TBH producer Faustina Tangitau interviews teens, parents, and qualified weight-stigma experts throughout the Bay Area to zoom in on how social media has worsened the promotion of eating disorders and corrupt body image.
Click the play button above to listen to the story.
Story Transcript:
Reporter: Everyone doomscrolls. You do it. I do it. We waste hours tapping through our social media feeds, and as a teenage girl who's still finding myself, my algorithm can send me down a toxic spiral.
Sound of toxic weight loss posts
Reporter: Teens like me / are constantly exposed to unrealistic standards that ruin our body image.
Sound of toxic weight loss posts
Reporter: My feed is full of social media influencers, promoting health products, extreme dieting, and ads for shapewear that would make me look “better”. Calorie counting, grams of protein, grams of sodium, grams of fat—it’s hard not to obsess over it.
Sound of toxic TikTok weight loss videos
Reporter: When I see these videos, I feel like I need to change everything about myself. I second-guess my meals, my appearance; I feel isolated. Even so, I know there are many other teens struggling too.
Reporter: Teens like Melissa Madriz. A student at Eastside College Preparatory High School.
MELISSA MADRIZ: “I usually look at myself and I’m just like,— “I wanna be as skinny as these girls I see on my social media. It kinda breaks me
Reporter: There’s this trend called headphone waist
MELISSA: They would put their headphones around their waist and then be like, "You see? Like, this is how I should be."
Reporter: Melissa started scrolling on TikTok when she was in elementary school and as she got older things got worse
MELISSA: I saw a trend where you barely eat, for example, a rice cake and egg whites. When I was in middle school—I did go a couple of days without eating.
Reporter: Now that she’s in high school, her internal dialogue still haunts her.
MELISSA: "Oh, do I look fat in this? Oh, like, am I chubby?" I think about it constantly.
Reporter: The negativity impacts even the simplest parts of her day.
MELISSA: In the morning I wake up and I get dressed and I'm just like, “Oh, I don’t know,” like
MELISSA: I’m just like “damn” “Am I really a pig”
Reporter: What Melissa says is relatable and not surprising because the TikTok algorithm even targets young users
Reporter: The Center for Countering Digital Hate set up fake accounts for 13-year-olds and found that if they briefly paused on videos about body image. In minutes, eating disorder content would pop up.
Reporter: And it’s horrible because on certain corners of social media, eating disorders are normalized and even romanticized. ANA (A-N-A) is a hashtag that represents the anorexic community on TikTok,—they post videos motivating people to starve themselves. Videos with text saying things like “step away from the fridge Piggy” fat lasts longer than flavor excuses won’t make the scale go down.
Sound of more toxic weightloss posts.
Reporter: There are guidelines on TikTok that ban that content, but they find a way around it. They use codes to keep posting pro-anorexic content, like the star emoji to say “starving” or the wing emoji to say “lighter is better.”
Sound of music
Reporter: Like Melissa, I also started seeing these videos when I was a 7th grader in middle school. I wasn’t even searching for it—they just showed up on my For You page.
Reporter: Distorted body image from social media. It's something my friends and I talk about all the time. It’s sad to see how much it’s hurting all of us.
CHLOE VILLARREAL: It's so deep-rooted, that insecurity, that I feel like it's around me all the time, 24/7.
Reporter: That’s Chloe. I’ve known her since kindergarten.
CHLOE: I always feel like I'm being perceived. Even when I'm in a room by myself, I catch myself peeking in the mirror. If I'm doing something on my phone, I'll like in the mirror and see if I look attractive doing it on my phone.
Reporter: And this is Isabelle. We’ve lived across the street from each other our entire lives.
ISABELLE FOX: It's almost made me feel unworthy of certain things. and depressed.
Sound of a bustling restaurant
Reporter: All three of us are at dinner with our moms. We’re sitting in a booth waiting for our food when I ask the moms how they feel.
JENNIFER VILLARREAL: It breaks my heart.
CLAUDIA FOX: It’s a little bit, uh, scary. I’m sad and worried for my, kids.
Reporter: Chloe’s mom, Jennifer, says even her mom was obsessed with weight loss.
JENNIFER: She used to be on every fad diet there was. Then she was always trying to go to, like, these Jazzercise classes or watch Richard Simmons, and then she was on- she was taking, what is it? Some herbal teas.
Reporter: My mom says fatphobic content has always been around even without social media.
FRISCO TANGITAU: It was present in magazines, um, especially on TV, like in commercials. Um, and now that we have social media, it's just magnified.
Reporters: Our phones have become a part of us. Weight loss content is literally at our fingertips.
VIRGIE TOVAR: I think there is this element of there's almost like this inescapability.
Reporter: Virgie is an author, lecturer, and a leading expert on weight-based discrimination. And her take on social media is an eye-opener.
VIRGIE TOVAR: They're looking to keep you on that site, like, in that app for as long as possible because as long as they can capture you, they can advertise to you.
Reporter: Virgie wants us to see social media for what it actually is.
VIRGIE: What we need to understand is that we need to develop critical media skills. And fundamentally, like, all media is basically an extension of advertising.
Reporter: And these ads, they want us to feel bad so we buy more things
VIRGIE: That's where the money from social media comes from. That's why it's free. You have to have that awareness of, like, okay, this is really an ad.
Reporter: She reminds me that when looking at posts, I’m allowed to ask myself, “Is this in my best interest?” “Does this work with my values?” “Does this create a world I want to live in?”
VIRGIE: The issue is bigger than social media. For us teens, trying to fit into a fatphobic society is what hurts.
VIRGIE: When it comes to fatphobia as a culture. We still believe that individuals need to control their body size in order to not experience fatphobia, and that's a really big problem, right?
ALI KARVER: It's a problem, but it it kind of just is something that I'm willing to keep fighting against.
Reporter: That’s Ali Karver, the Strength Coach at Eastside College Preparatory.
Reporter: When students come to ask her for advice she makes it clear that she doesn’t want them to focus on weight loss.
ALI: I don’t talk about weight loss with my kids. I talk about feeling good.
Reporter: But with social media, teens feel the need to chase an unrealistic body image.
ALI: I'll have girls come up to me and be like, "H- Ally, how do I look like this girl?" Or, "Ally, how do I get a bigger butt?" I'm not against kids working on aesthetic goals, um, but I also want them to be realistic.
Reporter: Ali wants everyone to know
ALI: Social media is not real. Look around, in the country in the people around you, they don’t look like the people on your social media. No one looks like the people on their social media because those people are edited.
Reporter: Fake images are hard to avoid thanks to social media, but there are also real people who show us real bodies
Reporter: Like Aiano Nakagawa. An influencer who posts her authentic self. She posted a picture embracing her belly after being mistaken for being pregnant. She has twenty-three thousand followers on Instagram.
She also posts cooking videos explaining why she stopped dieting. And started intuitive eating.
Sound of Aiano Nakagawa video
Reporter: Body-positive influencers and content are out there for us. There will always be bad, but focusing on what makes you feel good can help.
VIRGIE: When I start to second-guess my meals and start thinking my weight defines my worth, Virgie's words will stay with me. You're a really precious person, and you have this really unique contribution, and you have this really unique perspective that you've never... You, exactly as you exist, have never existed before.
Reporter: My life is worth more than trying to lose weight, or trying to look a certain way to be accepted. Yours is too.
Sound of restaurant ambience
Reporter: Me, my friends, and our moms sit around the table enjoying our food
Reporter: My friend Isabelle enjoys her chicken Caesar salad so much it makes her sing
Reporter: As I’m eating, I feel safe. I feel like I don’t have to accept society’s story about body image when surrounded by people who love me for who I am.
Sound of laughing
In East Palo Alto, I’m Faustina Tangitau for TBH.