What is the first thing you do when you wake up? Some people shower. For others, coffee is foremost on the agenda. Would you ever step out of your door, pyjama clad and one-by-one, knock on all your neighbours’ doors asking, “What did you have for breakfast?” I would hope the answer is no, but that is precisely what ‘What I Eat In A Day’ (WIEIAD) TikToks show you – and you don’t even have to leave your bed.
“I saw this girl on TikTok say she only drinks bone broth for breakfast and her body is incredible.”
These aesthetically pleasing food diaries feature every single calorie consumed from breakfast to supper, often edited together with a grating song in the background – one that seems to appear on every video. Drab conversation fillers have been transformed into irresistible morsels served up by the algorithm and devoured by viewers. Before you know it, you have scoffed an entire spread of content: leaving the table achingly full of comparison, guilt, and confusion.
Not only have these 30 second clips managed to stylise a morning bowl of porridge to high heaven, WIEIAD TikTok’s are often accompanied by clips of the creator’s body. A mirror shot, slow spin, top pulled up to reveal a minuscule midriff. Now we enter the danger zone. For those who have suffered with disordered eating the link becomes immediately obvious, an unconscious and unavoidable deduction, but the content has the potential to create negative associations even for people with no clinical history.
“I saw this girl on TikTok say she only drinks bone broth for breakfast and her body is incredible.” I heard my friend drop into conversation just the other day. Of course, environmental factors like diet and exercise play a large role in determining your body weight and composition, but it’s a fact easily shunned when you are presented with “the exact formula” to your ideal body. Genetics alone have been shown to account for between 30 and 70 percent of variability in body weight – but this content doesn’t show you causation, it shows you correlation and lets your brain fill in the rest.
For those of us raised on Instagram’s perfectly polished bodies and curated plates, the stakes are already loaded. And that figure doesn’t account for the vast grey area of disordered eating that doesn’t have a label. To top it off, a new cultural fixation arrives. Weight loss injections like Ozempic and Wegovy have entered the mainstream conversation, not just for celebrities but for your work colleague, your friends, or even your mum: reframing extreme thinness not just as desirable but as medically sanctioned and easily attainable. Portions are shrinking. So are the bodies deemed desirable.
And the effects are measurable. A recent study for Appetite journal found that just six minutes of lifestyle WIEIAD content was enough to increase viewers’ preoccupation with their weight and body shape and urge to engage in destructive eating behaviours – with effects strongest among women.
The real issue lies in the way the content is found. When I recall my first brushes with disordered eating propaganda on social media, I remember how secretive the whole thing was: hidden away in a dark corner of the internet, only some could access, if you knew where to look. Searching for ‘thinspiration’ posts under the hashtags ‘ana’, ‘proana’, and ‘mia’ (codenames for anorexia and bulimia) became a daily ritual. Back then, it was the Wild West – unregulated and dangerous. Popular hashtags were banned in 2018 by Instagram and the most extreme posts were blocked or taken down.
“Nourishment shouldn’t need to fit an aesthetic, and it certainly shouldn’t need to earn you a body.”
TikTok is different. It’s algorithm led, personalised, and highly sensitised to how long a user watches a video. You don’t need to go hunting for food content, it will find you. Pause for half a second too long on someone’s breakfast. Replay a clip of a body-check. The app will clock it and come dinner, your For You page is full of it. One UK study saw young people with lived experience of eating disorders describe being pulled into negative echo-chambers – one video leading to another until the For You Page became a spiral.
The most extreme content may be gone but repetition has a strange way of rewriting reality. The more no sugar, high protein, “realistic” low-calorie WIEIAD’s you see, the more your own diet feels like it’s too much. Insufficient. Wrong.
But wrong according to who? A stranger whose body, budget, genetics and lifestyle are nothing like your own? Eating in a way that works for you – that fits your needs, your cravings, your energy, your income – is not a moral, nor a personal failure. A beige freezer dinner after a long shift. Salty butter on warm toast in the middle of the night. Nourishment shouldn’t need to fit an aesthetic, and it certainly shouldn’t need to earn you a body.
You don’t need to delete the app in a blaze of defiance. It can be smaller than that. Closing it mid-scroll when you feel the familiar pangs of comparison and calculations creeping in. Swapping algorithmic inspiration for something closer to home like asking for the recipe of that soup your mum used to make. A chaotic pasta night with flatmates. The meal you know by heart because it’s delicious. Little refusals like these do more than protect your time from scrolling: they protect your peace.
And maybe the most nourishing thing you can do, in a world obsessed with watching, is to make something you love and scoff it without worrying what anyone else is eating.
