By Emily Shipley

*CW: Eating Disorders*

The viral ‘nature’s cereal’ TikTok might seem harmless at face value, but to an impressionable teenager it could be detrimental. For those who don’t know, the recipe – which is simply berries in a bowl of coconut water and ice – was created by @natures_food and has over 5.6 million views. Like other viral recipes, it has now been re-created and reviewed by countless food and health influencers, increasing the recipe’s exposure and deceiving vulnerable people in a growing audience into believing that a bowl of fruit is interchangeable with a real, nutritious breakfast. 

‘Nature’s cereal’ is the latest video in a trend of social media users promoting, intentionally or unintentionally, unhealthy relationships with food. The meals eaten in the ever-popular ‘What I Eat in a Day’ videos, when combined, rarely surpass 1400 calories – barely enough for a 4-year-old. Worryingly, these videos are hardly avoidable. The ‘For You’ page does not discriminate, and this dangerous rhetoric around food is being absorbed by young girls and boys worldwide through their phone screens.  

The most dangerous part of having an eating disorder is that the disease convinces you that it’s good for you. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder and bulimia can leave you with lifelong complications, but, according to your disorder, losing those extra few pounds is in your best interest. Controlling what you eat, how you eat it, or what you do after eating can become a constant in the chaos of the day-to-day. It gives you something to focus on, something to feel proud of in an otherwise stressful life.

Tiktok is a relatively new app, but the ‘nature’s cereal’ incident isn’t the first time that social media or the internet has been used to promote certain lifestyles. The pro-ana and pro-mia movement was huge in the noughties, bigger than you might think. In this online community, there were thousands of young and impressionable girls who had just discovered the internet and, unfortunately, had just discovered each other. Online forums and blogs on Tumblr, Facebook, and MySpace were used as platforms to share tips on how to hide food from your family, how to induce vomiting, and how to disguise weight loss from doctors. Even more perverse was the rise of “thinspiration” (or “thinspo”): images of the emaciated bodies of celebrities and models with protruding bones were put on a pedestal, considered desirable and aspirational. 

As this disturbing scene developed, some blogs took it even further. Taking on a cult-like dynamic, bloggers posted rules and guidelines that their followers had to adhere to, often called ‘The Thin Commandments’. Referring to starving yourself as ‘becoming pure’ and eating as ‘sinning’, the individuals following these blogs completely lost touch with their personal troubles and transcended as a collective, encouraging one another to push themselves to the brink of hospitalisation. These blogs swallowed up young girls that were otherwise healthy. Innocently stumbling across these websites whilst searching for diet tips ruined what could have otherwise been many happy adolescences.

Over the years, I have been messaged on several occasions by people that I met through pro-ana, all of them still in the throttle of their disorders, all of them looking to re-ignite what we once had. When it became clear that reignition was off the table, these people had other places to turn. A quick Google search still brings up websites entitled ‘My Pro-Ana Tips’ and ‘Forever and Always Pro-Ana’. There are still plenty of active thinspiration accounts on Instagram. There are still pro-ana support groups on Facebook. Now TikTok, the newest viral social media app, is teeming with videos of perfect (or perfectly edited) influencers advocating strict diet plans. 

At a time when social media giants are claiming that they are taking responsibility for caring for their users, why have accounts that advocate toxic behaviours with food not been taken down? We have seen the impact of allowing these communities to exist, yet they still do and continue to attract new members. The internet has grown and moved on since the days of early 2000s pro-ana Tumblr blogs, but the culture that it fostered still exists. You will find it in 60-second videos, hidden behind good lighting and catchy background music.