How TikTok ruined my relationship with my body

I was 18 years old when I first made an account on TikTok. At first, the app was known for the carefree dances that I would learn with my friends for hours late at night, all throughout my first year of university. I didn’t think that a couple months in, the app that once brought me so much pleasure and entertainment would have such a toxic hold over the way I viewed myself. 

Once those nights of laughing over my friends’ and I’s dance skills came to a sudden end due to the pandemic, TikTok became a much different experience for me than what it was intended for. Not only did I become obsessed with the app—as it was one of my only forms of entertainment during the height of those quarantine months in the beginning of 2020—but it also shifted from carefree videos to those of beautiful girls showing off their ‘perfect bodies’. 

Watching these videos at 18 years old, I began to ask myself why I didn’t look like the girls on the screen and began to compare my insecurities to these girls’ features. It wasn’t healthy and was the beginning of a very scary obsession. 

As the pandemic continued, my time on TikTok never decreased and  my ‘For You Page’(FYP) became infiltrated with typically thin girls making ‘What I Eat in a Day’ videos. No matter how problematic it was and how much I recognized the toxicity of viewing other girls’ food and eating patterns, I couldn’t escape them on my page, making nights of endless scrolling detrimental to the way I viewed health. 

During fall 2020, these toxic videos of what people eat in a day trying to lose weight, or girls body-checking themselves were at an all time high on my TikTok FYP. At the time, it was having a mindless effect, but looking back, I was at my worst mentally. I became obsessed with watching videos of weight loss hacks and constantly working out. Although I may have felt thin, I was not healthy, and most of all, I was not happy.

It’s been almost three years since I’ve downloaded the app and still at 20 years old, I find myself falling into these same patterns of disordered eating and comparing myself to others.

The scariest thing is, I’m not the youngest girl on this app. Although at 20 years old I am more confident and less impressionable than I was during my young teenage years, I am still affected by what I see on TikTok. As a young girl scrolling through my FYP, I couldn’t imagine the long-term effects these types of videos can have on their developing brains.

Although I don’t have all the answers as this issue is still something I struggle with, I am now able to recognize when I am falling into a deep rabbit hole of insecurity due to TikTok and I’ve found some ways to help me out of that. 

The first and most important thing to remember is that while everyone is different, everyone is beautiful. You’ll never be happy with yourself if you keep comparing your body to others. Secondly, when I see a page or account that I know will affect my body image, I block it. Instead, I focus on certain influencers on the app that encourage differences in bodies and promote inclusivity such as Remi Bader. This helps me remind myself that I should continue to love the way I look and assures me that food is fuel and I need to eat.

Although TikTok is meant to provide entertainment for its users and be a space to express creativity, it has become a very toxic place for anyone who struggles with body image. The worst and best thing about the app is that anyone can make a TikTok. This means that anyone can spread misinformation, but there are too many impressionable kids and adults using the app for this to be accepted as common practice. As a user of the app, it’s important to remind ourselves how important it is to stay educated and know what will pull our trigger, and how to get out of these toxic mindsets overall.