It is not a secret that at this age social media is addictive, whether you want to admit it or not. We have heard it all before: stay off the phones and numerous downsides to staring at our screens all day. But what happens when the information we absorb starts to kill us?
The life influence of toxic social media has significantly expanded the iron grip of eating disorders on teenage girls. Diet culture is slowly killing them, both literally and metaphorically. It starts innocently, wanting to eat healthier or workout more; the list goes on. Then all of a sudden everyone around you seems to be eating less and talking about how “unhealthy” your favorite childhood snacks are, trying to make their summer body diet their whole personality, taking the saying “get a life” to a whole new level.
Social media algorithms are quickly flooded with middle-aged women telling girls what to eat to look as good as them, and you start getting used to convincing yourself those low-calorie high-protein meals will satisfy you.
Food is a body’s way of getting energy and if it is craving something specific, eat it, or one day it will be all you can think about. This is the start to the bottomless pit of diet culture. For many girls, it does not stop there—but for other girls it is the end. More and more, people’s favorite foods are labeled as “bad” or “unhealthy” and they start to only eat what TikTok says will give them their dream physique.
Watching “what I eat in a day” videos and trying to get in extra workouts to get to that perfect 10,000 steps turns skipping meals and an extinct social life. Playing sports results in judgery and all the girls who are chronically online won’t shut up about how they probably shouldn’t get that cookie. Not only that but it is common for girls to lose their period as their health deteriorates.
It is chips away at their life everyday as the number on the scale keeps dropping. Social media knows they are interested, no, addicted to diet culture, so it keeps going, and the cycle repeats every single day. The mainstream social media apps; Tiktok, Instagram and Snapchat, know their platform algorithms are addictive, the predator to prey relationship these platforms have built with viewers has become deadly. This year, lawsuits regarding eating disorders have piled up against Tiktok and Instagram.
Families whose children have developed eating disorders or mental health issues may be eligible for a lawsuit to pay for medical bills, pain and suffering. Research has been done to prove these companies know their platforms are harmful but fail to act as to prioritize their profit.
“Its a myth spread all the time on social media that people will have the body they want by avoiding x, y or z through diet and exercise,” Clinical Psychologist Debra Gill said.
Teenage girls suffering from anorexia make themselves suffer with self-controlling behaviors that may sometimes show them short term “results” but rarely achieve sustained body satisfaction or happiness. Social media places value in the so-called will power of skipping dessert, cutting out sugars and adding protein to every meal to achieve the body it glamourizes—but the content is missing the warning label that this is the start of the never ending road to a life hindering and life threatening eating disorder.
The people on the Internet who are delusional, and believe what they are putting online and how they are living is ok ; are the ones who are not healed and need the most help. Instead of getting that help, they push their sick ideals out on social media where they know young girls will absorb it, instead of getting help.
“One of the big challenges with social media right now is that you’re getting information that’s not necessarily accurate or helpful from people who potentially have no idea what they are talking about,” Student Assistance Counselor at West Essex Anthony Emering said. “Now with the advent of AI you’re looking at images of people that are altered to look a certain way and you don’t even know it but it’s unattainable and unhealthy.”
In most regular circumstances, wanting to look a certain way is normal, wanting to workout for your health is a good thing and maybe even in certain circumstances wanting to eat better, but not less because it makes your body feel good on the inside is encouraged, but turning a healthy and happy body into a sick, underfed and overworked body is detrimental; eating won’t kill you, but not eating will.
