The rise of eating disorders and the “Culture” online has brought new visibility to dangerous and self destructive behaviors. #edaesthetic, #th1nnsp0 or #edtwt define a genre of social media known for glamorizing eating disorders. This subgenre of social media is wildly popular with young girls who are struggling with insecurity and low self-esteem.
These online spaces often present starvation and extreme thinness as inspirational, turning mental illness into a trend. As a result, countless users, especially impressionable teenagers are drawn into cycles of comparison, guilt and self-harm disguised as motivation.
Many of these pages and accounts have different goals in mind: some pages are to get advice on how to lose more weight while others are sharing “hacks” to lose your appetite or endure longer periods of time without eating. Many of these pages share photos and videos of extremely underweight individuals, glamorizing illness through hashtags that promote “thinspiration,’ intentionally promoting extreme weight loss and self-starvation, causing impressionable people to pick up unhealthy habits to gain these appearances. Often these pages are run by people with disordered eating themselves, many of whom aren’t focused on recovery and are just promoting these ideas to others causing more harm.
These online spaces often present starvation and extreme thinness as inspirational, turning mental illness into a trend. As a result, countless users, especially impressionable teenagers are drawn into cycles of comparison, guilt and self harm disguised as motivation.
The most common eating disorders include anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. These are serious mental illnesses characterized by extreme behaviors surrounding food and body image. These illnesses involve starving oneself (anorexia) or binging (consuming large amounts of food in a short period of time) and purging (making yourself vomit up the food consumed before it can digest).
Online, many people promote different disordered eating, most commonly anorexia and bulimia. Within these online communities, eating disorders are often romanticized rather than recognized as serious mental health conditions. Instead of promoting better habits and recovery, these groups actively reinforce the pathology, developing increasingly worse habits and damaging their relationship with food and body image. These behaviors are promoted by people online posting comments praising and wishing that they look like individuals showing visible signs of malnutrition encouraging those posting to continue their behaviors such as self starvation or food purging.
People will also talk about their goals, even posting their weight in their bios on their profiles with their goal weight asking for advice on how to achieve it. This, in turn, causes people to go online and share even more damaging “tips” such as avoiding “dangerous foods” and how to be rid of food that they feel guilty for eating.
Many people take and post photos as “Thinspo” (Thin Inspiration) by bodychecking in an attempt to make others feel inadequate and fuel others’ body dysmorphia and worsening health. This is found all over the internet and on many websites. These rabbit holes are very easy to fall into; just interacting with a post with a tag relating back to these spaces can flood your feed with these mentally damaging posts, funneling vulnerable young users into self-destructive thought patterns.
Online, when these affected people achieve their goal weight or appearance, they are still in their negative, self-deprecating mindset continuing to find more “flaws” in their appearance, causing them to fall further into the cycle of trying “making themselves look better“.
Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) is a mental health condition in which you can’t stop thinking about one or more perceived defects or flaws in your appearance. This flaw may be minuscule or imagined, but the person may spend hours a day trying to fix it. Often the person will try “fixes” which include cosmetic procedures, vigorous exercise and restricting food. Someone with BDD may frequently examine their appearance in a mirror, constantly compare their appearance with that of others and avoid social activities or photos. People may also spend immense amounts of time looking at their image, obsessively scrutinizing their appearance.
Eating disorders are a never-ending cycle, one where the goal is forever changing, a moving target, online eating disorder cultures are predatory and deeply harmful
