Do online groups push extreme diets too far?
Dieters say they’ve found supportive communities on Facebook and Reddit, along with unhealthy views and misinformation
This story is part of a week-long series on dieting in 2020. Next up: Keto, vegan, fasting — how to get the most out of the super-diets.
Whether you’re dieting to improve your health or physical appearance, it’s hard to go it alone. While people used to seek out friends to hold them accountable and struggle alongside them, it’s becoming more and more common to find support online.
No matter what the niche, from fasting to keto and paleo, it’s easy to find a group of health enthusiasts who are following the same regime you are, but can this lead to dangerous misinformation?
“When we’re talking about these kinds of forums or support groups, we really position them in the social aspect that it may affect how someone starts to view their body, their thoughts, feelings and behaviours around food and weight,” says Ary Maharaj of The National Eating Disorder Information Centre.
“If that starts to get really negative, it can lead to behaviours that can cause disordered eating,”
Weight loss can be a slippery slope, especially when it comes to more extreme diets like intermittent fasting. A trendy diet followed by celebrities including Kourtney Kardashian and Hugh Jackman, it consists of scheduling your mealtimes within a certain window. The most common form is16:8, which means you fast for 16 hours and have an 8 hour eating window (ie. 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.).
Falling under the fasting umbrella is the snake diet, a more controversial regime that requires zero food consumption, just electrolyte-filled supplements. Founded by trainer Cole Robinson, the snake diet consists of only drinking a mixture of water, sea salt, potassium chloride, baking soda, and sulfate salts to keep your energy up. Fasts can last a day to as long as a month.
Zovel Olivia Hyre, 28, is a Markhambased medical student, former national soccer player and a member of a snake diet fasting group on Facebook. After gaining weight, Olivia Hyre decided she needed a detox or cleanse of some sort, and thought a fast would do the trick. She first decided to try a juice cleanse, but then moved on to intermittent fasting, then came across the snake diet online.
Before she even decided to experiment with the trend, she spent hours reading on the subject and watching the founder’s explanatory videos that broke down
the science behind the regime.
Once she was convinced, she began fasting a few days at a time and felt a major, positive difference in her health. She began sharing her journey with her Instagram followers, and saw there was a lot of interest on the topic, and that led to her coming across the International Facebook group in April.
“Through finding that support, you realize that there are other people willing to do what you think you’re isolated doing on your own, there are actually others out there that are very avid about it,” she says, adding that the group is valuable because it’s able to actually inform individuals who are in need of more guidance.
“If someone posts about feeling dizzy, people can quickly respond and say they need to simply up their electrolytes and it’s natural the first day or two,” she says. “But if someone’s been fasting for 30 days and says they feel terrible and are vomiting, that’s when a bunch of people often jump in and say — pull the brakes.”
Listening to your body is key with any new diet, especially when it involves fasting for a long period of time. In an online forum, it can be especially tempting to compare yourself to the slew of before-and-after photos, but that’s when things can go awry. Social dieting forums are a wonderful way to stay motivated, connect with other health fans and learn more about various lifestyles, but anything can gradually go from moderate to extreme.
“Healthy eating and a healthy lifestyle is an admirable thing to work towards, that sometimes does require social support to keep on track, but there’s also more adaptive ways of doing that,” says Stephanie Cassin, a registered clinical and health psychologist and director of Ryerson University’s Healthy Eating and Lifestyle Lab.
She emphasizes the importance of adapting a lifestyle that’s lenient and not too rigid in order for it to actually be healthy and sustainable.
In moderation, fasting has been shown to reduce inflammation, lower blood pressure, and improve brain function, and potentially even help prevent cancer, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine. However, the main worry is what happens when it’s taken too far, especially when there’s a crowd of digital fans cheering you on.
“If somebody had a susceptibility or predisposition to an eating disorder, and they started on a really restrictive fast, that kind of short-term impact on their actual weight can become quite reinforcing,” Cassin said. “Sometimes people with anorexia will say that it actually just started as a diet that went too far and just kind of got off track.”
When it comes to more severe diet plans like fasting, it’s important to listen to your body and gauge whether you’re doing it to reach your weight goal or to genuinely improve your health. Just because it worked well for one person’s body doesn’t mean you will have the same success.
Another issue is the spreading of misinformation. Misinformation can proliferate on social media and it can spread quickly. For example, one member of an intermittent fasting thread on Reddit set out to break down big pieces of misleading information they came across in the thread, but even their post was littered with errors.
In response to a few posts about being overweight due to drinking alcohol, the user wrote, “Beers are high in calories but you urinate out lots of alcohol as it is a diuretic, it’s not in your system long enough to really affect weight. The real reason is when you are drunk you make worse decisions. Pizza, kebabs, pasta.”
But while millions of opinionated people and a wide and open database would seem to be a recipe for inaccuracy, others argue that social media users tend to fact-check each other. One recent post saw dozens of intermittent fasters in the same thread were quick to point out all the errors in the post. One even wrote, “When correcting people, anecdotes are no substitutes for actual sources. I think the term for this should be fastplaining.”
Sarah Black, a 44-year-old Bowmanville-raised massage therapist, has been fasting for more than 25 years and is also part of an intermittent fasting thread. During her time pursuing a diploma in massage therapy at Centennial College, Black also had to take courses in health and nutrition, but her interest in the topic dates back to when she was 16 and diagnosed with celiac disease. Reddit is the only social platform she likes to engage in because she feels misinformation gets clamped down a lot faster than on other platforms — especially by her. Her level of experience on the subject has led to her chiming in occasionally on the thread whenever she came across someone fasting in an unhealthy or extreme manner.
“I’ll pipe up here and there, but more so if I see something that’s blatant misinformation, or something that sounds like orthorexia (obsessive behaviour in pursuit of a healthy diet) or any approaches that are inherently unhealthy,” Black says.
“I tend to get mixed reactions. People are sort of appreciative like, ‘Wow, I hadn’t really considered that part or idea to this,’ and then other folks will get kind of defensive, like, ‘Who are you to say this?’ I try to back it up with research if I can, but some of it’s anecdotal.”
For example, in mid-November, a Reddit user posted a question asking how they could add more caffeine into their fasting routine. A few people, including Black, were quick to jump in and say it’s not healthy to add caffeine to a fasting diet due to it being a “diuretic” and the intense craving may be due to a caffeine addiction.
One thing Black has noticed, especially among less experienced fasters, is the habit of being “overzealous” and extreme.
“Some people tend to get very dogmatic with their approach and don’t take the time to really assess if something is healthy or is verging on being unhealthy,” she says.
“A lot of people get so invested in the process, that they’re not actually honing in on how their bodies are feeling while they’re doing it.”
“You realize that there are other people willing to do what you think you’re isolated doing on your own, there are actually others out there that are very avid about it.”
ZOVEL OLIVIA HYRE ON THE VALUE OF ONLINE DIETING GROUPS