that’s not what I want to do with my time. And if I feel this way, there have to be at least a few other people who feel that way too.” That’s the lane she’s built. Fitness creator, self-described nerd, gamer with a subcommunity where she rages and invents her own profanity strings inside her broader audience.
She has thoughts on the work itself, including the parts people don’t talk about. The biggest misconception, she says, is that the job is easy because it isn’t traditional. It’s not. “You have to show up every day and be intentional with your work structure. If you’re not type A, it’s going to be hard.” She also has things she wishes she’d known earlier. Like: be very careful with what you post. Years ago, living in Tampa, Zaks used to film vlogs at her apartment window, view and all. A follower once messaged saying she lived in the building next door and recognized the window. Nothing came of it. But a stalker situation that came later left her with months of not wanting to be visible online. “It was very hard for me to be vulnerable again.”
The same instinct that pulled her offline is what’s pulled her toward building things of her own. After years of being a billboard for other brands as a sponsored athlete, she wanted something that was hers. That something is Liska Swim, a swimwear line named after what her family has always called her. (“Liska” means “little fox” in Russian.) Zaks was born in Florida and raised in Russia for a stretch as a kid, and she’s vocal about her pride in Eastern European culture. She also has family and friends from Ukraine, and the war hit her hard. “I was literally a zombie. It hit me so drastically.” Liska Swim is how she channels that. The watercolor prints come from a Ukrainian artist she sourced herself, and a percentage of proceeds goes toward supporting Ukrainian families affected by the war. “If you don’t stand for something, you stand for nothing,” she says.
She’s coming back to her audience on her own timeline now. There’s more YouTube on the horizon, more streaming, more of her actual life, unpolished. “I think I finally have the courage to be myself again. I want to be more available to people. Maybe make friends with my audience again.”
She’s not in a hurry to be anyone else. “The great part about the internet is you can literally just make your own lane.”
