As you scroll through the endless buzzing feed on Instagram and TikTok, you may be faced with all sorts of diet-focused and health-orientated content. But have you ever seen a What I Eat In A Day video? More often than not, these videos present a beautifully health-focused girl detailing her seemingly pristine daily diet, which includes all the food groups, including carbs and highly processed sugar. The main idea? It’s all about balance.
I have one big question. For those struggling with disordered eating or food-related health anxiety, are these videos helpful or not? Although they may seem to highlight the benefit of incorporating cookies and chocolate into a diet that is considered healthy, they still provide the potential for self-comparison and influence. Young people struggling with disordered eating may not benefit from videos that concentrate on cookie-inclusive or otherwise diets. Often the What I Eat In A Day creator prefaces the clip with “I’m a dietitian” or “I’m a model”. Thus, the healthy and ultimately slim connotations are thoroughly intact. An impressionable young audience may take these videos seriously enough to copy the diet, whether it works for them or not. Especially if we allow social media to push the narrative that whatever a dietitian or model eats is the best diet for everyone.
In recent years, the mass media coverage and social interactions with diet culture have shifted dramatically. Worldwide, people are refusing to adhere to the strict diet cultures of previous generations, instead focusing on a well-rounded diet that prioritises feeling good over looking good. We are centralised in a body-positivity movement, and instead of fat-shaming, we are actively trying to embrace all body types and sizes. That said, there is still a massive media focus on eating and determining or commenting on what people should and shouldn’t eat. Even if most diet-focused videos promote eating whatever you want, in today’s social media climate, there is still significant pressure on being healthy.
Currently, What I Eat In A Day videos push one consistent narrative: that you should eat whatever you want to feel good instead of only eating stereotypically healthy and slimming foods. The clips show a diet of oats for breakfast, wraps or salads for lunch, pasta for dinner and a bar of chocolate or some cookies with chamomile tea. In other words, the videos show an overall healthy diet that allows stereotypically unhealthy treats as part of the daily practice. The message is that it isn’t normal to only eat strict, traditionally healthy foods, i.e. broccoli and kale.
Writer Chloe Gray comments: “What I Eat In A Day videos are booming online, but our longstanding obsession with other people’s diets isn’t good for us.” Is Chloe right? Are these endless clips pushing other people’s diets into our social feeds bad for us? You may be wondering how widespread and influential these videos are. We’ll let the statistics speak for themselves. As Chloe highlights: “There are over 11 billion views for #WhatIEatInADay (WIEIAD) videos on TikTok. That’s 11 billion times that people have watched, in explicit detail, what other people put in their mouths over 24 hours.”
One issue Chloe highlights with the What I Eat In A Day videos is how they perpetuate the practice of women comparing their eating and lifestyle habits to others. Everyone’s dietary needs are different. We spoke with Priya Tew, Director of Dietitian UK and award-winning Dietitian, TV Presenter and Eating Disorders Specialist, who highlights this issue. Priya stresses how many different factors determine how much we should eat in a day which makes comparison to others problematic.
Priya says, “As an eating disorder specialist dietitian, I do not think the What I Eat In A Day posts are helpful. Everyone has different nutritional needs, and these posts can seem like a perfect way of eating. We can all eat differently on a day-to-day basis. This may mean some days you eat more, some days less, some days you have more fun foods, and some days you don’t have any. How can we show all of that in a post about one day? Activity levels, food likes and dislikes, menstrual cycle, illness and so much more can impact how much we eat. There is no one perfect way of eating. Due to the wellness influencer pressure on social media, people will likely post what they see as their best day. This can make it seem like that is how they eat all the time.”
Although social media iterations of What I Eat In A Day have soared with the popularity and growth of Instagram and TikTok, this, in theory, is a practice we have seen for many years. In the days of tabloids, magazines would reveal juicy insider info from the dietitians of celebrities who would detail their clients’ diets and exercise routines. The goal is to inspire readers, often most focused on girls and women, to follow in the footsteps of their singer or model idols, who are impossibly skinny and beautiful.
The What I Eat In A Day videos have always graced the YouTube stream of lifestyle vlogs and include completely unnecessary recipes for half a grapefruit for breakfast and steamed veg and baked fish for dinner. I remember vividly watching a YouTuber model detail her breakfast of two cups of black coffee, a hard-boiled egg and a rice cake. Whether or not this was a satisfying breakfast for her is unknown, but it certainly wasn’t enough for me.
However, more and more influencers are starting to champion intuitive eating and incorporating all the food groups. The current mindset that many influencers are trying to push is that a healthy, well-rounded diet is not restrictive and includes stereotypically unhealthy foods. I have seen clips reminding viewers that even though you had a big lunch, you should still eat dinner and deserve dessert if that’s what you feel like. This starkly contrasts with the early 2000s and earlier diet culture, which told people, notably women, to order salads and “hold the dressing”.
So, the big question is, could this be helpful? Although it still poses the potential for comparisons, promoting the importance of eating to satisfy hunger despite the context or circumstances of someone’s day is a positive message. And perhaps to mitigate diet-culture we need to champion influencers who share this message.
Maybe a little comparison could be good, if it is framed in a positive, encouraging way with a disclaimer that the viewer shouldn’t necessarily eat the same way. A young, impressionable audience may benefit from seeing other people eating a non-restrictive diet, especially if they hold that someone in high regard. Nothing will change the fact that young people, especially young women, with access to social media will always be in danger of comparison. If comparison is inevitable, the least we can do is make it positive.