If you’re on the internet at all, you have probably noticed the increase of “health” related content in last few years. If you have noticed this and felt like it’s getting scary, it’s not just you.
Before we had so-called fitness influencers, we had “Pro-Ana” forums on Tumblr and Reddit. Black and white thinspiration images with visual bones and starvation as discipline, often using Kate Moss’s infamous quote, “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”. Now, we have people like Liv Schmidt, whose entire account is being cruel to herself and her followers, saying things like, “we are not bears storing up fat for winter.”
Liv Schmidt and people like her are proof that harmful body culture has not disappeared since the 2000’s, but it has adapted and rebranded. The 90’s and 2000’s was the wave of “heroin chic”, now we are in the wave of “looksmaxing” and “what I eat in a day.”
In Pro-Ana forums, the harmful messaging was explicit. Although these places were framed as “support groups”, the tips for starving yourself and showing off extremely thin bodies was easy to flag.
The new wave looks different. We have “that girl” routines showing women getting up before the sun rises and doing a grueling workout on a toddler sized meal. These routines are restrictions disguised as wellness. The messaging has not disappeared; it has just learned to sound healthier. It is easy to fall for the intense routines and restrictive eating, because the algorithms make us internalize unrealistic standards without realizing it, shifting our baseline for what a healthy body looks like.
So, how do we spot these harmful messages, and more importantly, how do we survive it? We can start by paying attention to the subtle warning signs. Food being framed as moral for example, using words like “good,” “clean” and “guilty.” Pay attention to content that makes you feel like your body is a problem to fix.
It is one thing to spot the content, but how do we not fall victim to it? Curate your feed by blocking creators who are harmful and clicking “not interested” on tips for toxic dieting. Think about who benefits from you feeling shame about your body; it certainly isn’t you. Not all health and wellness content is harmful. If you are passionate about fitness, find creators who use positive language and avoid people who are mean to themselves and others.
I know how easy it is to slip into comparison and harmful body content, because I experienced it. I allowed these creators to make me feel like I needed to be fixed. But now I know that I am more than something to optimize.
Despite what toxic internet corners say, you are allowed to simply live in your body without constantly trying to improve it. Surviving this new wave of body culture does not mean we have to log off completely, we just need to learn what deserves our attention, and what doesn’t.