Why I Have A Bone, Or Rather, A Skeleton, To Pick With Tiktok

Usually I write about racism and privilege, but today I’m going to write about something else. If you know me, you’ll know about my disdain for the Tiktok craze. How I’ve called it dull, distracting, endlessly time-consuming, an unspoken pandemic.

But the main reason I don’t use Tiktok is one I don’t really address — the fact that a disturbing number of people have migrated to it for the normalisation and promotion of disordered eating. Which I’ve been struggling with on and off for as long as I can remember. I was never diagnosable (ergo, it wasn’t a full-on disorder) or in imminent danger, I doubt I’ve ever been mathematically underweight, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a thing.

This was at its lowest during the first of the lockdown trilogy. We’ve all heard the punchlines about the Quarantine 15 and the ceremonial filling of freezers with unthinkable amounts of icecream. We haven’t talked about the lockdown I, and many others, spent on the other side of the story. (Content warning for rest of article: descriptions of restrictive eating habits and symptoms.)

I haven’t talked much about it either. I worried I would be congratulated, asked for tips and tricks and hacks, for my “mammoth willpower” of becoming more and more restrictive, swearing-off chocolate first, then eschewing all added sugar, then refusing to touch gluten and some kinds of dairy with a ten-foot pole. I’m not allergic to either of them. Yet I’ve heard that a growing base of Tiktok users encourage all that, and more. Calling it tips and tricks and hacks instead of the debilitating struggle it is. Lots of people think being one point away from underweight is “motivational”.

I was constantly cold and tired. My body started disintegrating its own muscles. My brain went haywire; I would count-down to pizza day as a small child looks forward to Christmas, and I was more irritable than a Ukip supporter whose wife had left him for an immigrant. I dismissed all these symptoms of long-term undereating as being “just a teenager” and ploughed on, ever-desperate for control of the only thing I felt was in my control as I spent months on end locked down in a household where tempers frayed and criticism felt as rampant as the virus itself. I simply couldn’t “be good” any other way.

I’m not one of those people who believes social media is evil and deleting everything is how one can single-handedly solve world hunger and Aids. There are lots of people, including me, to whom social media is their main source of human connection. Yet there’s something about the Tiktok user base and the way the algorithm works that facilitates, well, the wrong kind of human connection.

I’ve heard pro-restriction content worms its way into your feed even if you’re looking at innocuous things like recipes and exercise routines. I don’t want “special swaps” or “flat belly” workouts. I like to cook because it’s an important life skill, not to make a big deal out of how much of this or that I’m adding. I like to exercise because it feels good and frequent exercise improves sleep and heart function, not to use it as a cudgel for self-flagellation. I don’t need an algorithm reuniting me with harmful attitudes towards these things I’ve learned to enjoy and make peace with.

My inner critic isn’t alone. I’ve heard more self-flagellation than I care to remember, in the form of Diet Talk, that comes with living with a group of women. As much as the diet mentality and disordered eating are coded as white, female phenomena, it certainly doesn’t discriminate by race or gender. I’ve witnessed my own Kurdish demographic climbing onto the bandwagon of shapewear and shakes with unpronounceable ingredients. Mind you, Kurdish women are already more likely to engage in harmful habits like smoking and sketchy diet pill use to maintain a low weight. I’ve conjured up many a conspiracy theory that the diet industry was invented by the Turkish state to sterilise my demographic, seeing how long periods (no pun intended) of undereating can damage one’s fertility. When I go online, onto any social media site, it should be to find solace from Diet Culture, not to get sucked deeper into its miraculous metabolism-boosting magnetic field.

And we mustn’t forget, I existed during the 2012 heyday of Tumblr. Even though I wasn’t involved with the competitive restriction community, viewing the site almost exclusively for music and memes, I still did run into pictures of thigh gaps I didn’t have and flat chests that harshly contrasted with my embarrassingly large one. Tiktok has become the new Tumblr in that respect. That’s why I’m railing against it. I need to learn that my eating habits aren’t what makes me a better or worse person. My food restriction was about virtue and pleasing others more than anything else.

I don’t want to accidentally beat myself up like that again. I don’t want to run into one meme about missing a meal, and inadvertently turn my entire Tiktok explore page into a cheerleading team for my old restrictive habits. I want to leave my old habits behind, moving forward in life with the new habits of eating intuitively, exercising enjoyably, and looking at the bigger picture of health. I need fewer “what I eat in a day: restrictive edition” challenges and more “Your life won’t end if you eat more than 7 almonds” reminders. Something tells me Tiktok isn’t the ideal place to find the latter.