Acai bowls, green smoothies, avocado toast – any social media user has seen more content about these foods now than ever before in their lives. That is not because they haven’t been menu items before, but because lifestyle bloggers haven’t been around before.
Social media use has risen exponentially in the past few years, with over 3 billion people being active users – that is 40% of the entire world population! Instagram has established itself as a favorite not only because of the filters or hashtags, but especially because of the power it had over its users.
Instagram influencers came about not too long ago, as people who have the power to influence decision making in others, due to their established reputation for having expertise on a particular category – beauty, fashion, lifestyle – you name it.
Brands of all sizes have used influencers as a marketing tool, targeting their Instagram fan base to generate more sales for their products.
It has now become a part of the law that influencers make it known to the public they are advertising products by writing #ad or #partnership. However, the danger lies among the influencers who advocate for a particular lifestyle that may affect their followers’ health.
‘Foodies’ are no stranger to the Instagram platform, as people love posting what they eat, where they eat, and how the quality was. It is no wonder that #food is the 3rd most popular hashtag in this platform.
This behavior may be seen as perfectly normal, however, it has great potential for danger to one’s mental health.
Daniella Isaacs, a UK health blogger, shared her story of obsession over clean eating. While that may sound like a heavenly obsession to all of us who can’t seem to stop eating sweets and fried food, Daniella explains how this “healthy” obsession proved to be remarkably damaging to her mental health.
Despite facing mental related issues like anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and even depersonalization throughout her upbringing, Daniella never had any issues with eating, let alone a disorder in relation to eating.
She had maintained a weight normal for her age and height, despite also struggling with food containing gluten, as her celiac disease was persistent. A family friend had suggested she turns to clean eating to help with feelings of bloatedness and an upset stomach.
Daniella took the advice to heart and slowly started cutting out foods from her diet. These included carbs, sugar, oil, and dairy. It made her feel better for a while, but the real turning point in her life was when she began posting her food on Instagram. This is when the real obsession started.
Her posts about green salads, fruit smoothies, and vegan meals were getting a lot of likes and recognition. Daniella had never gotten this many likes in her posts before. She began getting a lot of followers and a lot of messages.
The comments she would get were very positive and of praise, giving her the kind of attention she had never had before. One may think this is normal activity for a social medium, but the implications they had on Daniella’s health are not as obvious.
All this positive feedback provided for a great deal of reinforcement for Daniella, and she wasn’t planning on stopping. Her obsession grew at the same time as her follower base grew. Her life began revolving around her food intake, and the control she had to have over it.
She began running more kilometers. She avoided meeting up with friends for meals. If she was invited at someone’s house, she would insist on cooking the food as she was scared the ingredients they would use wouldn’t be healthy, or they would use too much oil or milk. She managed to drop to a size 6 from a size 10 very quickly.
She took a lot of time to make her food look as healthy as possible for her posts, as that got her the most responses. Her behavior was only further reinforced when she was offered help to launch her own brand, as her expertise in the health and wellness industry was truly appreciated by her followers.
She developed a recipe for a gluten-free granola bar and became a role model for so many people.
What Daniella failed to realize is that she was dealing with an eating disorder named Orthorexia Nervosa. It falls within the Eating Disorder category, although is not as famous as Anorexia or Bulimia, because of the lack of research and its support by the medical community.
That, however, doesn’t change the fact that so many people struggle with it. ON is a disorder that overlaps with both anorexia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, in which individuals experience intrusive thoughts about being impure when consuming unhealthy food, engage in ritualistic behavior such as meal prep, and experience guilt if the diet is not followed. Differently, from Anorexia, people with Orthorexia don’t obsess with weight, but with feeling clean, and they show-off behavior as opposed to hiding it.
This fact brings light to why Instagrammers’ food-sharing habits may be markedly damaging to themselves, as they may feed off of the positive feedback for unrealistic standards of beauty imposed on all of us unfairly. Even people who seem to be the healthiest and happiest on their posts have their secrets of struggle and discontent.