What do you think? Was I out of line with this take on eating disorders?
It was going viral, of course. Raking in hundreds of thousands of views in a matter of days. Every time I opened the Instagram app on my phone, I was flooded with hundreds of notifications of comments, likes, and shares. Until it abruptly stopped.
My video had been removed, I was banned from going Live for a year, I was not allowed to monetize and none of my content was able to be shown to non-followers. In other words, I had been put in Instagram jail.
I honestly thought there had been a mistake. That AI had flagged my video by mistake because of all the talk of eating disorders in the comments. I really and truly believed that if a human watched the video, it would be restored immediately with full apologies.
Oh bless my naive heart.
Multiple calls to support proved fruitless and it would be months before I “proved” to the giant Meta AI bot that I could be trusted to create content that didn’t “go against community standards”.
So what was the video that caused so much fuss? What had I posted that was so harmful it had to be removed to protect Instagram’s users?
It was background footage of me cooking (I don’t have it saved to post here but it was literally me just scooping mushrooms out of a frying pan) with these words over the top…
During WW2, 36 conscientious objectors agreed to be semi-starved for science.
They became depressed and obsessed with food.
One man cut off three of his fingers with an axe.
They were eating 1500kcal per day, which is more than many popular diets.
And this was the caption down the bottom:
How to develop an ED 👇
Go on a restrictive diet.
Before the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, it was generally thought that an eating d1sorder started in the mind and manifested with food.
But this turned that thinking upside down 😲
36 fit and healthy young men were semi-starved for months.
They became depressed and utterly obsessed with food.
Many read cookbooks in their spare time. One guy even took his girlfriend to a fancy restaurant just so he could watch her eat.
One man cut off three fingers while chopping wood and was unable to say if it was on purpose or an accident…
Many basically seemed like they had developed an eating d1sorder.
That’s what being partially starved on 1500kcal per day did to them.
Turned them into eating d1sorder patients 😬
If your nutrition clients say they have food noise in their head 24/7, are depressed and have lost all zest for life…
The first thing they need to do is ditch dieting.
This is a study I’ve talked about over and over again, because it truly did change how we treat eating disorders. We now know that we can’t ‘fix’ someone’s mind and then wait for their eating habits to change accordingly. We have to push the food, because this helps to heal the mind.
This is why regular eating is one of the first steps on my Food Freedom Framework! You can download the cheat sheet of the Framework as part of my free Swag Bag for health professionals btw!
Now I’m not exactly sure why Instagram took issue with this – I asked countless times but no answers were forthcoming. Perhaps it was the mention of the fingers? Or maybe the fact I had provocatively captioned it “How to develop an ED”?
Regardless, it blows my mind that I could easily go on social media and promote a potato-only diet, or push weight loss medication without telling you any of the side-effects, or claim that my meal plans cure cancer… and I wouldn’t be censored at all. But dare to talk about how dieting causes eating disorders and suffer the wrath of Meta’s giant AI machine!
I think it might be time to post the video again though… Maybe if I alter the wording slightly it won’t be immediately torn down and my account punished this time? What do you think?