Body-editing apps on TikTok ‘trigger eating disorders’ | Hacker News Reader

Body-editing apps on TikTok ‘trigger eating disorders’

bbc.com

18 pointsmikesabbagh27 comments

I wonder why this is such a prominent focus on our society.

I was watching Gothika the other day, and at one point Halle Berry walks into a public shower nude and my partner’s immediate reaction was “wow Halle Berry and her unrealistic body”.

That’s a person’s body, they look like that. There isn’t anything “unrealistic” about it. The vast majority of humans outside of health conditions could achieve a similar level of lean. In fact, just a few decades ago obesity was a small fraction of the population, and even being overweight was a fraction of what it is now.

With models, they are “unrealistic”, with brilliant minds the suggestion is that anyone is capable of it, that hard work and the right conditions could make anyone a scientist. Why are we so insecure about our bodies but so confident in our minds, when it’s actually far more unrealistic that everyone could be a scientist compared to everyone being as lean as the average model?

I suspect it’s no more harmful, intrinsically, to see “unrealistic intelligence standards” than it is to see “unrealistic body standards”, we just have a culture where growing your mind requiring hard work and sacrifice is ok, but improving your body requiring hard work and sacrifice is wrong

Actors and actresses and models do maintain very expensive regimes (with things most people cannot afford like a dedicated fitness trainer or nutritionist, let alone a team) that can be unhealthy to do in and of themselves. Most male actors have talked about how punishing their regimes are , like Christian Bale rapidly gaining and losing weight: https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2465697/christian-bale-admi...

Diet/body image also have a massive industry pushing dodgy easy methods to consumers willing to spend. Anorexia and bulimia were glamorized with celebrities publicizing their 1200 calorie diets. Fen-phen, a weight loss drug, was the most costly recall of a drug ever with over $14B awarded in liability suits.

People are unhealthy, yes, but the media and entertainment do not have a great track record of pushing actually healthy habits.

> Most male actors have talked about how punishing their regimes are , like Christian Bale rapidly gaining and losing weight

Note the term "rapidly". I think it would be far easier if you had, for example, a decade to reach your target. For example by eating healthy and exercising since childhood.

https://www.fatfighterblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/B... Exactly, the vast majority of people will never go through such a dramatic change in their entire lives much less do it in time for filming

But this isn't really what Hollywood is promoting, right?

The grandparent criticizes the notion that it's unrealistic to look like Halle Berry in a movie. I think this is getting what his SO was saying wrong; she's saying it's unrealistic to look like Halle Berry in a movie because she puts in an unrealistic, probably unhealthy amount of effort into doing so and she gets paid to do it as part of her job.

1200 calories per day is very reasonable for a woman on days with no exercise. You generally want to be on a 500 calorie deficit when losing weight.

The recommended calorie consumption for women is 2000 a day. 2000 minus 500 is 1500. The average American is not exercising enough to be burning 300 calories a day; so how does one justify cutting down further to 1200?

2000 is just an average. Rather than being gender specific, it would be totally correct to stay that 1200 could be sufficient on a temporary basis for a small adult with a sedentary lifestyle who is trying to lose weight in a safe, sustainable manner. YMMV.

YMMV comes with so many caveats that the general advice for going to 1200 is "ask your doctor."

You won't get a useful answer from most doctors unless they have a specialization in bariatrics or similar. Better general advice for going to 1200 is "ask your registered dietician."

https://www.cdrnet.org/

No, 1200 is too low to generally approve like this. 1200 is commonly stated as the absolute minimum for women not under medical observation. The consensus for "is 1200 enough" seems to be "ask your doctor" not "it's very reasonable for a woman on days with no exercise".

I hope this isn't too controversial, but I'd like to argue that there can be social and economical advantages to the average person being slightly unattractive.

First off, there's jealousy. Wikipedia says "Rape and sexual violence have accompanied warfare in virtually every known historical era" [1] With that in mind, you're probably better off if your people are, on average, less attractive then a neighboring country. Also in the modern world, not every woman would want the (sometimes violent) attention that comes with being highly physically attractive.

Then there's the overall economy. Everyone knows that advertisements are full of attractive people, because that works to convince normal people to buy stuff. If most relationships were between two people who are both highly physically attractive, they'd probably pay a lot less attention to the people on TV. So for most companies, there's a strong financial incentive to keep the average person less attractive than their ad models.

And lastly, your time and energy is very finite. If you could trade a 10% decrease in health for a 90% increase in salary, would you do it? Many competitions and industries are close to being a winner-takes-all system, meaning that a tiny increase in your work performance might have an outsized effect on your reward, because it was the last 0.1% to push you ahead of the competition. So it might be a reasonable decision for the average person to let their health slide a bit and focus on getting a good job first. "It is well known that poorer Americans are more likely to be obese" [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_slavery#Historical_case...

[2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181211103139.h...

This post makes a lot of assumptions which aren't necessarily true.

In regards to money vs health: this isn't as clear-cut cause and effect. One could just as well claim that having constant financial troubles is likely to cause mental health issues, which in turn drains one's will power and likeliness to stick to a diet and regimen without comfort. In this case, money becomes the barrier to entry rather than the person making the decision to focus on not being poor over being healthy. We see this in the common argument that eating healthy is more expensive, which is too simplified: sure, eating extremely healthy is expensive, but loads of fast food bought my poor people both take up more time and are less healthy than cheaper alternatives. Clearly, there is more going on there.

Regarding sexual violence: way too many factors are at play here. Mental health issues. Correlations between attractiveness and wealth, the halo effect, etc. Just like one could argue being above average draws more attention, so too can one argue that being above average gives them power that an average person wouldn't have. Add onto that sexual violence itself doesn't necessitate the victim be above average in attractiveness at all, only that they surpassed the attractiveness floor set by the assaulter. For many assaulters, that floor is very low.

Being attractive and healthy isn't rocket science for the far majority of people. But as your second point puts it, there is too much money to be gained in pressuring both adults and kids to form poor habits and profiting off it.

Rape has absolutely nothing to do with attractiveness. Talk to any woman and ask if she isn't worried about sexual assault. Pick any woman you consider unattractive, and see if she thinks she's even the slightest bit less at risk than her most attractive friend.

Rape is used in warfare as a method of dominance. It demoralizes the population, causes enormous numbers of pregnancies to be dealt with, and creates fear. It's terrorism. No woman is safe from it. (Nor, it should be noted, are men, though that's less common and much less discussed.)

Rape is a crime that keeps all women scared. They never know if it will be them, tonight. They know it has nothing to do with them as human beings, only that they carry female genitals and some men will use force to get at that. Nothing else about them matters, certainly not their faces. This is a thing that every single woman will tell you.

I don't think you can do the same in a movie, but I assume every photo used is heavily photoshoped. Sure the model looks awesome naturally, but no they don't look like that.

This is one of the more unsympathetic and arm-chairy threads on HN I’ve seen in a while. It would appear that no one here has had an experience, tangential or otherwise, with eating disorders and are hypothesizing on it like some article on arxiv. A relative of mine has had an eating disorder their entire life, they look like a walking skeleton. In grad-school one year I went from 160 to 130 pounds because eating regular meals was often “inconvenient”, I’m 6’2”. To respond to comments here:

Eating disorders are different from alcohol and substance abuse because no one expects you to do those things.

The way women are expected to look in society is unrealistic in addition to all other things society demands of them. People in movies look that good because they are paid a lot of money to do so. Men, try to get a body like any of the Avengers and you will go mad. The process involves weeks to months of bulking up and then days of dehydration and food abstinence before a shoot. A weight lifting friend talks about how an average joe could out-lift any of them on shoot days.

There is no advantage to an eating disorder. It’s miserable and makes anything with your friends around food awkward. Escaping an eating disorder is difficult because undertaking one fundamentally rewires your brain, it took a summer and the help of my partner for me to come to grips that yes, I do need to eat more. The proceeding year I had to very actively focus on eating regularly and I felt so much better and actually performed better academically because of it.

Finally the article: TikTok should remove the body altering filters. Young people see images of digitally skinny people and don’t recognize it’s a filter and think that’s how they should look. They will do this in vain and in the supreme detriment to their health mentally and physically. Both platforms should ban ads on diets or weight-loss supplements.

If you’d like to learn more, and stop Dunning-Kruger’ing yourself into oblivion, go on down to /r/EatingDisorders or listen to any episode of the podcast Maintenance Phase.

Aside from being an app feature, how is different from things like alcohol and sexualized content, which can also trigger those who struggle with those issues?

My main thought is that those two things have lots of regulation and warnings around them. Body shaping images do not.

I do have a small belief that these apps should not be allowed to be advertised, although I'm not sure where the line is. I've dealt with eating disorders myself and with friends so I'm definitely on the side of trying to reduce the effects

Fatties are a much bigger health problem than eating disorders, rather stop thinking that a normal human body is a "unrealistic" one. Way to go america!

If only we could trigger a “movement disorder“

If people walked close to 10 miles a day like they did in the past, there is a much smaller likelihood that over half of America would be obese.

So you're asking for a Forrest Gump?

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