What I Eat in a Day: A Recipe for Disaster
If you ever find yourself scrolling on Tik Tok or Instagram’s “reel” feature, you may have come across a few “what I eat in a day” videos scattered across your feed. “What I eat in a day” videos show all the meals and snacks that content creators consume in a day in hopes of creating “inspirational content” for viewers. These videos can be set around achieving various “goals” with regards to obtaining certain body types or more simply to obtain a certain lifestyle on social media.
These intentions are the reason that these creators end up doing the exact opposite by posting these videos. Raising the idea that a certain lifestyle or body type can be achieved solely through what a person eats in a day can make these videos extremely harmful to people on the receiving end, specifically those with eating disorders. While “some creators will film only food, ...others add in captions or voiceovers dictating the number of calories they consumed, or proportions of protein, carbs, or fats” (Wolters, 2021). Disclosing this kind of information online can be seriously harmful for people watching for a number of reasons; the first being that more often than not, the creators making these videos tailor their eating habits toward fitness goals and weight loss that entail eating an insufficient amount of calories. This can start to become a huge problem as “creators can intentionally or unknowingly promote unhealthy habits when filming themselves eating too few calories or relying too heavily on a particular food group. TikTok viewers may look up to certain creators, and thus start to incorporate these unsafe food rituals into their own eating habits as well” (Wolters, 2021).
Another problem that comes with the nutritional aspect of “what I eat in a day” videos is that everybody has different nutritional needs and every diet is going to look different for different people. Since “nutrition is seen as one of the only things that we have 'control' over when it comes to manipulating our bodies” (Wolters, 2021), presenting eating habits that are going to affect every person differently can lead people down a very dangerous path. This is because “any kind of diet trend that eliminates several or even one food group risks major nutritional deficiencies [and a] vast majority of people who are watching are going to have serious health implications of eating a grossly unbalanced diet” (Wolters, 2021).
What people often don’t think about when they see “what I eat in a day” videos is that they simply show what a person eats in one day. By showing this small snapshot of a person's life, a large majority of the context we need to fully understand that person's health is left out. “We don't know what they're consuming the next day, the day before, how much activity they got, what their metabolism is, what their unique body needs are genetically” (Wolters, 2021). By leaving out all these pieces of the puzzle, it can give people a damaging and backward idea of what “healthy” looks like.
Moving forward, it is vital that we find a way to stop this trend or change it into something that is more positive and does not make people feel the need to change their own eating habits in order to look a certain way, as the current trend suggests. An essential first step is for content creators to stop incorporating calorie counts and other nutritional categories into their videos as this is extremely toxic and is, in my opinion, the most dangerous aspect of these videos. Once that first step is taken, it is important to start changing the language used in these videos to make it more personal so that it feels as if the person is explaining what works for them specifically instead of suggesting that everyone does the same thing as them. Lastly, it is most important to talk about health-based content and educate people about how everybody works differently and has different needs in order to help change the idea that adopting one person's habits will provide you with the same results.
Sources:
https://www.verywellhealth.com/dietitian-review-what-i-eat-in-a-day-trend-5206277