Any girl who has spent even a bit of time on social media has learned it firsthand, at some point: content that romanticizes eating disorders (EDs) is everywhere. As early as the 2000s, the internet was already full of “pro-ana” forums, where young users suffering from anorexia shared photos of extremely thin bodies, calling them “thinspiration,” and encouraged one another to fast for as long as possible. Then came Tumblr, which for years was an endless archive of protruding collarbones and calorie-restriction diaries; Instagram and the countless variations on the “what I eat in a day” theme (almost always very little); Twitter, where communities that encourage the development of eating disorders—numbering in the hundreds of thousands—still thrive, and which has in fact worsened following its acquisition by Musk and the resulting reduction in moderation.
According to the most recent data, in Italy more than three million people suffer from EDs (especially anorexia and bulimia, but not only): among adolescents, between 8 and 10 percent of girls and between 0.5 and 1 percent of boys are affected, with a recent increase in cases even among children aged 8 to 15. Globally, EDs are the mental disorder with the second highest mortality rate overall, and their incidence has been rising for decades: in the general population, they doubled between 2000 and 2018, and in the United States medical visits for eating disorders among children and adolescents doubled again between 2018 and 2022.
There is no single cause—the factors are psychological, biological, and social—but experts agree that social media plays a significant role. “Are there individuals who are introduced to disordered eating behaviors by the large amount of related content found online? Certainly,” Lauren Breithaupt, a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist at Harvard University specializing in EDs, told Wired. “And once someone interacts with that content, the algorithm makes sure they see more of it.”
Various experts believe that not only people who already struggle with their body image encounter this content, but also those who had never had issues with food up to that point. Every time a platform has tried to intervene—by banning hashtags, removing content, shutting down accounts—these communities have simply moved elsewhere, or adopted new language to evade automatic filters: #proana became #pr0ana, an extra “a” was added to “anorexia,” and so on. TikTok, by far the most widely used platform among teenagers, is no exception to these dynamics. Before it was banned, videos under the hashtag #SkinnyTok had tens of millions of views.
The company has said it takes the issue very seriously, and indeed new hashtags that emerge on the topic are often identified and removed with notable speed, but the platform is still full of videos in which girls repeat mantras to resist hunger, such as “your stomach isn’t growling, it’s applauding,” and other “harsh motivation” content.
For some time now, however, a new community has been emerging on the same platform and using the same formats—people who use TikTok not to reinforce their eating disorders but to document their attempts to recover from them, or to highlight how dangerous the messages conveyed by #SkinnyTok videos are.
The community has existed for a couple of years, but it already has its own codified conventions. One of the most common types of videos is that of “recovery victories,” in which creators celebrate small and large wins over their disorder: one girl shows a dress that only fit her when she was very thin and that she can no longer close, then turns it into a nice top; another shows the substantial breakfast in front of her, symbolizing the regained freedom to choose what to eat. There are videos about the reality of recovery, which do the opposite: they show how complex it is to get better, without sugarcoating reality but demonstrating that it is still possible and that many people are working on it. And there are the classic intimate video diaries that show an ordinary user’s daily life, but set in recovery centers or hospitals.
Many of these videos also have a meta dimension: they talk about social media itself, the role it has played in triggering or worsening the disorder, and the gap between the curated image posted online and reality. In a post titled “Social media vs. reality: ED edition,” for example, one creator juxtaposed photos from her Instagram feed—where she was smiling at a birthday party—with ones she never posted: lying in bed in her pajamas, unable to get up, just hours before the same event. Others produce more explicitly educational content: lists of things not to say to someone trying to recover from an ED (“You look so much better! You don’t look anorexic. What was your lowest weight? Just eat, it’s not that hard”), along with an invitation not to blame oneself for having said them in the past, but to keep them in mind for the future. Then there are videos about “fear foods,” foods that provoke anxiety: one girl films herself trying to eat a chocolate cookie, hesitates, and then takes a bite. The caption reads: “Celebrate every tiny victory.” Another explains how labeling certain foods as “forbidden” created a vicious cycle of guilt and self-punishment.
Then there are those who directly push back against the messages spread by #SkinnyTok. Stephen Imeh, for example, is a nineteen-year-old from Houston who regularly posts videos of himself eating burgers, overlaying them with messages like: “None of your friends will envy you because your disorder made you look like a skeleton. Pick up that fork.” His approach is deliberately blunt: Imeh regularly lists all the medical complications associated with these disorders, such as early-onset osteoporosis, cardiovascular and gastrointestinal problems, absence of menstruation, possible infertility, erosion of dental enamel, and kidney damage. “If there’s one thing I know about Gen Z, my generation, it’s that they’ll only stop doing something when they realize they look ridiculous,” he told Wired.
On the one hand, the intention is clearly to better inform those who do not yet suffer from eating disorders, by showing the less glamorous side of unhealthy thinness. On the other, there is a desire to make visible and shareable forms of suffering and paths that are often deeply individual, and around which there is still a massive amount of shame. Eating disorders are almost always experienced in great secrecy: those who suffer from them hide what they do, lie about how much they eat, and experience the conflict between the need to nourish themselves and the fear of doing so as something strictly private. In this context, recovery videos serve precisely to externalize those conflicts and stage them, even if doing so requires showing intimate and painful moments.
For now, the impact is not measurable, although various psychologists believe that watching recovery videos is certainly better than spending time on #SkinnyTok. However, several researchers who have studied the community have pointed out the evident limitations of this content. For one thing, a close look reveals that the food shown in “What I eat in a day” videos is often not actually consumed: it is not uncommon for a creator to open a bag of chips, eat one, and then throw the rest away, without showing what remains inside.
Then there is an issue of representation. The community is fairly homogeneous: Stephen Imeh is a Black man, but most #edrecovery content is posted by white, young, and still very thin girls. Those who do not fit the visual stereotype of an eating disorder tend to be excluded: researchers cite the example of a girl who posted a “before and after” video captioned “from starving to happy,” and was insulted in the comments because in the photos where she was suffering from anorexia she did not appear thin enough to “really” have a problem.
There is also a deeper ambiguity, concerning the very nature of these videos. Eating disorders are characterized by difficulty in mentalizing bodily experience, in coming to terms with one’s body and identity. For those who suffer from them, filming oneself and posting on TikTok can be a way of seeing oneself from the outside, of giving shape to something that otherwise remains confused and elusive. It is an act of self-representation that can be meaningful, an attempt to reconcile with a body that feels wrong, to trace a path over time between a “before” and an “after.” But it is also, inevitably, a performance: to show “what it’s really like” to have an eating disorder, one uses the tools of a platform that is inherently based on virality and imitation.
What clinicians keep repeating is that social media, even when it shows positive content, remains a limited tool. “What I work on with most patients is reducing time spent on social media,” Breithaupt told Wired. “Doing something else is more helpful for recovery, even if you’re watching recovery-oriented videos.”
Viola Stefanello