Curate Your Online Environment as an Act of Self-Care in Recovery By: Hopewell Volunteer Liz Marasse

Whatever your recovery journey looks like, learning not to orient your entire life around attempting to control your body weight, shape, and size is hard work. You have good days and not so good days, and, sometimes, you have a long string of bad days, but, no matter what the process feels like, you have faith that a life free from your eating disorder is worth the effort you put into making it a reality.
Like most people, you engage with Instagram, Facebook, and maybe other social media platforms daily. While participating in social media mostly brings you joy and relaxation, you’re becoming more and more aware that some content makes you feel at best uncomfortable, and, at worst, triggered. Acquaintances post photos of their “healthy” meals, extoll the benefits of eating “clean”, write about intense new workout regimes and “lifestyle” changes, and share articles from “experts” about how sugar is going to kill us all. Celebrities are doing yoga on the beach and drinking macrobiotic smoothies. Amidst all of this, you see countless advertisements for weight loss products, fitness apps, and resources to help you eliminate the next “bad” food group from your diet.

How do you process what you’re seeing when your recovery has illuminated how harmful a lot of these behaviours can be for you? Even though you intellectually understand that you don’t have to go along with what “everyone else is doing”, you can’t help but feel like maybe you should.

Is any of this sounding familiar?

The reality of media is that we are influenced by what we see. A conservative estimate suggests that we see 500 media messages per day. For women (and men), this includes countless negative messages that we aren’t thin enough, attractive enough, good enough – all serving to generate a sense of inadequacy that only products and services can “fix”. And, in addition to the messages we are getting through advertising, we, as social creatures, are also hardwired to be influenced by our peers. We absorb everything we take in, and social media is no exception.

You’ll notice that I’ve been putting a lot of words in quotations. This is deliberate, because I’m calling out what practitioners in the eating disorder recovery community (dieticians, psychologists, physicians, activists) refer to as components of diet culture. In diet culture, health (or, more accurately, the appearance of health) is a moral imperative. This is underpinned by a healthist mentality, a worldview that judges human behaviours by how we think they affect health. In diet culture, we acknowledge and reward “good” (read: health-promoting) behaviours, and vilify “bad” behaviours (those that seem not to promote health, or are seen as detrimental to health). In layman’s terms: in our healthist society, it is generally expected that everyone should be focused on their waistlines and their fitness levels, and, if you aren’t, you’re either “lazy”, “uninformed”, or “irresponsible”.

Diet culture negatively affects all of us, even those without a clinical diagnosis. This becomes obvious when you look at the proportion of the population who have struggled with, or continue to struggle with poor body image and eating and exercise disorders. Statistics vary, but I think most of us are concerned by figures like those recently released by the British Columbia Mental Health and Substance Use Services suggesting that 98% of women and girls are unhappy with their bodies, and 10% of the general population is living with an eating disorder.

Like many others in the recovery community, I reject diet culture’s all-consuming fixation on the superficial, because I’ve learned in recovery that there are so many things that need my attention more than my perceived physical imperfections. I reject its message that we have a moral obligation to be healthy, because I don’t think morality should be attached to food and exercise. And I reject its narrow definition of health, because I think it ignores the mental health implications of holding individuals solely responsible for things like weight and health status, which are often influenced by factors outside of their control.

So – how does all of this relate to social media?

Part of recovery is establishing new habits; that’s how you take care of yourself and support your progress. Recovering alcoholics don’t usually spend a lot of time in bars, so why would those of us in recovery from eating and exercise disorders spend time in a similarly triggering environment? Fairly early in my recovery, I realized that I felt unsettled by all the diet culture content I was subjected to on social media. I started to question why I was participating in diet culture online when I so fervently rejected it in my life offline, and so I started to take deliberate steps to curate my online experience.

I started by “hiding” posts that I found triggering or that made me feel uncomfortable in any way. I then started to unfollow accounts or individuals whose messages didn’t align with my recovery mindset. (This only applied to my digital life – in fact, I’m still totally open to having contact with some of these people in my time offline. The idea was more about managing what I absorbed on a day-to-day basis than a judgment about the individuals behind the accounts). I then started to teach Facebook and Instagram what advertisements NOT to show me (yes, you can do this!) I set my ad preferences in Facebook based on my interests, and provided feedback on each triggering ad that popped into my Instagram feed (there’s an option to mark ads as “irrelevant”, and the platform’s algorithms learn over time not to display ads similar to the ones you’ve flagged in this way).

Implementing all of the above suggestions alone made a world of difference in my social media experience, but the most important step I took was starting to follow body positive and anti-diet content creators online. There is so much out there, and, in the same way that a constant barrage of diet culture messaging challenged my recovery, regular exposure to positive, affirming and recovery-oriented content supported my growth and helped me feel like I wasn’t alone. (See the end of the post for a list of 10 social media content creators I highly recommend – and realize that there are hundreds more out there.)

Many others have written extensively on this subject, and I don’t claim to be an expert. I’m sharing this as someone who is influenced by social media just like everyone else, and who has learned how to navigate it so that it supports me in my recovery. I want to spread the message to everyone, (not only to those navigating eating disorders), that you get to make decisions about your time online so that it contributes to your happiness and well-being. 

These days, my time on social media brings me a lot of pleasure. (I think anyone would enjoy watching cat videos and cat photo shoots all day, but maybe that’s just me :) Importantly, I consistently reject posts and advertising that is not right for me. I don’t think this makes me weak-minded, nor incapable of overlooking small things. I see it, rather, as self-care, because I know that small things add up, and I love myself too much to let them become big things that disturb my well-earned peace of mind.

If any of what I’ve written resonates with you, I hope you will take the time to curate your social media environment so that it brings you the happiness and connectedness you deserve.

10 Body Positive and Anti-Diet Content Creators Worth Following: 
Megan Jayne Crabbe: Bodyposiopanda (Instagram)
Dr. Colleen Reichmann: drcolleenreichmann (Instagram)
Tess Holliday: tessholliday (Instagram)
Michelle Elman: scarrednotscared & bodypositivememes (Instagram)
Kelvin Davis: notoriouslydapper (Instagram)
Jes Baker: themilitantbaker (Instagram)
The Body Positive: thebodypositive (Instagram)
Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, CDN: chr1styharrison (Instagram)
Not Plant Based: notplantbased (Instagram)
ASDAH (Association for Size Diversity & Health): haes_sizediversity (Instagram)