Free Educational Webinar: “The Dangerous Intersection of Negative Body Image, Social Media, the Diet Industry, and Eating Disorders”

This presentation aims to investigate the detrimental impact of social media, the diet industry,and the perpetuation of the thin ideal on the development of eating disorders among young girls and women. The rise of social media platforms has revolutionized communication and information dissemination, but has also brought a multitude of challenges, particularly in relation to body image dissatisfaction, mental health problems, and disordered eating behaviors for young girls and women.

The diet industry’s pervasive influence combined with the constant exposure to images and messages promoting the thin ideal, has created an environment in which young girls and women feel pressured to conform to unrealistic beauty standards. The diet industry’s relentless promotion of weight loss strategies and products reinforces harmful beliefs about body size, leading to a negative impact on body image and contributing to disordered eating. A growing body of research demonstrates longitudinal associations between social media use and poor mental health outcomes among adolescents, including anxiety, suicidality, depression, poor body image, and eating disorders. One driving factor is the role of social media on mental health concerns with social media platform’s use of algorithms, which drive increasingly extreme content to vulnerable youth users over time. This presentation will examine existing literature and looks at the direct and indirect effects of social media, the diet industry,and the thin ideal on body image dissatisfaction, depression, and disordered eating. The research indicates social media use is harming the mental health and body image of young girls. The increased eating disorder content on Instagram and TikTok will be examined and how this influence could potentially be increasing the prevalence and severity of eating disorders across the board in youth. Girls are surrounded by idealized bodies, constant filtered and perfected images, and diet culture on their feeds and are inundated with negative content coming at them in all directions due to sophisticated algorithms. As one page from internal Facebook Papers that was leaked through an investigative report put it, “we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” These platforms are aware of the concerns of their content and they continue to feed the damaging content to young users. A lawsuit was just filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Meta and the suit by the family states that Instagram caused their daughter’s eating disorder and self-harm. The lawyers on the case make unprecedented use of documents released with the Facebook Papers. It is critical that providers know how to properly assess the impact of social media on their clients,and how to help educate clients on the potential dangers. This presentation will highlight the need for greater awareness of the detrimental effects of social media and the diet industry and the perpetuation of the thin ideal on young girls and women. This presentation will also discuss brain development and how the process of brain development in mid-adolescence may heighten vulnerability to these platform algorithms. It underscores the importance of education, media literacy, intuitive eating, and the promotion of positive body image in mitigating the harmful influence of these factors.