Wednesday, January 16, 2019 // The Statement
7B
Wednesday, January 15, 2020 // The Statement
7B
I
n 2010, while sitting at a table in a
no-longer-existing diner, I used the
iPhone application Lose it! for the
first time. I was eleven years old.
At the beginning of the last decade,
“wellness” took off as a modern trend and
began its descent into a capitalist, money-
making business that thrives on pyramid
schemes and overpriced vitamins. Ben
Zimmer, former columnist for The New
York Times, dated modern wellness back to
1950 in a 2010 article, beginning with the
World Health Organization’s 1948 consti-
tution. It read, “Health is a state of com-
plete physical, mental and social well-being
and not merely the absence of disease or
infirmity.” Seventy years later, we’ve spi-
raled from a foundation for healthy prac-
tices to an exploitative world of obsessive,
expensive tendencies. The wellness trend
has blown up into an industry that boasts
shiny gyms with expensive membership
rates, diet powders to add to low-calorie
smoothies and Instagram accounts of
white women doing squats and advertising
flat-tummy teas and homeopathic turmeric
pills.
Growing up, I never thought about my
diet. My siblings and I were lucky to be
raised on healthy ingredients, fresh pro-
duce and lean proteins. Counting calories
and being hyper-aware of the things I ate
was never on my radar. In sixth grade, after
receiving an iPhone for my birthday, I was
introduced to the trend of wellness via
social media.
I was new to Instagram and was infatu-
ated by the cohort of slim, tanned women
in well-fitting athleisure who preached
wellness under the guise of kale juices and
grass-colored matcha lattes containing an
array of impossible-to-pronounce boost-
ers and vitamins. At five foot with a body
developing softer curves, I couldn’t help but
wonder why I didn’t look like the women
doing squats on my iPhone screen.
As my spiral into social media deepened,
I downloaded Lose it! — an iPhone app with
a scale emoji as the logo. The first thing you
see when you log in is their tagline: “Weight
loss that fits.” The app requires you enter
your starting weight and goal weight, then
an algorithm comes up with the number of
calories you should consume each day in
order to reach your intended goals. The app
fails to take into account any other health
information — I grew up with a disease
called hypothyroidism, one that requires
specific dietary restrictions and regiment-
ed food plans in order to maximize my
health. The app didn’t know this and never
would.
You track calories by entering every-
thing you eat in a day. The setup is easy:
Lose it! acknowledges all major brand
food and chain restaurant meals as well.
Once you start, it’s hard to stop. Counting
calories became an obsession — the first
thought of my morning and the last thought
of my day. The idea of not entering a meal’s
calorie total becomes far off, unimaginable.
As you add meals and snacks, your calories
decrease until you reach zero, meaning you
shouldn’t eat anymore. If you go beyond
zero, you have a negative sign, indicating
you’ve eaten more than your allotted calo-
ries. The concept of breaking below zero is
terrifying, even if you have your calories set
to 1,100 per day as I did in 2010.
I remember downloading the app,
shielding my phone from
my friends as baskets of
chicken fingers were set
down in front of our ado-
lescent faces. I googled
things like, “how many
ounces in four chicken
fingers” and “how many
tablespoons is a serving
of honey mustard,” which
would be the beginning
of hundreds of similar
searches. To avoid ques-
tions from my friends, I
ordered the brownie when
they did, shakily entering
it into my app, swallowing
the sugary consequences.
Lose it! quickly turned
into
MyFitnessPal,
a
more specific application
in the calorie counting
and weekly notifications
reminding me to “step on
the scale.” I lowered my
calories to 800. I used it
for weeks and deleted it
for days, hoping to end the
vicious cycle and eat without restriction
and anxiety.
The
app
has
been
proven
popu-
lar, Forbes recorded over 150 million
accounts in 2018. That being said, for me,
it became a dark tunnel in which I could
never find my bearings. Adding up calories,
tracking workouts and recording my weight
became a daily occurrence — a thoughtless
routine. It didn’t lead me to the results I
craved, instead, I had headaches from lack
of nutrition and struggled to get a grip on
the thing I never thought would be a prob-
lem: food.
Physically, I appeared as though I didn’t
have eating problems, but I suffered men-
tally, fearing to put anything in my mouth
I couldn’t record with ease. Restaurant
meals and undisclosed calories terrified
me. By college, eating out or drinking cock-
tails made a heat creep up my neck. I opted
instead for foods I could measure with my
measuring tools at home and labels that told
me exactly what I was eating. I was lauded
by MyFitnessPal for a streak of recording
my full day of eating, and I didn’t want my
streak to end. This obsession began because
an iPhone app built off internalized patri-
archal messages, dedicated to “wellness,”
dictated my every move. Nobody knew. It
was between me and the screen.
As I continued down the path of “health-
based” destruction, wellness culture con-
tinued to gain speed. I thought I was the
epitome of health as my life passed me by
while I spent hours a day adding calories
and stalking the Instagram accounts of the
women whose bodies I envied. I was idoliz-
ing wellness Instagram bloggers like Rachel
Mansfield and Kayla Itsines who made
their living convincing young women like
me to buy into their diets and “wellness
fads” — plant-based meals, celery juices and
intermittent fasting. I bought their skin-
care products, their paleo pancake mixes
and their natural laxative tea. I spent half
of my free time scrolling through accounts
that appeared light and happy —full of col-
orful juices and shirtless mirror selfies. The
other half of my day was spent on spin bikes
and treadmills, measuring out plain Greek
yogurt and almond butter.
The wellness bloggers I idolized and
envied for their Instagram pages were the
fast lane, the gateway drug, the tip of the
iceberg for my own wellness demise. So
many young women suffer from destruc-
tive eating tactics and orthorexia as col-
lateral of the boom of the wellness trend.
The National Eating Disorders Associa-
tion recognizes orthorexia, a condition
with symptoms of obsessive behavior in
the pursuit of “health” or “wellness.” The
societal push toward thinness and the age
of social media make Instagram the perfect
place to put the eating disorders and disor-
dered eating of wellness bloggers on display
— making them normal, beautiful and even
envy-worthy.
Lee Tilghman (@leeforamerica) was one
of these idols for me. I spent hours of my life
staring at her thin legs and yoga-toned abs,
her charcoal lattes and plates full of avo-
cado and spinach. After a six-month hiatus
from her Instagram account over a year ago,
Tilghman reentered the social media world
with a deeply personal blog post apologiz-
ing for the way the wellness practices she
preached were obsessive and destructive to
her followers.
Wellness blogging and eating disorders
are not mutually exclusive. MyFitnessPal and
Lose It! work the same way. Wellness culture
can lead to hours of body scrutiny and an
11-year-old to spend the last ten years of her
life obsessed with a word that truly means
nothing: calories. But the wellness industry
can also inspire and influence positively. I
would be lying to you if I said I unfollowed
wellness Instagram accounts, deleted MyFit-
nessPal or if I stopped counting calories. The
truth is I’m aware of the effects of these plat-
forms on my life. I know what they’ve afford-
ed me and the darkness we walked toward
together, hand in hand, toward a world of
thigh gaps. I had to learn how to prohibit an
Instagram persona and a weight-loss applica-
tion from being the pinnacle of how I lived my
life. I was born with a disease (hypothyroid-
ism) which causes my metabolism to work
slowly and has burdened my eating habits my
entire life. Stalking skinny people on Insta-
gram has no real agency over my own health
or weight loss. I had to learn that a number on
a scale or specifically curated amount of calo-
ries is no basis for my self worth and it never
will be. I simply needed to listen to my body.
I’ve needed to all along.
Fear of food
BY ELI RALLO, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE HUANG