Tiffany Graham is a school psychologist who has been practicing for 22 years. Her professional training helps her identify patterns with children and how things such as social media affect them. Due to her collaboration with teens, parents and adults, she is positioned to recognize signs and give advice to evaluate both the risks and benefits of social media when it comes to eating disorders.
Dr. Graham’s answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
How do you think social media affects teenage eating habits?
I think there’s a strong relationship but not a direct link necessarily, but definitely a strong relationship because we live in such a strong comparison culture with both children and adults. Youth see adults on social media a lot, on their phones, tablets, and anywhere actually. So children and youth just match what adults are doing. The issue is with the algorithm — it just populates over and over. So if you look up one diet just to get more information, it’s going to populate more information about that, and you’re going to end up going down the rabbit hole.
What do you think most affects students, seeing their peers on social media or celebrities?
I would venture to say seeing their peers because teengares are extremely intelligent and they realize that celebrities have money, personal trainers and chefs. [Influencers are] working out with their personal trainers, but their friends that they go to school with, they’re more attainable. They’re real people they can actually see in real life, so they have more of an influence on them than a person they would never have any contact with. There may be body goals in terms of the celebrities, but the real impact is the people they can actually talk to and have a conversation with.
What do you think the most harmful impacts coming from these eating habits spread from social media are?
Messing up and destroying their metabolism, as well as not showing them how to be truly disciplined because they think everything is just a quick fix and life is not a quick fix. You have to go through a process in order to, you know, work on a goal in order to get what you like. Examples are like high school, you don’t go in a year and graduate. It’s a process; you have to work at it.
What are some warning signs that parents, coaches, peers and teachers should be looking out for?
If they never want to eat around a group or around people, or if they always want to remove themselves from the table or from the environment. Frequent impairment or complaint when they eat because they’re trying to avoid it, sickness when food is presented, and often compared to other people when they’re around their peers. That’s a sign of body dysmorphia.
Conversely, are these any aspects of social media that can positively influence teenage relationships with food and body image?
I think if a teen can not go down the rabbit hole, they can look up healthy things about the proper caloric intake, healthy foods, healthy diets and not healthy diets. If they can have a balance in what they’re consuming on social media, which can definitely have some pros if they’re disciplined enough. If they can follow some influences that are more realistic in their images. These things can gravitate towards things like this instead of some of the more extreme things that are out there, it can definitely be a positive.
