I hate my phone. Or rather I just hate the toxic culture that the apps on my phones try to encourage. The unattainable beauty standards coupled with calorie counting shown through my phone represent all that’s wrong about humanity —the constant need for “perfection,” or whatever that entails. Now, in 2023, technology’s mind-numbing social media apps have plagued our most important resource: our minds.
Getting my first iPhone used to be a cherished memory, opening the freshly packaged box, taking out my brand new phone, and staring at it in wonder. Now, when I think back to the memory of my brand-new iPhone, all I want to do is warn myself.
I remember downloading the standard social media apps, Instagram, Snapchat, and Youtube. I like to call these apps the trifecta of hell as they create a soul-sucking feeling among their subscribers that can only be described as standing in the fiery pits of hell.
Instagram, an app on its perilous throne made of puppy tears, knows its young audience and promotes unhealthy eating habits and body images with their lucrative advertising and deeply flawed algorithm. The unrealistic images of body types that society deems attractive on this platform put the young viewership in a position of vulnerability, one where they feel the need to monitor their own weight. This is where the hypnotizing calorie-counting apps come into play.
By forcing the narrative that there is something wrong with how you look, these apps create a solution: strict weight counting and feeding into the naïvity of users’ self-esteem issues. These large calorie-counting corporations benefit from this twisted ideology.
The relationships between the apps and their demographic can be explained in a simple idea, small fish in a tank of sharks. The sharks, the companies, preying on the little fish, the kids as the fishes swim around, seemingly unaware of the danger that lurks in the shadows.
Dietician Annie Rubin says that children’s presence on social media, a place where companies will support an unhealthy lifestyle, can be extremely damaging to their development.
“A lot of times, [these] companies are funded to promote their products or apps, and generally not focus on the nutrition part,” Rubin said. “I think social media can really easily harm a child’s mental health in general.”
Rubin mentions that these apps can not only have an impact on the child’s current health, but this message can remain as a long-term influence.
“A lot of childhood eating habits, especially if you are surrounded by people who use a lot of calorie restrictions in their daily lives,” Rubin said. “I think that [childhood eating habits] affects kids more than people realize, and that carries into their adulthood, it never really leaves them.”
Even though these sayings are harmful, with the rise of social media apps, it’s becoming increasingly easy for children and teens, whose prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed, to be exposed to this sort of harmful behavior. Manipulating their vulnerability and exploiting their new-found curiosity in technology is what makes adolescents more susceptible to falling for weight-loss lies.
In a Wall Street Journal report detailing an 18-month deep dive into teen mental health, Instagram admits that its most harmful feature is the Explore Page. This section of the app pushes algorithm-selected content based on the information provided which is formatted in a way that promotes social comparison and negative body image.
While the primary concept behind tracking your weight may seem reasonable, it doesn’t reflect the true outcome. Calorie counting promotes the idea that users must “earn” the right to eat, implying that eating food is a privilege rather than a necessity. By supporting diet culture and toxic mentality, these apps validate feelings of shame or embarrassment for, in their terms, overeating.
MyFitnessPal, a calorie-counting app that is currently hot on the market overemphasizes calorie needs because it overestimates how many calories the average person burns from activity according to the National Library of Medicine article. As a result of this, users begin to underestimate protein needs, thus leading to a dangerous outcome of misunderstanding proper calorie intake. When teenagers are still growing and undergoing puberty, this has a big influence on their development.
What follows suit from this soul-crushing mentality is the encouragement of body discrimination and the development of eating disorders.
According to the National Center for Health Research, mental health experts believe that fitness apps such as calorie counting can exacerbate symptoms of eating disorders because tracking calories can often increase rigid, inflexible thinking towards health and exercise.
Eating disorders come in many different forms, but the end result is always the same: the destruction of the mind and body. Harvard’s School of Health reports that 10,200 deaths each year are a direct result of an eating disorder. To put this number into perspective, that’s one death every 52 minutes. The beginning of eating disorders stems from what these apps preach — that the constant obsession with calorie intake is beneficial to you, not slowly deteriorating you from the inside-out. In the end, the blood of all these victims is on the hands of these companies.
Although there are cases of death, eating disorders result in debilitating symptoms like overeating, skipping meals, or feeling disgust for eating, which can lead to a decline in both mental and physical health. Despite this, the ghost of these symptoms still haunts the victims, long after they’ve recovered.
I am no exception to the pattern of damsels in distress. I am just like the millions that have had this experience, and I will not be the last. I fell for the same tricks, the same lies, the same mindset but I am not just another number.
My story is the same yet astronomically different. There will always be victims of this horrible scam, victims whose entire livelihood gets destroyed, victims who don’t survive.
When Instagram asked me why I wanted to block an ad promoting calorie counting, it asked if the account had scammed me, and I said yes. They scammed me of my childhood and the childhood of millions. I wish I could have warned my past innocent self, but I can’t. Instead, I warn you — I warn you not to get sucked into the trifecta of hell and I warn you to stay away from the misery of calorie-counting apps.