00:06:48.320this like pro-eating disorder part of the internet,
00:06:52.280which like you said, it's been around for decades.
00:06:54.860Even before social media, it was on forums.
00:06:57.480Like from the time that the internet existed, there were communities of people who were sort of like when you go into these communities, what it is, is it's like a space for people who are experiencing eating disorders to connect.
00:07:10.580But unfortunately, the culture that flourishes within them encourages and sort of promotes eating disorders.
00:07:17.260And so what I saw happening last year is this culture had escaped containment from these niche community spaces and was being algorithmically pushed to almost everyone on these social media platforms.
00:07:30.120I had people, multiple people reaching out to me being like, this pro eating disorder stuff is on my For You page.
00:07:36.580to this pro-eating disorder stuff is right when I open up Twitter, it's the first tweet that I see
00:07:40.880that's being pushed to me. And what I eventually figured out is that the social media platforms
00:07:46.360in the process of developing new features like community tabs and tweaking their algorithms,
00:07:53.180as well as some of these broader cultural changes that were happening, it was a perfect storm where
00:07:59.100all of a sudden pro-eating disorder content went from something you had to seek out to something
00:08:04.360you could no longer avoid. And so Skinny Talk is another iteration of this, where if you are a
00:08:10.820TikTok user, even now, even they've recently banned the Skinny Talk hashtag in response to a lot of
00:08:16.940this great reporting that's come out. But even now, when I open up TikTok, I cannot avoid, it is like
00:08:22.960my feed is cluttered with all of these posts that are glorifying extreme thinness, influencing young
00:08:30.280women in particular and girls to have an extreme calorie deficit. There's content for boys and men
00:08:36.100that encourages them to lose a lot of weight really dramatically and drastically. And it's
00:08:41.140like this toxic soup that I find to be like so harmful to people's mental health. It's actually
00:08:47.140a disturbing kind of side effect of where we're at with social media. I have experienced the exact
00:08:53.500same thing. As I said, I've been on the internet for a really long time. And only very, very
00:08:58.560recently, like in the last few years, I knew that kind of content was out there, but this is the
00:09:03.240first time that it's really been surfaced for me, right? I went my entire life never thinking about
00:09:10.220whether or not a human is meant to have a flat stomach. It just never came up. And now it is
00:09:15.380everywhere. Like, and I'm, I'm, I'm, I am not somebody who has, you know, struggled with
00:09:20.300disordered eating and like real body image issues in my life. But only in the last few years have I
00:09:25.780found myself thinking about this because it is all I am seeing on social media and I can only
00:09:30.940imagine what that would be like if I wasn't an older person right if I'm if I'm 14 15 16 if the
00:09:37.980way that it's impacting me as like a fully formed adult how is it impacting youth who are being
00:09:43.880surfaced this kind of content on the regular I've talked to like at least half a dozen experts in
00:09:50.280the eating disorder space people who work with treatment people who studied this from an academic
00:09:55.100lens. And what I've heard is that over the course of the last few decades, eating disorders have
00:10:01.100emerged as a phenomenon and they have skyrocketed alongside the proliferation of mass media.
00:10:08.120So what that means is that when TV and magazines became much more commonplace in like the 20th
00:10:15.360century, you started to see women and girls in particular, they were encountering like cover
00:10:21.780images on magazines. They were encountering women in commercials and on TV and in movies
00:10:28.340who fit this beauty standard that oftentimes was extreme thinness. And this beauty standard,0.74
00:10:34.300it comes from a lot of different places, but it's also a beauty standard that prioritizes0.89
00:10:38.420whiteness. It's a beauty standard that prioritizes these sort of conventional Eurocentric features.
00:10:44.360And it's a beauty standard that really overemphasizes being thin. And you see diet
00:10:49.360culture reflect this, you see the way that diet and exercise are incentivized and the way that
00:10:55.340thinness is incentivized in sort of all walks of life, all contribute to sort of the social
00:11:01.720factors that drive eating disorders. So here's something I keep noticing in content that flirts
00:11:08.240with disordered eating. The people making it rarely think they're promoting anything harmful.
00:11:14.340They say they're just being real and that life really is easier when you're thinner.
00:11:19.360And the worst part is, they're not entirely wrong.
00:11:23.000But calling that honesty doesn't do anything to challenge the system.
00:14:03.120You know, the culture that you just described where people who are thinner report or if you lose a lot of weight, you report, you know, being treated nicer by at work, being treated nicer by the staff at a restaurant, all of that.
00:14:15.020What some of these creators are saying is I'm just not sugarcoating it.
00:14:23.560And this content does really fall on a spectrum because you have like the most extreme content that really is like explicitly glorifying and advocating for disordered eating.
00:14:33.920And then you have this content like you just described that isn't saying like you should be you should be having an eating disorder.
00:14:41.460It isn't saying you should be anorexic or you should be binging and purging.
00:14:44.480So when you have these women and it is overwhelmingly women, like you see it with some male influencers, too.0.93
00:14:50.800And I think that's really interesting and also concerning.
00:14:53.560But overwhelmingly, like the skinny talk influencer, the archetype is this is a woman who is blonde, white, extremely thin, conventionally attractive.0.57
00:15:05.640She lives in a beautiful apartment in New York City or another big city.
00:15:09.040And she's sitting there and she's telling you, like, this is your path to winning and succeeding at life.
00:15:15.080And it starts with you having a lot of times it's framed as self-control or being healthy.
00:15:20.720And as long as you reach this sort of thin ideal, then other opportunities will open up for you and you'll be happier and you'll be healthier and you'll be freer.
00:15:30.100And they may be starting at a point where like there's a kernel of truth to this, which is that then people are treated better in society.
00:15:38.940But rather than confront that or seek to push back against that status quo, what they're doing is they're really reinforcing and perpetuating that status quo and saying that it's the right thing to do.
00:15:52.340And a lot of times the way that you see this in the rhetoric that they share is they'll talk about how over the past decade or so, there has been a social movement to push back against the beauty standard and thinness and disordered eating.
00:16:07.600And a lot of times that's called the body positivity movement or the body neutrality movement or like health at every size is another one of these movements.
00:16:16.220And these skinny talk influencers will actually attack and undermine these movements directly.
00:16:21.340And they'll say like it is unhealthy to be it is unhealthy to be obese.
00:16:26.500These movements are promoting obesity.
00:16:28.200They're promoting negative health outcomes.
00:16:32.540This carries into a misinformation, disinformation territory in which a lot of these creators are actively spreading very dangerous information around health.
00:16:43.720Because it is true that you can be healthy at any size.
00:16:47.140It is true that you don't need to adhere to the ultra-thin ideal to be healthy or happy.
00:16:53.100And in fact, if you go too far along that pathway of losing weight, you are unhealthy.
00:16:58.520It's sort of like this conversation and this reframing of thinness and health completely
00:17:03.080loses out on the fact that eating disorders are incredibly dangerous and efforts to lose
00:17:09.260weight and maintain that extreme thinness that these influencers are selling, for most
00:17:14.100people that's actually going to be much more unhealthy and lead to worse outcomes than
00:17:19.920if they maintained like their average weight or the weight that they feel most comfortable
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00:18:29.560that's 844-844-iheart when i was 14 years old i was kidnapped and held captive for nine months
00:18:37.660I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed
00:18:43.620them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low taunting
00:18:51.160voice next to my ear saying shut up don't say anything. Every week I'm with survivors who
00:18:58.760live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up without a doubt he was going to hurt me. I
00:19:05.580I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:19:13.020They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:19:16.900But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:19:20.360They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:19:24.000Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:19:31.780If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:19:38.660This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:19:50.780I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:19:57.960I'm going to have to look up this story.
00:20:57.160plain and simple. But because we live in a deeply fat phobic society, this kind of misinformation
00:21:02.820is often tolerated, even normalized. It rarely gets treated with the same urgency or scrutiny
00:21:09.280as other kinds of false health claims. And that is a very serious problem. A lot of my work is
00:21:16.260grounded in the mis- and disinformation space. And when it comes to health information specifically,
00:21:21.460so often it's like the conversation gets boiled down to like vaccine misinformation and things,
00:21:26.500things that seem things that they are things that are kind of you can talk about them from a certain
00:21:31.480specific kind of black white lens i feel less often are we talking about the way that content
00:21:38.140that glorifies extreme thinness and disorder of eating is just like genuinely health mis and
00:21:44.080disinformation right yes the idea that a grown adult could could have their caloric intake be
00:21:51.720like 800 or 900 calories what a child would eat that's not true there's just like unless you are
00:21:58.700in some rare situation where you are working with a doctor for them for the majority of people
00:22:04.280that's simply false and if you're getting online and and spreading a false message about people's
00:22:10.360health on the internet i don't understand why we don't see that as a clear-cut mis and
00:22:15.400disinformation issue the way that we do with other kinds of health mis and disinformation does that
00:22:19.240make sense? Absolutely. And one thing that's been really helpful for me over my reporting has been
00:22:24.320talking to nutritionists about what the truth really is. And I think you have kind of like a
00:22:29.880collapsing different degrees of failure at play here, because there is sort of a lack of
00:22:36.960communication about what healthy eating and what a healthy body type is, generally speaking. I think
00:22:43.680Most people in the public who are on platforms like TikTok or aren't even on platforms like TikTok have sort of a misguided understanding of what health and diet and exercise and beauty mean.
00:22:56.660Because for so many of us, for the vast majority of us, our knowledge of these topics is based on what we hear from other people in our lives and what we hear through mass media.
00:23:07.720And those formats spread misinformation and disinformation.
00:23:10.860I look at how a lot of these like dieting and exercising tips, they are passed down from woman to woman through generations.
00:23:18.200You hear it from your mother. You hear it from your grandmother.
00:23:21.160You have the exact same slogans going viral on Skinny Talk today that were diet slogans being advertised to women in the 80s, decades ago.
00:23:30.420It's just constantly recycling this same old messaging over and over again.
00:23:34.680And ideally, social media platforms could be used to take real information coming from people like nutritionists and scientists and eating disorder providers, and you could take that and share that with the world.
00:23:49.860And I do think we're starting to see a little bit of that turn.
00:23:53.820When it comes to content that glorifies disordered eating, platforms like TikTok can be a double-edged sword.
00:23:59.700On the one hand, they can surface harmful content to users who might not have sought it out.
00:24:04.680But they can also be a source of support, a place where people struggling can find connection, resources, and real hope.
00:24:12.320Creators like registered dietitian Michelle Pilipich used TikTok to share accessible, judgment-free content about building a sustainable, healthy lifestyle.
00:24:23.760Welcome back to my series from Bad to Balanced, where I take the foods you think are bad and make them into a balanced meal.
00:24:28.720In your piece, you spoke to creators like Michelle Pilipich, who was a registered dietitian who makes kind of anti-skinny talk content, almost sort of to retrain folks as brains against that kind of thinking.
00:24:42.320Do you see social media platforms almost as this double edged sword where there are folks showing up to use the platform to glorify disordered eating and extreme fitness and also folks there who are using those same platforms to sort of retrain folks to say like, hey, actually, this isn't healthy.
00:24:59.900Actually, this is misinformation. Here's a better way to be thinking about it.
00:25:02.960Exactly. And I think that a lot of times, and you see this with eating disorders in particular, there's a lot of legislation and a lot of activism happening right now that's against social media. And oftentimes, issues like eating disorders will be framed within this anti-social media activism as like, we shouldn't let kids use social media because eating disorders are rising at a scary rate among teenagers. And we think it's because of social media. So the answer here is to just never let them use TikTok.
00:25:31.760But I really disagree with this because the way that I see it is that social media is a double-edged sword in the same way that it's been weaponized against progress.
00:25:42.520It could, in fact, be used for progress.
00:25:45.140And you see that with creators like Michelle, who, like you said, she's a nutritionist who I interviewed.
00:25:50.840And she's such a good example of this because what she did is she listened to her patients who were telling her about this messaging that they were hearing on platforms like TikTok.
00:26:00.520And she went on TikTok and she started creating viral messaging in the opposite direction that was actually informing people about what healthy eating looks like, what health looks like, encouraging people to share things that helps them recover from eating disorders instead of what encouraged them to go down this path.
00:26:19.260And her success, as well as other creators doing the same thing, looking at their success, the way that I see it is that we should actually be encouraging more speech around these topics on social media, rather than looking at how we can limit this sort of speech.
00:26:34.420I think that putting more of it out there, giving people the information where they already are, reaching people where they are, I think is the way forward here.
00:26:43.360And the flip side of sort of these attempts to censor social media or moderate social media is that time and time again, platforms like Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, all of them, they've all made attempts to just ban pro eating disorder content.
00:27:02.940They've banned specific influencers. They've banned entire communities. They've targeted types of rhetoric. And what we've always seen happen is that it just migrates to another platform or just shapeshifts so that it can create a new form.
00:27:16.860So these efforts to like stop this content in its tracks have not been successful.
00:27:22.420What we are seeing some success with, I've spoken to some people who are young, who are on the pathway to recovery from eating disorders, who found this content on social media that actually helped them.
00:27:35.140Trying to get social media platforms to curb this kind of content used to be my job.
00:27:39.440We compile examples to paint a bigger portrait, essentially saying you all are not doing a good enough job keeping content that glorifies disordered eating off of your platform.0.58
00:27:48.700But what the leadership at these platforms often seemed to hear was just take down these specific bad posts.
00:27:55.440They rarely engage with the deeper issue of why this kind of content keeps showing up in the first place or how to stop it long term.
00:30:58.320But beneath that aesthetic was something darker, a steady stream of content that promoted disordered eating and a toxic obsession with thinness.
00:31:07.360She became the poster child for a certain kind of that girl content, the kind the algorithm devours.0.80
00:31:14.140And she took it even further by creating a paid, subscriber-only platform called Skinny Society,0.93
00:31:19.540where women and girls, as young as high schoolers, traded restrictive eating tips and competed over restrictive eating practices.0.85
00:31:27.180When the backlash came, it wasn't the platform that stepped in first.
00:31:30.560It was the users, calling out how content like Liv's pushed harmful ideals to millions, especially young women and girls.
00:31:38.700After a critical piece in the cut, Liv's TikTok page was banned.
00:31:42.360So she moved to Instagram, where her content has been demonetized.
00:31:46.640Her account may be gone from TikTok, but her influence?
00:37:31.000And it is like that kind of rhetoric is unmistakably like similar to what you see from like the
00:37:37.980alt-right and what you see from conservatives who have similarly mastered these online
00:37:43.480landscapes. They all use really similar rhetoric. And I think that part of the larger picture here
00:37:48.800that I also think has been kind of unexplored is that it's no coincidence that you see rising
00:37:55.720conservatism, dominating online spaces, and the offline world. You see rising authoritarianism
00:38:01.860around the globe at the same time that you see this massive resurgence of pro-eating disorder0.99
00:38:08.280and just content that glorifies extreme thinness for women. These movements are connected.0.91
00:38:13.480And Michelle Pelovich, the nutritionist, actually recently did a post about this where she was like, if you are against Trump, like you and you are a woman and you oppose sort of the modern conservative party, you should be nourishing your body.
00:38:27.040You should be eating enough food because the ultimate goal of these sort of conservative, very misogynistic spaces is that they want women to be small.
00:38:35.680They want women to take up less space.
00:38:37.080They want them to be frail, unable to help themselves, and they want them to be very preoccupied with their own appearance because it becomes an obsession that distracts from you being able to participate in democracy to the fullest extent.0.88
00:38:50.920It's a distraction that prevents women from being able to occupy the same positions that men do.0.89
00:38:56.300So this sort of pro-eating disorder content is part of this larger picture of women's oppression.
00:39:02.400And it's just no coincidence that like the influencers in the alt-right spaces and the influencers in the skinny spaces are using the exact same types of strategies.
00:39:11.280So I clock this all the time on social media and I feel like whenever someone says it out loud, just the comments are like, what are you talking about?
00:39:19.160you're crazy and i mean i'll see content that's like you know glorifying it's not just being
00:39:27.780thin it's thin blonde rich partnered sometimes like quiet and subservient like it's just like0.99
00:39:34.960like when you pull apart the kind of things that they're saying goes along with with like
00:39:39.520the good life in scare quotes that will become available to you if you are first thin it really0.99
00:39:45.540is like it becomes very clear that this is about a very oppressive vision of the future where women0.96
00:39:50.900are quiet frail not really participating fully in public and civic life like it all goes together0.99
00:39:59.120it does it does and a lot of times when you have these skinny talk influencers they will talk
00:40:05.160about like like libschmidt talks about this she's like you need to be having fun you need to be0.69
00:40:09.680living like a full fulfilling lifestyle but what she's modeling and what she's showing as the0.72
00:40:15.180example of that is that she is like a model. So she's telling women that they should aspire
00:40:20.400to their currency and their worth and their value being their appearance. And part of the flip side1.00
00:40:26.560of this that's very unfortunate, both for Liv Schmidt as an individual and for all of the women
00:40:30.880and girls who she's influencing, is that no matter how skinny you are, no matter how much you are
00:40:35.840able to adhere to this beauty standard in your youth, you will age out. There's no future for1.00
00:40:41.880you if your entire worth and being is rooted in how you look as a young, conventionally