SIO489: TikTok Banned #Skinnytok and It Was Right to Do So

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:13 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 489. I'm your host Thomas Smith and with me again, Lydia Smith. How are you doing? Where's Holly?

0:00:20 Lydia: Hello. I'm doing great.

0:00:22 Thomas: Is Holly here?

0:00:22 Lydia: No Holly today, but we do have another guest. Okay. We love Holly.

0:00:23 Thomas: Uh, yeah. No offense, but I miss Holly.

0:00:32 Lydia: We do love Holly very, very much. But today we're actually going to have Dr. Jenessa Seymour join us because we are going to discuss some that were happening over on TikTok talk that caught her eye, specifically related to a hashtag called Skinny Talk, Skinny Talk, yeah, and what the science says about eating disorders and the internet. Going to be talking about what happened there, what the the science says about eating disorders and how they can proliferate across, you know, the internet and with friend groups and things of that nature. And then Janice and I both kind of share some of our experiences and kids growing up in society, as girls growing up in society and dealing with those pressures.

0:00:49 Thomas: Skinny talk.

0:01:17 Thomas: Excited to have Jenessa here. She always brings so much It's that she has, it's wide-ranging, I love it. Well, I'm excited to get to it. Why don't we take our usual break. Can support the show and avoid the breaks: patreon.com/seriouspod. Thanks much to our supporters, and this break. We'll get to it.

0:01:19 Lydia: Yeah. Right.

0:01:45 Thomas: I am joined by, uh, Some other co-hosts of other shows. Lydia Smith, you have a show called, mean, kind of, right? Gavel Gavel and Where There's Woke, essentially.

0:01:53 Lydia: Yeah, yeah. I'm co-hosting both of those with you and having a great time over on both of them.

0:01:56 Thomas: Yeah. We are joined by the subbing in co-host of Opening Arguments, Jenessa. How are you doing? In

0:02:07 Jenessa: Pretty good, um, world's burning down, but there's gonna be a new Taylor Swift album, so, you know, you gotta balance these things out.

0:02:12 Lydia: You go.

0:02:14 Thomas: And Yeah.

0:02:14 Lydia: New era. Yeah?

0:02:16 Jenessa: Yeah.

0:02:16 Thomas: Well, it's for everybody who likes Taylor Swift. I'm I am supportive of this. I know that's that, that's what gets me. She likes it. I don't, I don't dislike it. Oh, it's just kind of, doesn't, it's nothing to me.

0:02:17 Jenessa: Yeah. Uh, Oh, I

0:02:25 Lydia: Daughter likes Taylor Swift, so there you go Yeah. It's not your thing. It's not your thing. Yeah.

0:02:33 Thomas: No, Yeah. It's not for me.

0:02:34 Lydia: And That's okay, all

0:02:34 Thomas: It's not for me. So I'm super happy for, for all of you clones who. No, I mean, everybody. Just kidding.

0:02:39 Lydia: Right.

0:02:43 Jenessa: Wasn't even into the, that much, and then the algorithm, I think, just decided, you're a woman in your 30s, you're into this now.

0:02:44 Thomas: No.

0:02:51 Lydia: You're a Swifty.

0:02:52 Jenessa: I was just like, yeah, it was all in my face forever. That

0:02:52 Lydia: Yeah.

0:02:56 Thomas: Yeah. What if the best pop stars just have control of the algorithm somehow? That's that's how they do it. You'd be like, I don't know how they're doing it.

0:03:01 Lydia: Oh, man. That's

0:03:02 Jenessa: Would explain it there.

0:03:03 Lydia: The true conspiracy. Yeah.

0:03:04 Thomas: Yeah.

0:03:05 Jenessa: Was like, one day an article that was like, do you want to know what that song was about? And I was like, probably. And then once you click one of those, it's like, you want to know what a feet smell like, and I'm like, Jesus. No, stop. It like everything is Taylor Swift after you click on one thing.

0:03:22 Thomas: Yeah.

0:03:14 Lydia: Yeah. Oh, God. Oh, My god. Oh, people are probably going to come for me in the comments and and stuff, but I have a friend who it, and she was like, stop it. The fifth track is Father Figure, and it was like mind-blown emoji, and I was like I don't get it. It's like Father Figure and it's the fifth track. I think that means something for all the albums. I don' know.

0:03:36 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:03:38 Lydia: I could not tell you. I enjoy the music. I'm not that deep in it.

0:03:41 Thomas: I miss the days when Paul was just dead. You know, that that was back in my day of the 60s. It was just that Paul was dead and all the signs were that he was actually dead the whole time. Time.

0:03:46 Jenessa: Paul Oh, oh, oh, wait, is it? I thought the conspiracy was that he was still alive. Oh, wait, no, he is still alive. That's

0:03:58 Thomas: No, it said he was, he was replaced.

0:03:54 Lydia: Yeah. McCartney? Yeah. One

0:04:00 Thomas: He is still that's yeah. That's reality. He's still alive, but there was genuinely the same level of Swift, like, you know, Swifty stuff.

0:04:02 Jenessa: Truth that. He's, oh, Jesus. Yeah.

0:04:09 Thomas: They thought like he's barefoot in the Abbey road album. And they're like, everybody's reading these signs.

0:04:14 Thomas: Yeah. That he's actually dead and been replaced. So that's always existed. It's kind of funny.

0:04:14 Lydia: Of Does it mean

0:04:09 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah. The is Taylor Swift has admitted that she purposely puts clues in an album that will tell you, like, a year from now what's in the next, like, she's doing it on purpose.

0:04:21 Thomas: She's dead. No. Yeah, for sure. What would

0:04:23 Lydia: Oh, Yeah, there's Exactly. Well,

0:04:28 Thomas: Be her incentive not to say that? Because, like even if it was entirely unintentional at this point, you'd be like, yeah, no, it's all a secret code, of course. My album and see.

0:04:30 Jenessa: Of course. Yeah.

0:04:33 Lydia: You gotta lean in Now yeah. Well, I, I don't know, like, like there's things involving, like, numbers and times and dates and things like that, that like do keep showing up. So I don't know.

0:04:42 Jenessa: Yep. Mm-hmm. There

0:04:43 Thomas: Uh huh. Yeah. And that means it's good art. So now

0:04:49 Jenessa: Go. Now that we girled up your podcast podcast.

0:04:49 Lydia: You know, she's having fun. She's

0:04:50 Thomas: That we've we've lost our no, it's great. And Phoebe is the key to my heart. So as soon as Phoebe starts rocking out to something, I'm like, Like, yeah, Lydia got Phoebe into into the Heights. So now I have to be like, yeah. Lin -Manuel Miranda. No, it's good. There's a lot to like. There's always stuff to like about good art.

0:04:53 Lydia: Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah. She likes in the Heights. Hey, Frozen was that too, at the beginning.

0:04:54 Jenessa: Oh, gotta get into it. Oh, Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:05:11 Thomas: Yeah. Well, Frozen's just genuinely good. I was I here's what was about that. I was wrong about.

0:05:14 Lydia: Were wrong. Mm hmm.

0:05:16 Thomas: Yeah, I just was bummed out by how depressing the Do You Want to Build a Snowman was. That's honestly what it was. I thought it was so sad that I was like, Jesus. Well, OK, I'm not wrong about that I don't like that song. But everything else about Frozen rules. What are we talking about? Here. Speaking of algorithm.

0:05:21 Jenessa: Oh. God. Yeah.

0:05:21 Lydia: And you hated Let It Go. Yeah?

0:05:31 Thomas: Yeah, we'll probably put this fully at the end of the show.

0:05:30 Jenessa: Anyway, coming back. Yeah. Speaking of algorithms, there

0:05:36 Thomas: So the show will just say, speaking of algorithms, and then we'll go.

0:05:36 Jenessa: We go.

0:05:40 Lydia: Yeah.

0:05:41 Thomas: That'll be how the show actually went after the edit.

0:05:41 Jenessa: Yes. All reason I came to you with this, uh, algorithm showed me things about the algorithms, because everything's eating itself now, and, um, turns out recently TikTok banned the hashtag Skinny Talk. I'm not on TikTok, so I don't know about any of this, but, um, thought that was a little unusual because TikTok tends to just let people say literally anything, like anti-science nonsense, conspiracies, and

0:06:09 Thomas: Yeah. Anti -China stuff, but you know, other than that.

0:06:15 Lydia: Yeah.

0:06:16 Jenessa: Yeah, they, once they were like, "Yeah, this is bad," and, um, would like to affirm that decision decision, this was a really good idea. This shit is dangerous. Um, talk, like, you know, book talk and, I don't know, lemon talk, there's would assume so. I don't know what they're all up to, but definitely the skinny one is not good. Um, news, bad news, um, good news for me is this required minimal research, because bad news, this is not new. I did a lot of research on this back in the day when I was younger, and it was, rather than calling it Skinny Talk, or I've been seeing a lot lately of like Y2K skinny, of

0:06:23 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:06:28 Thomas: Skinny talk. Okay. Yep. Both those things sound a lot more healthy than skinny talk.

0:07:04 Jenessa: Like Y2K

0:07:04 Thomas: Yeah they called it sparkling circling anorexia or whatever.

0:07:07 Jenessa: Fashion is coming in.

0:07:08 Lydia: Oh, that's exactly it. Yeah, the fashion's coming back. And so now, like, we also have to have the body type.

0:07:10 Jenessa: Yeah. Yup. The body.

0:07:14 Lydia: Yeah.

0:07:15 Thomas: Don't do the eyebrows, guys. Just don' t. I know I don't have much of a say in it, but just don't, please.

0:07:17 Lydia: We've learned.

0:07:18 Jenessa: Again. It me like years to grow my eyebrows back to normal human thickness. It was...

0:07:25 Thomas: Opening arguments question, is there a class action on behalf of eyebrows everywhere? Can they get certified?

0:07:28 Jenessa: Christina Aguilera did this to me.

0:07:33 Thomas: Everybody's eyebrow hair, every girl's eyebrow from the 90s can certify as a class, you know?

0:07:40 Jenessa: When I was younger, it was thinspiration, masturbation pictures and The worst of it was, uh, have you ever heard of pro-ana websites? Yeah, pro-anorexia. It's exactly what it sounds like. It is just straight up arguing that anorexia is not a mental health disorder. It is a lifestyle choice, and that the people trying to tell you you have a mental health disorder are just just trying to oppress your right to slowly kill yourself.

0:07:44 Thomas: God. Oh, I already hate this. Oh,

0:07:50 Lydia: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, control you. Yeah. Yeah, this was like big in Tumblr days, like when Tumblr first started. Yeah, you'd see a lot of pages about this stuff.

0:08:12 Jenessa: Yeah.

0:08:18 Thomas: Really? Okay.

0:08:20 Jenessa: Has been going on forever. It's not new. And we already have really good research on this, just how harmful this is. Is not just people who have an eating disorder talking about it, it is causing eating disorders and it's spreading it. So, not great. So first thing we should talk about is just in general what is going on here. Anorexia nervosa is one eating disorder in the DSM. There's other ones, you know, people have probably heard of bulimia. There is eating disorder not otherwise specified, which is just like this is clearly disordered eating behaviors. It doesn't necessarily fit exactly those two patterns of anorexia or bulimia. Body dysmorphic disorder, which is usually, it's just in general misperceiving your own body in a really drastic way. It's usually to do with weight.

0:08:36 Lydia: Mm -hmm.

0:08:37 Thomas: Yikes.

0:09:18 Lydia: That often comorbid with either anorexia? Yeah, yeah. Or bulimia, et cetera.

0:09:20 Jenessa: Yes. Yeah, yeah. So they're not necessarily the same disorder. You could have one and not the other, but it is often the case that why are you engaging in these obsessive control of your eating behaviors? Because you are misperceiving your body. Doesn't have to go that way, but it often does. Is, depending on how you look at the numbers, it's possibly the most deadly mental health disorder.

0:09:28 Lydia: Mm hmm. Oh, wow.

0:09:52 Thomas: Wow.

0:09:53 Jenessa: Yeah. The

0:09:53 Thomas: Really? Yeah. There's some there's some bad ones, you know, there's some not not cool ones.

0:09:58 Jenessa: Comparable to substance use disorder. Lifetime risk for just your average person, which includes people with mental health disorders, everybody in the country, the lifetime suicide death risk is 1%. For people with depression, 3 .5 % will die by suicide. For anorexia, it's 20%. Yeah, it is really bad. Bad it's

0:10:23 Lydia: Wow.

0:10:25 Thomas: Holy shit. That's crazy. I never would have known that.

0:10:30 Jenessa: You look at the rate of actual death to expected deaths in a population, like, assume you didn't have this disorder, you know, for disorders that don't affect your lifespan, it should be one to one, right? For anorexia, it's anywhere from 6 to 17 times more more likely to result in death overall. So it's it's really bad.

0:10:53 Thomas: So maybe being pro that is like not super cool. Not like amazing.

0:10:53 Jenessa: No. No.

0:10:59 Lydia: This This is honestly, like, really depressing, and I'm going to start crying.

0:11:00 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, that's horrible.

0:11:01 Jenessa: Yeah.

0:11:02 Lydia: Jeez.

0:11:03 Jenessa: Yeah, first thing to know with this is just how important this is to prevent. It is not just some phase somebody's going through, it's not just a diet, this is it's an emergency. If somebody is showing these behaviors, early intervention is key. Stopping this from getting to its worst point, because one of the worst predictors for it is this body image disturbance, this misperception of, I have to get thinner because I'm so big, I'm så big, and misperceiving, even as you get thinner, thinner, thinner, not seeing that you are emaciated at that point. To which that is happening predicts the long -term treatment outcome. It predicts the likelihood of a relapse. And those relapses kill people. Between starving and suicide, side, we are seeing this kill people.

0:11:15 Thomas: An emergency.

0:11:16 Lydia: Yeah. Mm -hmm.

0:12:04 Thomas: Was actually

0:12:04 Jenessa: So a joke.

0:12:04 Thomas: Going to ask. I don't know how much people are are actually dying of basically starvation. Is that being like counted as suicide when you, when you mentioned those suicide stats?

0:12:17 Jenessa: Actually a really complicated question in the literature. A lot of people are bouncing back and forth on like, how should we think about this? It's a similar problem when you estimate deaths by substance use disorder. Somebody somebody overdoses, I heard many mental health professionals who work in substance use counseling say that pretty much every overdose is actually a suicide. People know their dose and they're, if nothing else, they are taking a risk.

0:12:18 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:12:46 Lydia: Mm.

0:12:48 Thomas: Mean, people, drugs get spiked or they're wrong about like the potency of a drug for sure. But yeah, short of that.

0:12:51 Jenessa: Sure, that happens. That can happen. Fentanyl has changed this equation quite a bit. But like pre -fentanyL, when you were like, Like, oh, my God, I didn't realize what I got. Yeah, a lot of those overdoses were intentional suicide, deaths by suicide or attempts of suicide. So, yeah, tough to define exactly. But ultimately, if somebody is dying of liver failure because they're not eating, is that the disorder killing you? Is that the same as other methods of suicide? I mean, I don't know. At some point, what's the difference, I guess?

0:12:54 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:13:33 Jenessa: One's no joke. It's real, real bad. If you or someone you know is struggling with this, really, they need help now, not later. Problem. That's at issue here is this is typically thought of as what's called a culture -bound syndrome.

0:13:42 Lydia: Yeah.

0:13:52 Jenessa: Something like depression, anxiety, like everyone, everywhere that, you know, everybody can get a little anxious sometimes. In every culture, there are people who get anxiety disorders, like you can just be born that way, you can, you know, environmental factors, whatever. But for things like body dysmorphia disorders and anorexia and things like that, this is heavily influenced by culture. Um, always gonna find some one-off spontaneous, like, um, sometimes it can be an OCD kind of manifestation of, maybe, you control all these other things in my life, but I can control this. If I control my food and my exercise, I watch my weight change and I feel like I'm in control. That's some people. You can imagine being independent of culture. What we're really seeing is there are some cultures where it is way more common. It is way more common over time in certain times as opposed to other times within the same culture. And it's also gendered.

0:14:33 Lydia: Right. Right. Mm. Right. Right.

0:15:02 Jenessa: Do see body dysmorphic disorders in men. We can see anorexia is very rare in men. But we will see eating disorders in men look more like, it's usually focused on exactly what you would think in a Western culture, muscle development.

0:15:20 Lydia: Muscles. Mm -mm.

0:15:21 Jenessa: Yep. So think about like bodybuilders. They are usually severely underweight. They don't look underweight the the way that we think of like women who are starving. Um, if you can like see every little ab muscle on somebody that's, they don't have a healthy amount of belly fat.

0:15:43 Thomas: Yeah. I mean everybody knows this, but when they do, when they film movies, when they need to do photo sets, photo shoots with that stuff, That is a very temporary condition brought on by like starving themselves that literal day or night before. And it's not nobody walks around looking like that. It always takes me out of every single movie when it's like shirtless guy and, like, his abs are totally flexed and, like, there's not an ounce of fat and he's just trying to look casual about it. Like, oh, whoa, oh, what's going, it's like okay like

0:15:55 Lydia: Mm -hm.

0:16:05 Lydia: Super cut. Yeah. He's been oiled up, like right before, too.

0:16:13 Thomas: Sure not a hair on your body. Totally. I am in the realism of this film. Yeah.

0:16:14 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:16:20 Jenessa: Like that's see that same impact, right? So this is the image that's being sold to men as like, that's what you're supposed to look like. Anything less is less. And sure enough, when we see disordered eating and and body dysmorphia, the way it manifests in men is usually focused That way they want to be bigger.

0:16:46 Thomas: You know what's interesting and this is hardly worth saying, but I think it is interesting that in the same way that men think, some men think that that, like, that's what women want, I actually think it's widely true that that what's driving the skinny trend is more women than men. I don't think men actually like it that much. I think it's like, like in the same way that women don't, and some women might like the big muscles and all that, but, like, for the most part, women are usually like, yeah, I'm not, my favorite superhero is Spider-Man. It's not fucking Thor or whatever. And in the some way it's like most men, you know, when they, when they vote on things and whatever, it's, like, they, they don't mind curves, like at all.

0:16:48 Jenessa: Uh, sure. Yeah, this actually, um, a huge part of what's socially driving things is, um you can ask men about this in a way that they don't know that other people are going to see what they said. So when it is like this social status thing, yeah, it's a status symbol to have your tiny, skinny, blonde, white girlfriend. But if it was just like your own preferences, we do actually see a huge diversity in what people are attracted to. So there's a huge difference in what you are consciously and unconsciously aware society says is attractive, and therefore it is a status symbol to be with that person versus what you're actually into.

0:17:55 Lydia: Interesting.

0:18:13 Jenessa: To And You're, yeah.

0:18:12 Lydia: God, that's dark.

0:18:14 Thomas: Yeah.

0:18:15 Jenessa: Yeah. You

0:18:15 Thomas: Well, but that, I mean, that makes sense. I mean everything that we have, every, everything we own, everything we buy, all of that is not, is driven somewhat to varying degrees based on what we think people are going to respect or think is cool or show. I mean, the car we drive, how we do our house, all that stuff.

0:18:22 Lydia: Yeah.

0:18:30 Jenessa: Yeah.

0:18:34 Thomas: So like, yeah, yeah. I think, well, right.

0:18:33 Lydia: I know, but this is a person. I guess that's what I mean is just, yeah.

0:18:38 Thomas: But I don't know exactly the context Jenessa is talking about. But if it's, you know, if it survey stuff involving like what what people's perception of what society is going to like is, then, you knows, kind of stands to reason.

0:18:39 Jenessa: Yeah.

0:18:47 Lydia: Right, right. Yeah.

0:18:49 Jenessa: You know, I've seen people talk about it, um, anecdotally as like, here's their their perfect little girlfriend, and then here's the person they're cheating with, who's like the curvy person that they're clearly, that's what they're into, but they're not going to show their friends this person, right? Like, it's, it seems to show up a lot a lot anecdotally. And the data will show us that, yeah, depending on how you ask the question, you have to get people to answer. I'm not asking, what do you think society says is attractive? I'm not asking what do YOU think would make YOU attractive to be with? I'M asking just like, what do ya like? Just what do YA like?

0:19:29 Lydia: Yeah.

0:19:29 Jenessa: And it's a different question for People. Um, there's certain things that are universal. Everybody likes symmetry in the face, like there's some really basic stuff, but body types vary hugely, especially across cultures. Um, the the body types that people have and the body type that people are attracted to. So So yeah,

0:19:20 Thomas: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I

0:19:31 Lydia: Yeah.

0:19:50 Thomas: Always another small nothing, but it always bothers me with the symmetry stuff is because I want to know maybe you can answer this. I wantto know how that's rated against just like other qualities of your face, because you could have a giant, you know, J.R.R. Tolkien dwarf nose that's entirely symmetrical, like with that. But people won't be into that. You know, like you can have ears that are the size of elephants, but they're exactly the same. I wonder, like, how how do you score that against other stuff? Like I, you know, it's interesting. Yeah.

0:20:03 Jenessa: Right. Yeah,

0:20:14 Lydia: Yeah. King Charles. Yeah.

0:20:20 Jenessa: The thing is, like, those studies are always like a huge sample size, and they're, lot of times they'll take a face and, like, do this very silly Photoshop where they, like, move something and you're like, well, yeah

0:20:28 Thomas: Yeah. Oh. And then they'll be like, which one's more attractive, and and it's it's like one of them, they've done the artificial symmetryizing, symmetry symmetricalizing of it. Yeah. No, that makes sense all

0:20:38 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah. It's like, so this, none of these are real people faces.

0:20:42 Thomas: Things equal Yeah. Oh.

0:20:44 Jenessa: And yeah, so it's like exactly like if you have a giant sample size, you can pull out this effect that we generally prefer that. But yeah, a slightly less symmetrical face that has a lot of conventionally beautiful features versus like, oh, that is symmetrically disfigured. You'd be like, damn. All right. I don't know. You know, it's all a lot of subjectivity starts coming in. And of course, personality, we do in fact care about this. But looking at media, you're just going to keep getting presented with a certain image of like, there's this body type that the vast majority of us do not look like and couldn't look like that if we tried.

You could starve yourself and you're never, you're gonna die not looking like that, and makes up like 90 of the images in the magazine. Like, then what do you do? It's it's just very confusing for our brains when we're told like this is what's supposed to happen. So we end up with this this cycle where your culture is telling you something and you're trying to achieve it and you can't to achieve it and it becomes disordered. So see a lot of variability between different cultures over time and between genders of how this manifests. And it was getting really bad. Like a ton of papers in that late 90s, early 2000s, 2000 to 2010 era are like, we have an epidemic of anorexia, a crisis level of eating disorders. Um

0:21:27 Lydia: Do you remember thigh gap? Like how big thigh gap was at that time?

0:22:17 Thomas: Yeah. When when Was that God, that sounds, I feel like that was yesterday. When was that whole thing?

0:22:18 Jenessa: I can't

0:22:22 Lydia: Man, I don't remember exactly.

0:22:22 Thomas: Yeah.

0:22:24 Jenessa: Remember everything is yesterday. I don't know. It was like everybody was so obsessed with that. I remember being very small and thin, like pre-puberty, and I don't think I had a thigh gap then. Like, some bodies just don't do that.

0:22:24 Lydia: Yeah. 2012. 2012. Oh

0:22:27 Thomas: Yeah. That That's That's one. And again, I should not to bring in the, you know, the male gaze part of it. But like, that's one that filtered through to like stuff that I might look at. And then like women would post like thigh gap. And I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, why would I care? Yeah, it's like, why is that a thing that anyone would care about? I don't understand. Oh,

0:22:47 Jenessa: Like algorithm.

0:23:00 Jenessa: Yeah, all very frustrating. So so we end up with back in that era, the clinicians find out about these very secretive communities of pro -Anno websites. Sites. The thinspiration stuff was more like, um, would say it was a little more mainstream. They were less like hiding it. They were maybe, the way I saw it, was more people who seemed a little in denial about the fact that it was disordered, whereas the pro-Anna stuff was like fully admitting they meet diagnostic criteria. Um, looked at one study that was aimed at clinicians to, like, keep them aware of, did you know this exists? Um, there's this new thing called the internet, get ready.

And they analyzed one of these websites that was just, it was kind of like a message board, and, uh, 28.6 percent of posts had, uh, tips and tricks for dieting, for restricting calories. 14 were tips to distract yourself from hunger. And the part that was really concerning for clinicians is 11 were tips on how to lie and conceal your symptoms so sure your doctor doesn't realize you're dieting, that you are exercising, that you are restricting your calories. It was really trying to make sure clinicians knew they are sharing within their community tricks for how to not let you notice that they are doing this to themselves. So like you need to be there. There are people trying to be sneaky about it and they're, they're teaching other people how to be sneaky

0:24:21 Lydia: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:24:21 Thomas: God, I

0:24:51 Jenessa: About it. And this is a problem.

0:25:04 Jenessa: Of the questions was like, OK, is this just the Internet exists now and people are going to find community? And so people who already have a disorder go here, but people who do not are not going to go here. What's the problem? Got two studies for you. One of them looked at, uh, it was more of a naturalistic, like, let's just interview, uh, seventh graders, ninth graders, and 11th graders, and even the seventh graders, they were aware of this. And, uh, this sample, 12.6 percent of girls had visited one of these websites websites. % sad it's a very thing that websites exist, 44% said it's bad or somewhat bad that these web sites exist, 33% said, it's good thing that these websites exist. This is great. We love this. Yeah. Don't know.

0:25:56 Lydia: What? Yeah.

0:26:01 Thomas: Can't think of a reason.

0:26:02 Lydia: Any follow -up questions?

0:26:04 Thomas: Yeah.

0:26:05 Lydia: Geez.

0:26:05 Jenessa: Yeah, so it's a lengthy survey about like, do you know about this? Have you been to one of these websites? How do you feel about these websites, and then they surveyed them about their own behaviors and their own self attitudes, and sure enough, the people who have visited the websites, especially the ones who said they think it's a good thing, we're more likely to have the actual diagnostic criteria for an eating disorder, more likely -to -be subclinical but showing symptoms of an eating disorder. There's a couple of things they measure often, like drive for thinness. There's a questionnaire you can give that measures the extent to which somebody is feeling this like, I must be thin kind of impulse. There's also the thin ideal internalization. So that's the extent to which you believe, if I'm not thin, I cannot be loved, I will not be special, I will not be happy. Like, that's the only way you're gonna have to be thin first to get good things in your life. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:26:59 Lydia: Man.

0:27:19 Lydia: So that's like 85 % of girls when we were growing up. Maybe more. Almost everybody. Buddy. I

0:27:25 Jenessa: Is absolutely what was being pushed, especially then.

0:27:27 Thomas: Is there Can I, can I, and sorry to, again, just try to translate this into to what, what the dude side of it, but is what's The wording of that, because I could imagine answering, like, differently if it's being, like, not perceived as fat versus being thin, you know, and I know it's going to be different for women, obviously, but, like, is that, is that wording, like, how is that worded exactly to where it's just, just like you need to be thin or being, like, not perceived as very large or something?

0:27:35 Jenessa: Yeah.

0:27:59 Jenessa: Don't have the questionnaire in front of me at the moment, um, so I'm not 100 percent sure. The, the way I've seen this questionnaire framed in general is more the direction of, uh, not that being fat makes you unlovable, it is very much the I must be thin to be loved, like, that there's only one option. Like, that is that kind of what you were getting at? Uh,

0:28:24 Thomas: Sort of the difference. And again, I think it might apply more to men than women. But I could see a difference in like I always whenever you tell me about these surveys, I always kind of like think about how I would answer them. You know, and I could imagine answering if someone said if the question was like, do you think you need be thin to be loved? Well, no. Do you think you need to be not perceived as like obese to be loved? I'd be like, yeah, maybe like I might answer that one more positive, like in terms of my own like body image, you know, stuff. I might feel differently about those two questions.

0:28:30 Jenessa: Huh. Yeah. Uh.

0:28:56 Lydia: Just did a quick Google search and it looks like it does both. Like it does a fear of fatness and the pursuit of thinness on the scale.

0:28:58 Thomas: Oh, OK. Oh OK. Interesting.

0:29:05 Jenessa: That drive for thinness is one that is a big predictor of, especially, engaging in the disordered eating behaviors. And then you've also got this fear of fatness, which, like, they they have have a different, they interact in different ways to affect the type of behavior the person is going to engage in. They're ultimately both not healthy, obviously, for your mental health or your physical health. This also, like, just to be clear, this doesn't like, well, but at least it makes you skinny. No, it doesn't work this way. We have a ton of research that making people feel ashamed shamed of their weight does not help them lose weight. Mostly it just makes them not want to go to the gym and be in front of people. And it makes them binge eat in private.

0:29:19 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah.

0:29:25 Thomas: Sure. Yeah, for sure.

0:29:51 Jenessa: Like it doesn't help.

0:29:51 Thomas: That's what always drives me nuts. I mean, like if shaming people worked, you don't think there wouldn't be a skinny, there wouldn't Be a fat person like, come on, like our society, like it's, it's crazy.

0:29:59 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah,

0:30:01 Lydia: Post Perez Hilton, like period of the internet. Yeah

0:30:06 Thomas: Oh, I don't know what that, that means exactly, but sure. Yes. I don' t know if you want to get into it, but okay.

0:30:07 Jenessa: There you go.

0:30:06 Lydia: Yeah. We'll get into it at the end of the episode.

0:30:12 Thomas: Okay.

0:30:12 Jenessa: Yeah yeah yeah. That's just an example of looking at what I found really disturbing about that. It's just like seventh grade girls, like, like this, we're talking like what is that, like 11 years old, they were already viewing these websites and expressing this drive for thinness, this thin ideal internalization, um, viewing these, these websites was correlated with it, uh

0:30:12 Lydia: Yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:30:37 Lydia: Know, and I just, I'm just thinking kind of out loud here, you formative experience for me in relation to all this happened in eighth grade middle school is like a tough, tough time for all kids, right? But, but then also thinking about like the combination of puberty, like getting your period for the first time and like all of these changes that are happening to your body. Seems like an incredibly vulnerable time to then also be exposed to this is what a good woman looks like and this is what you should look like as you're dealing with like these hormonal changes taking over your body, your fat composition changing to, you know, address for all of those things that are going on. Just it feels like a very, very key moment to, to catch this for sure.

0:30:49 Jenessa: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. For women at puberty, you are supposed to not just get taller, you are going to have fat deposition on your body, that is how you grow hips and breasts, like that is supposed to happen to you and it is normal and healthy, but like if you were coming into your mind of like, this is the body that I have, and it was small and skinny, it was like pre-pubescent, and at the time we were teenagers, pre-cubescient androgynous bodies were like what models looked like and then all of a sudden you're like, my perception was not, oh, I am starting to look like an adult woman, my perception was, I'm fat like

0:31:39 Lydia: Yeah. Yep. Yeah, that was mine too.

0:32:12 Jenessa: It it happened pretty late for me because I did gymnastics for a long time and so I was like 16 and all of a sudden I was like, oh my god, boobs, what happened, and like it was a weird experience and then all of the sudden. And I was like,

0:32:12 Lydia: That was 100 % mine. Yeah?

0:32:24 Thomas: That's going in the, that's, that' s going in The Post credit. Oh my God, boobs.

0:32:26 Lydia: Yeah.

0:32:26 Jenessa: I was, like, literally I had, like. Worn a size zero dress forever. I was a tiny little string bean. And then, like I remember the moment that somebody told me. I was not going to fit in a size 0. And it was, emotionally devastating. Today I'm, like wearing a size 14. And I'm like, whatever.

0:32:49 Thomas: Another symptom of this, women's sizes are fucking batshit. I don'' t understand them. And they seem to change too.

0:32:50 Lydia: Loving your life. Oh, yeah, they are. They

0:32:56 Thomas: I don't, it's like, they get more, we're going to be at like negative. They're going do like the square root of a negative number. It'd be like, I yeah.

0:32:54 Jenessa: Nonsense oh

0:33:04 Thomas: Like three, I will be my size.

0:33:03 Lydia: Do. Vanity sizing. Yeah Yeah. Well, and it changes between brands. It changes within the brand. There are some times where like, oh, yeah. If you shopped at Hollister, it was well known like a size six jean, if you grab a size 6, a size 6, they're all going to fit differently on your body. They could be the exact same thing, but for whatever reason, they are not actually the same thing. Really, really messes with you.

0:33:09 Thomas: Yeah. Oh

0:33:07 Jenessa: Yeah. Uh, -huh. Oh. Yeah. Mm. -hmm. Oh. Yeah, I I could wear anywhere between a 12 and an 18 and get, like, the 18 could be twice and tight and the 12 could be baggy, like it's it's nonsense.

0:33:34 Lydia: Nothing makes sense. Yeah.

0:33:35 Jenessa: So somehow we had, like, especially back then, size, like, zero was, like, this beautiful ideal, and it was, like, it freaking mattered if you couldn't fit that anymore. There were clothing brands that were like, "Like, 0 to 4, those are the sizes we have. You can't shop here if you're, yeah.

0:33:48 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 579 was a popular store when I was like in high school. 579, that's the largest size that they had and my best friend at the time was not a 9. And so she like couldn't even go in the store. Yeah.

0:34:02 Thomas: My God. That's horrifying.

0:34:04 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah.

0:34:05 Jenessa: Like, such a social outcasting of, can't emphasize enough how not big a 9 is. Like, it's ,like, oh, boy.

0:34:08 Thomas: Yeah, wow. I didn't know that.

0:34:16 Lydia: Like me now. Yeah.

0:34:18 Thomas: Wow.

0:34:18 Jenessa: Yeah, it, it' s, it'' s nothing.

0:34:20 Lydia: Yeah.

0:34:21 Thomas: Should be illegal. That feels horrible.

0:34:22 Lydia: Yeah.

0:34:23 Jenessa: It? It's really terrible.

0:34:24 Thomas: Like, not having the sizes and creating that environment. That's awful.

0:34:25 Jenessa: Horrible.

0:34:28 Lydia: Like a 13 year old, 14 year old, 15 year old girl. Yeah.

0:34:29 Thomas: Oh God, come on.

0:34:30 Lydia: Yeah, I

0:34:32 Thomas: Is that still going on or was that, do they, okay, good.

0:34:33 Lydia: I don't think that store exists anymore.

0:34:35 Thomas: Somebody burned it down.

0:34:37 Jenessa: Have to check, I cut this if it's the wrong name, but I think it was Brandy Melville. Was like one size fits all and then you walk in there as a bigger person and they're like, not you. Like, and I think that's a recent brand that was just that might not be the right brand, but there's a brand that's like that. It's just one size fits most.

0:34:51 Lydia: Yeah, it is. Yeah.

0:34:59 Jenessa: Everybody else, go Yeah. You walk in there and there's no sizing. Just pull this stuff off the rack and figure it out. Like, we have that study that's correlational, but we're showing that very young girls are visiting these websites that tell them this is a lifestyle choice you can make to starve yourself and it's good for you. And, and everybody is just telling you you're ill, but you're not. And here's how you can lie to your family and friends and doctor and starve yourself. Here's how you can throw your food out. Here is how you can secretamente exercitar tudo. Está acontecendo? Isto é apenas correlacional onde as pessoas que estão prontas a isso vão para o site ou está causando

0:35:00 Lydia: Size fits all.

0:35:42 Lydia: Right.

0:35:42 Jenessa: Isso? Então nós temos alguns estudos que tentaram olhar para a relação causal e nós we find it where um one of them went through, uh, it's a really, really well done study. I have a quibble with one of their statistics, but it ended up not having an impact on any of the results I cared about. Um, uh, through current magazines at the time and they pulled out, uh, control groups like any advertisement that was like just a product, no people in it, and it had to, to not be a food or dieting related product so that it wouldn't activate those feelings.

And for the experimental images, they had any image of a model. It could be like the models wearing these clothes or these sunglasses, whatever, but the model had to be the focus of the image, no text over their body, like you could see the whole body. And they did a really good job of obscuring the purpose of the study. They were pulling in intro psych students. It's a really easy way to get participants like, hey, extra credit in your class. Gave them a huge battery of questionnaires and a whole bunch of other visual tests. So it wasn't super obvious what they were up to. And then for this part, they told them we're looking at the impact of advertising on visual perception. And they had 30 minutes to peruse 40 images, and they were going to be asked memory questions about them. And they were. So they did give them a totally bullshit memory test that they couldn't, like, right in the garbage, that data. Nobody cares. What they finally asked them,

0:36:46 Thomas: But

0:36:46 Lydia: Yep.

0:37:22 Thomas: How

0:37:22 Jenessa: Among

0:37:23 Thomas: Did I do? Did I do, did I do okay?

0:37:23 Jenessa: A bunch. Did I remember correctly? All the skinny weirdos.

0:37:28 Thomas: You can still tell me how I did. Like, you don't, how

0:37:31 Jenessa: Right in the garbage, um, and they purposely told everybody, um, we're gonna do the full debriefing after all our data collection, because what they don't want to do is have anyone in the class find out what it's about and tell other people, um, they withheld the debriefing until they're totally done. And they asked somewhere in there, the questionnaires about body image and eating disordered behaviors and all of that stuff. What they found was literally 30 minutes of looking at these 40 images of these ultra-thin models, as opposed to the group that looked at just like random advertising, higher rates of dissatisfaction with your own body, higher rates of anxiety symptoms, depression symptoms, endorsing that thin ideal attitude, endorsing that they need to lose weight, just a ton of negativity about their own body and negativity about other people's bodies and negativity about being fat and positivity towards being thin.

Something that was really interesting was they also tested some people, they went to the, like, local, I don't know, whatever clinical hospital and pulled in some anorexia and bulimia patients. The anorexia patients were no more likely than that group to endorse that thin ideal. So what they think was going on is what I think is particularly concerning. You can be saying to yourself, "No, I believe that everyone has value. Everyone is deserving of love."

0:38:30 Lydia: Mm Hmm.

0:39:24 Jenessa: "No, of course you don't have to be skinny." Skinny. You spend time staring at one image after another of just skinny, tiny, tiny skinny. "I am bigger than this person. I'm bigger than that person," over and over and again. It still affects you. It does not matter that you swear up and down you don't think that being skinny is the the only way to be happy and you try not to endorse that, uh, explicitly, we're still seeing exactly the internalization of it. Still came out with the anxiety, the depression, the negative self-image about their own body, even when they said, "No, of course I don't have to be thin to be happy," but also in the next questionnaire, "I hate my body." So

0:39:53 Lydia: It's the internalization.

0:40:12 Lydia: Yeah. You know, when you mentioned it, and it only took 30 minutes there, when I was preparing for this, I saw a headline from like a more recent study specific to TikTok. And it's like it's that but on steroids. Like, you know, I know we're talking about body image issues. But and this study is from like, you Know, 2024. I don't have like all the details. But for that, it said that participants exposed to just eight minutes of TikTok, the inspiration content was enough to affect body image. Isn't that crazy?

0:40:26 Jenessa: Yeah.

0:40:44 Jenessa: I'm not surprised at all. Like, honestly, doing this research, I, like, remind myself of, like, oh yeah, I used to do a lot of that stuff, shit. Like

0:40:54 Lydia: Yeah, yeah.

0:40:55 Thomas: Long does it last? Like, do we know if that effect, you know, does it go away pretty quickly?

0:41:00 Jenessa: Tough, because then we start getting into the correlational study design where everybody's going to complain that, you know, well, is it, is it causal? Or, um, do I get a sample where I, I give, I randomize and give you that exposure exposure, and then I wait days and then give you the questionnaire again? Well, I don't know what you did in the interim.

0:41:21 Lydia: Yeah, the media consumption in between.

0:41:24 Jenessa: Then it starts to be, you know, if I just let you consume your own media at your own rate, then it's correlational design. Like, how this is the problem today is, like, you're just exposed to bodies all day if you're scrolling. So, like, I dunno, when does, when does the effect end? Um Short version is no, I don't know, but

0:41:25 Lydia: Yeah.

0:41:43 Thomas: That's a good point.

0:41:47 Lydia: The algorithm is also built to show you that stuff over and over and over.

0:41:50 Thomas: Let's just just interview the algorithm. Hey, how bad do you make people feel about themselves, for how long? Like, oh, forever, all the time, right?

0:41:51 Lydia: Yeah.

0:41:58 Jenessa: Been a lot of talk about that of, I don't, so this is something I don't know a ton about, but I have heard the conversation about it. Seems like TikTok is really just feeding you pretty people. I don't know how much of that is just, yeah, because people linger on a pretty face versus, like, this is intentional, um somebody purposely design it that way, or did humans accidentally just do that to themselves because we just like looking at a pretty face, but mean, that seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation to me, but one way or the other, we have very clear evidence that, like, the societal ideal of beauty in faces and bodies is what is getting way more attention on any of these apps. Like, I don't want to just blame TikTok. It's everywhere, is just like shoving this in your face. So want to be very thumbs up at TikTok for, like, cut this out. Do not steer people towards somebody who is telling you all these really negative dieting tips.

0:42:16 Thomas: Yeah, what

0:42:25 Lydia: Yeah it's just a human behavior. Yeah right.

0:43:18 Jenessa: I think something that we really need to talk about in the modern day is I know if you've heard this term orthorexia.

0:43:26 Lydia: I don't know what it it means. I have heard it, but I can't remember what it means, yes.

0:43:26 Thomas: Well

0:43:31 Jenessa: So it's it's not yet in the DSM. They keep having a debate about whether it should go in or whether it's just anorexIA with more steps. It's basically the like crunchy granola mom thing of like, hey, that's obsessive behavior around food, too.

0:43:45 Lydia: Right. Clean eating. Yeah, yeah.

0:43:51 Jenessa: Yes, the clean eating thing of like, hey, food's not dirty, actually. Like, I mean, food could come out of the ground with dirt on it.

0:43:55 Thomas: There's that that influencer that I always see that, like, I don't know why, it's just tends to be a thing on Reddit or whatever, like, this influencer, food influencer died because they ate all this, you know, she, she whatever the hell she was doing with her food that she thought was like natural, clean, whatever, um, and so yeah, that's that can sounds really dangerous, super

0:44:07 Jenessa: Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah, exactly. Like this obsession with I can only eat fruit or oh, you can't have fruit because it has too much sugar or you can'T have any added sugar or you CAN'T have this. You CAN'T HAVE that. You HAVE to have have this. You must have this it. Soon as we hit that must and can't, as soon as we hit the obsession, the, I have to weigh all my food. I have to count all my macros. I have to take 10,000 steps and I must, must, must. It's disordered. Like, sorry, I don't care how healthy that could be in moderation. If it's not happening in moderation, it's disordered. It has to stop. It absolutely leads people into, yeah, we have that example of somebody literally dying from just eating fruit all day, like, you moderation in your life, and part of moderation is like a meta moderation of like a, like, just not giving a shit is so important, like, taking a breather it's, yeah, it's becoming a growing problem that people have convinced themselves this isn't anorexia, this, this isn't starving myself to death because I'm getting all my protein.

0:45:14 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah?

0:45:27 Jenessa: That is not enough to get you around this. So if anybody is looking for help with this, I know a lot of us have struggled with this kind of thing. Any mental health counselor in general can help you with dealing with obsessive thoughts, dealing with body image issues. But if you're specifically struggling with eating disorders, the National Alliance for Eating Disorders has a hotline, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Friday. It's 1-866-662-1235. Five and

0:46:02 Thomas: To memorize, so easy. Yeah.

0:46:04 Lydia: Yeah. It'll be in the show notes.

0:46:05 Jenessa: Yeah. At its worst, these disorders have a really high rate of suicide. If you are needing help 988 Uh 911 is good. 988 is the crisis hotline.

0:46:07 Lydia: Yeah 9 -1 -1. Oh. Yeah.

0:46:17 Jenessa: You can call or text that um you can also text text hello to 741741. That'll get you somebody to talk to mental health professionals on the line. Please talk to somebody. This is not normal and it's not something you have to just accept and deal with. Can come out the other end and have a much healthier life. I wish I could tell teenage me, someday you're going to be 60 pounds heavier and you're gonna love your body. And And

0:46:12 Thomas: Yeah. So

0:46:17 Lydia: Mm. Yeah

0:46:48 Jenessa: That's not a thing I would have believed at 14, that it would change quite a bit. People are well. Stop obsessing about your food. I'm sure I just cured everybody by telling you to cut it out. Mental health help.

0:46:48 Lydia: Yeah.

0:47:03 Thomas: Yeah. The takeaway is this stuff, not even, not even once. You know, it's like this, this, uh, is that the main takeaway of these TikTok? It sounded like you started with they banned skinny talk or something. I

0:47:09 Jenessa: Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And that doesn't mean they ban the hashtag. Tag that does not mean that content is gone, so like, for real, especially if you know you struggle with this, stay away from this. This can cause eating disorders. This is not people with eating disorders go to this content. This is people who are otherwise doing well mentally can see these people talking about all these ticks, tips and tricks for how to starve themselves, and it can make you start doing that. It can influence your behavior. So, stay you away. You start seeing somebody telling you all their little diet tips and tricks. Just turn it off. Get

0:47:15 Lydia: The hashtag, yeah. Right, yeah,

0:47:58 Jenessa: Away from talk to a dietician.

0:47:59 Lydia: I think we have to have a real reckoning again, I mean, I feel like this happens all the time, but like, like really, because it's such a slippery slope into that kind of content, especially when you don't control what you can and can't see on an app, then, you know, what starts is like a cooking video, but, you know, being done by a pretty woman and in a very like aesthetically pleasing house, and, you know, there's filters on it, et cetera, et cetera. And then that just kind of leads to the next thing and the next thing and then the next. And then all of a sudden, now you're watching someone with their very like calorically restrictive diet showing you what I ate in a day and like counting the calories. And then that just kind of feeding onto itself. Self. So something that, that a person can't, they can't always see when it's gone that far. And that's that like, we have to figure out how do we address that at like the, societal level?

0:48:17 Jenessa: Mm -hmm, yeah, yes, yeah. Mm hmm.

0:48:57 Lydia: I don't think the answer is to shut down all the apps. Right. And the answer is also like, don't ever go on an app. There, there's somethingthat needs to be addressed dress there.

0:49:04 Thomas: Feel like, yeah, if we had a government, I feel like some amount of regulation on these tech companies and their algorithms could be appropriate. I don't know what, but I, you know, and, and the thing is, like, I shouldn't have to know what the fuck that is. Like, I don't, we should have a functioning system where, uh, Congress, here's how it maybe might have kind of used to happen. You could form a committee or whatever, subcommittee, they could have hearings. They could have experts, actual experts that aren't just, you know, industry people that are trying to accomplish something to their own ends. They could have testimony. They could create a whole congressional report. And maybe they actually, honestly, maybe they have done this, but I don't know how trustworthy it is.

0:49:47 Thomas: But they certainly aren't in a position to actually pass anything that matters right now. So that would be another reason to have a functioning government is they could look out for our safety in things like this, maybe. And if we elected the right people who actually care about issues and care about helping people, that's, that's the function of government. We're not, this is too big of a thing for you and I or any, but even like a, you know, maybe at the state level, I do, I do feel like that's, there's something there. I know that sometimes California has done regulations that end up affecting everybody in other states, I think, here and there, uh, like when it comes to clean emissions and stuff like it ends up

0:49:19 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:49:58 Jenessa: Mm hmm.

0:50:22 Lydia: Or I mean, even social media, I think there's been some things that California's tried to lead the way on that.

0:50:25 Thomas: Yeah. And it does, it does end up trickling to, out to everybody because the companies aren't going to maintain two different kinds of things. Or you get the thing we covered on OA the other week with the Pornhub situation where if states do a certain thing, then those states just don't have Pornhub. So that could also happen.

0:50:26 Lydia: Yeah? Right.

0:50:33 Jenessa: Right.

0:50:44 Thomas: But I guess in this instance, it wouldn't be terrible if it was like this state just doesn't have TikTok or whatever. But yeah, it's like, this is why we need a functioning government. This is why I would love to have actual investigation into this and and what might be the potential solutions that could help, but I just don't think it's good to have these algorithms do, and this is one of many problems, you know, pushing people to the right, all the stuff they're doing.

0:51:08 Lydia: Oh, yeah?

0:50:49 Jenessa: Yeah yeah. I'm definitely not interested in the report from RFK Jr. about how how my body should look. No, thank you. Not interested. So honestly, the biggest thing right now is going to be, hey, if you're trying to get into that Y2K fashion, literally don't go back and look at pictures of what people looked like back then.

0:51:13 Thomas: God, exactly, yeah. Oh

0:51:31 Jenessa: Because most of them have an eating disorder.

0:51:30 Lydia: Yeah, I well, and I do want to take a few minutes to talk about what life was like back then, right? Because I think when, You know, I struggled with body image issues for sure. I don't think I had an eating disorder, but maybe I did. I don' t know. I really honestly do not know. But, even to this day, I still struggle with, you know, some of these, like I'm still unpacking things, you know what I mean, from back then. So part of that was because, like, you would see pictures of these, like, very thin celebrities, flat stomach. I wanted a flat stomach so badly. It's what I wanted so badly. I mean, honestly, to this day I still catch myself being like, "Oh, if I had a flat stomach, um..."

0:51:39 Jenessa: Oh, God. Yes. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:52:19 Lydia: That, that is a big struggle. Thigh gap, I wasn't ever really into that, but the flat stomach thing was like a big driver for me. And it was like, you know, this, this becomes like a generational problem that kind of continues on, that gets passed on if we're not careful, because, like, our moms, our grandmas, like, they, like you said, this is not a new phenomenon. It wasn't a new phenomenon when we experienced it. I think what was new for us was the advent of the internet and the way that those things were being used and how pervasive TV was and reality TV shows and America's Next Top Model.

I just think about all of these different influences that kind of combined to make it so challenging to see value in yourself if you didn't look like this. You weren't worth anything unless you look like this. And the number of magazines, and I mentioned Perez Hilton at the beginning, and he played a huge part in this, taking pictures of celebrities, you know, paparazzi pictures, and then like putting them in paint and circling cellulite or drawing semen on their face. And And like, like

0:52:21 Jenessa: Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah. Right. Right? Mm hmm?

0:53:30 Lydia: That, that was normal.

0:53:29 Thomas: My God, and we let this person in society now still? That's disgusting.

0:53:34 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. He has children. Yeah.

0:53:37 Thomas: I

0:53:37 Lydia: Was such a normal experience. And like and I consumed that, you know, like I would be scrolling along and like see, oh, yeah, you Know, she she's gotten kind of chunky. Jessica Simpson, right? Oh, Britney Spears, when she came out of her mental health crisis and had a kid and everything. Thing. Joel McHale went on TV, like on the news, to talk about her VMA Awards performance and how fat she looked. And that is just so insane to me. All of that was normalized. It was so normalized.

0:54:08 Jenessa: Mm hm.

0:54:09 Lydia: We all participated in it. And well, Hollywood

0:54:09 Jenessa: Mm hm?

0:54:11 Thomas: Didn't. Sorry, you're not getting me with this one.

0:54:15 Jenessa: Well, know what's crazy? Look back to and like, I saw somebody did a reel of this the other day. And I was like, damn, it hit me so hard. They were like, here's a slideshow of women we We called fat in the 90s.

0:54:17 Lydia: Did. Women did. Yeah.

0:54:32 Lydia: Oh, yes.

0:54:33 Jenessa: And it was like, do you remember Kate Winslet in Titanic? They were like, look, a plus size woman as the star. I look at her now and I'm like, she is skinny as shit. And she just like has cheeks, has boobs, isn't on cocaine.

0:54:33 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah.

0:54:50 Thomas: Yeah, it's nuts.

0:54:33 Lydia: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. She doesn't have the body of Kate Moss. And so

0:54:56 Thomas: That was before the social media stuff. So what the hell happened then? What in the world?

0:54:59 Jenessa: Yeah. Magazines, TV. I don't know.

0:55:04 Lydia: Was a lot of that. And then it was also influence of peers. Like I mentioned, my friend really, really struggled with her weight and it became an obsession for her. And because she and I were best friends, it wasn't something that I got into. And I was trying crazy crazy diets. I had mentioned to you guys offline, I did this thing called like the military diet or the three -day diet where you ate like, for it breakfast, you would have coffee, a piece of toast, and

0:55:04 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah. Mm -hmm. Ugh.

0:55:31 Thomas: For lunch, you murdered some civilians.

0:55:32 Lydia: No, lunch was like a hot dog, a hotdog, no bun, and cottage cheese. And then dinner was like half a grapefruit and you could have as much coffee as you want. You could have as much herbal tea.

0:55:45 Thomas: That what they do in the military?

0:55:46 Lydia: No. I don't know why they called it this. And then you did it for three days straight, and then you got to have a couple days off, and then you would do it again. And I was so obsessed with this. I bad for my mom, because I don't know what kind of position I put her in, but she was out grocery shopping with me to get this stuff, because I was like, "I'm going to do this diet." That's what I mean by this becomes a generational issue.

0:55:49 Thomas: Okay.

0:56:07 Jenessa: Yeah.

0:56:08 Lydia: The special K diet. I don't know if you guys ever heard of that where you replace two of your meals with a bowl of cereal.

0:56:13 Thomas: Oh, I just do that normally. Yeah?

0:56:15 Jenessa: Remember hearing about that one.

0:56:16 Lydia: Yeah, I did that. I took weight loss pills for a while. I ordered them from like from a commercial. Yeah. I like picked up my phone and like

0:56:17 Thomas: I'm an an expert at that dad the hell you were an episode of whatever every show on when they like the diet pills and the whatever, uh, any of the TGIF level shows you're

0:56:31 Lydia: Seventh heaven. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember it. There was like, I wanted to lose weight faster, so I like doubled up taking the pills and stuff. It made me so sick and I didn't stop. I just kept doing it. And like, and so you have the influence of your peers. You're kind of like kind of enabling each other through this.

0:56:40 Jenessa: Ugh, mm. Yeah?

0:56:51 Lydia: And so all you need is like exposure to a little bit of media for one of you and it becomes an epidemic. It really, really does.

0:56:51 Jenessa: And Mmhmm. I come from this big Italian family where, like, the the cultural ideal back then was to be chubbier, and, like, it wasn't a big deal that, like, it was nice to have some curves on you. And then that culture shift, like, really hit my family hard. Let's put it that way. And so I watched, you know, all of the, like, there's my mother and my aunts and my cousins. These, there's so many women in my life I was very close to, and I'm listening to all of them talk about dieting and that they gotta lose weight and um right.

0:57:38 Jenessa: Fun fact about genetics: I grew up and I have their body, so I spent my whole childhood hearing about all the problems with that body, and now it's mine, so For real, if you're dealing with this stuff, super don't talk about it in front of your kid. They don't need to know that you don't like how you look because they're going to look like you.

0:57:32 Lydia: Yeah. Problems with their bodies. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep, right. Yeah.

0:58:03 Jenessa: It's not just the face they're going to have. They're going to have your hips and your waist, and they don't needs to know you don't like that waist because they will have it, and then they will look at it and go, oh no, like, oh, it's I I don't blame anybody, like, people didn't know. Yeah.

0:58:20 Thomas: I mentioned this on Dear Old Dads, but, uh, that's definitely something, and I I think, hun, there's definitely I've I've, feel free to contradict me, but I've definitely, like, I don't mention any of that around the kids. I one time I almost said, like, oh, I feel fat around Phoebe and she didn't, I don't think it was a while ago, I don't think she really processed it, and instantly I was like, oh my god, I don't want to do that.

Like I just had, and it wasn't even any sort of you anything, I just, like, genuinely as a parent was like, man, I don't want, because I anticipated Anticipated her asking me, like, what do you mean? You know, like in that moment, I just anticipated, like what if she was like, what? And then I would have to explain that thought. And inevitably, like even just, even that, just that feeling of like explaining that thought to her was like oh my god, I don't want to do that. Like I don t, I d n t want to legitimize these kinds of, you know, it's going to happen anyway. Society is going to do it anyway, but like

0:58:35 Lydia: Yeah,

0:58:45 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah. Ja.

0:59:17 Jenessa: Ja.

0:59:19 Thomas: I'm not, I'm n t contributing to that, you know.

0:59:19 Lydia: They don't need our help. Yeah exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

0:59:21 Jenessa: Ja I, there's so many little ways to do that too. Like, oh, instead of like, this is a good food and this is bad food, like, this food is nutritionally dense. This food is really satisfying. This is one of my comfort foods. I enjoy this food so much. Like

0:59:38 Thomas: This food is Taco Bell, the best food. Yeah, I'm with you.

0:59:41 Jenessa: Yeah, There's ways to talk about, like, as opposed to like, this one's good for you. All the foods are good for you. This food is good for you because it's nutritionally tense. Like, that's what we mean when we say that. It would, like, putting that, the second there's moral value on it, oh, that's a bad food, I ate it, I'm bad. Like, it's so easy to get that cycle going and breaking it is really hard. Like, I don't want to act like I'm perfect. I deal with the same stuff. Like, I was on Weight Watchers starting at, like, 14 and I did it for, like, a decade. I was eating about 12 000 calories a day For

1:00:15 Lydia: Wow. 1200. 1200 calories.

1:00:21 Thomas: You're on the Michael Phelps diet. Oh

1:00:23 Jenessa: Yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was bulking up. No, 1,200 calories a day for starting at, like, 15 years old maybe. Remember being like, oh, I'm a tall person with a lot of curves on me. I was never going to be a normal BMI. I went into my doctor and I was like, I still can't get, I'm still in an overweight BMI, and he took one look at me and said, stop losing weight. I was like, oh, hmm.

1:00:50 Lydia: Yeah. Good for that doctor, because I don't think every doctor would be that way, honestly.

1:00:57 Jenessa: Yeah Look back at pictures of me then and I didn't look like the I, I was not like emaciated, but I do look back and I'm like, damn, I thought I was fat. Look how, how skinny I was. Like, skinny. So throw that BMI chart in the trash. Like That messed with my brain bad. I, I really thought, like, that means I'm fat because I could not get down to that weight no matter what I did. And it's like, yeah.

1:01:08 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Well

1:01:12 Thomas: Yeah, BMI is garbage.

1:01:21 Lydia: Especially Yeah And They, and they label the categories of BMI overweight and obese, and so then if you fall in that category, that numerical category of BMI, now you are overweight, and that carries, you know, all the, the connotations and stuff that our society has, has laid on us. Yeah, yeah.

1:01:22 Jenessa: Right. Right.

1:01:39 Thomas: Jenessa, what's the takeaway from the science for this. I mean, if people listening to this episode, you know, don't mess around with this. It sounds like this affects us even if we don't know it. And, you Know, anything else people should take away from this?

1:01:49 Jenessa: Yeah All the pep talks in the world about how I don't have to be skinny, I don't have to look like those models, it's not going to insulate you from the damage of staring at these images and listening to this kind of essentially pro eating disorder content. So like, like, just scroll away, get away from it, and seek help, professional mental health help if you need it. Hurts to talk to a therapist for any of us.

1:02:18 Thomas: Yeah. All right. Well, Jenessa, thank you so much. Lydia, thank you so Much. And fuck Perez Hilton. I don't Know. I can't think of a better way to go.

1:02:25 Lydia: Oh, yeah. No, he's the worst, he's the absolute worst.

1:02:28 Jenessa: Yeah, I'm on board for that.

1:02:52 Jenessa: My god boobs what happened and

1:02:55 Thomas: That' s going in The Post credit. Credit. Oh my God, boobs. Food is Taco Bell, the best food.

1:02:55 Lydia: Yeah.

1:03:06 Thomas: Yeah, I'm with you.

1:03:05 Jenessa: I was, Yeah, there's was eating about 12 000 calories a day for 1200

1:03:11 Lydia: 1200. 1200 calories.

1:03:14 Thomas: You're on the Michael Phelps diet.