I feel like every time I open up any app, I’m forced to look at people promoting their eating disorders. I open TikTok and I see ads for My Fitness Pal — which has been linked to a higher rate of eating disorders — and now it’s a targeted ad seen by millions everyday. I love my social medias but I miss not constantly having to see the #skinnytok TikTokers who are promoting disordered eating. I get ads for mini steppers and they are never talking about wanting to feel better or have a nice accessible way to get in exercise. I feel like they are always saying things like “Summer is around the corner and this shaved inches off my waist.”
I think the “Big Back” trend has done irreparable damage to our society. You are not a “Big Back” because you need to eat. If you are hungry, you need to eat. The assigning of moral value to food creates a perceived moral superiority for not eating things. Food with sugar is not my enemy. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental health disorder according to Auger et al., 2017.2 Your body eats itself. This cultural fixation on being skinny is deadly and I feel like a few years ago, body positivity was huge. Where did the body positivity movement go? The active fights against the societal pressure to have one type of body was something we were moving towards and I miss that. I miss opening TikTok and not being told that my face is fat because I have high cortisol. I was diagnosed with an eating disorder when I was in kindergarden. My whole life I’ve been working on dismantling these ideas in myself and in those I choose to spend time with, and seeing these ideas come back is heartbreaking. Scrolling on an app because I want to see cute videos of cats and being bombarded with “what I eat in a day under 1,500 calories” style videos is terrifying to me. An extreme calorie deficit is not doing what people think it is — these never ending restrictive diets are exhausting. I’m exhausted. I’m so tired of hating your body being the default.
The rise in weight loss drugs is also scary. When are people “skinny enough”? There was a trend on TikTok a little while ago that showed up for around a month on my For You page that was people showing their family members Ozempic, a diabetes medication, and talking about stealing it so they could lose weight. I go to the JFK/UMass train station and for the last few months, there has been an ad for an injectable weight loss medication. I get ads on Facebook from websites like Hers — which I knew about for being a more easily accessible way to get mental health medications — now is selling Ozempic so people can lose weight. Everywhere I turn, I’m being told I need a drug so I can not hate my body. I don’t want to hate my body. It’s so exhausting.
I feel like I can’t escape these repackaged eating disorder dog whistles even offline. I get the wonderful privilege of working with kids at a summer camp and I can see how this is affecting kids. I watch 13-15 year old kids check calories at snacks and skip meals. I watched a child on “ice cream night” check to see if the whipped cream had too many calories for her diet. The rise in needing to be skinny is terrifying and it’s going to end with people dying. Eating disorders thrive on competition and they love a role model. If someone is watching you and you skip a meal because “you’ve been bad,” what is that teaching others? Why has food become a thing you need to earn? You aren’t being bad because you had some ice cream and you aren’t more deserving of food if that food is a salad.
I can’t stand this rise in eating disorder promotions disguised as being healthy or being pretty. Everyone needs to do their part to call out these harmful beliefs and practices when you see them. I am always working on making sure I’m not internalizing these harmful ideas and it is an ongoing process and that’s ok. For all the people promoting the #skinnytok ideas, there are also a good few people working on educating and fighting against this and I think they are doing amazing work. Some of my favorite people to watch when I feel like I’m getting stuck in my head about food are @stevocircle on TikTok, who calls out the eating disorder dog whistles and points out the real effects of eating disorders. Another person on TikTok who has been really helpful for my relationship with food has been Liam (@theplantslant), who calls out these things and also talks about being healthy in a way that is actually kind and not focused just on losing weight. Another one is Ali (@geniusgirlalert), who has a whole anti-skinnytok playlist that talks about the dangers of eating disorders. There are so many people actively fighting the eating disorder TikTok so the last one I’m going to promote is Taylor Grasso (@simplyhealthyrd). She promotes intuitive eating, which is the belief that you should eat if you are hungry and stop when you are full, and is a dietitian. It’s so exhausting to hate your body. Wear what you feel good in, eat the snack, take up space, and remember that you never know who is listening to you talk about your body so please be kind to yourself.
1Levinson CA, Fewell L, Brosof LC. My Fitness Pal calorie tracker usage in the eating disorders. Eat Behav. 2017 Dec;27:14-16. doi: 10.1016/j.eatbeh.2017.08.003. Epub 2017 Aug 18. PMID: 28843591; PMCID: PMC5700836.
2Auger N, Potter BJ, Ukah UV, Low N, Israël M, Steiger H, Healy-Profitós J, Paradis G. Anorexia nervosa and the long-term risk of mortality in women. World Psychiatry. 2021 Oct;20(3):448-449. doi: 10.1002/wps.20904. PMID: 34505367; PMCID: PMC8429328.