Lucy Findlay explores the commercial forces behind the evolution of diet culture in an age of social media.

When me and my friends all got our first phones, we were met with lectures about how dangerous they were. Repeatedly, we were told that ‘what you see online isn’t real’ and ‘don’t compare yourself to people online’. This doesn’t blunt the force of online spaces and nowhere is this force more insidious than in online diet culture, an ecosystem where we see the internet at its most influential. Where there are viewers, there is profit.

There is no capacity for neutrality because social media is ultimately a business which seeks profit at the expense of ethical concerns. From the moment you open TikTok or Instagram you are subject to their echo chambers and algorithms which have the sly ability to push harmful narratives. Whilst there have been efforts to fight this danger, such as the UK’s Online Safety Act, culture moves faster than policy and online culture, slippery and ever-monetised, moves fastest of all.

The late 2010s onwards were meant to be the age of ‘wokeness’, which brought the death of diet culture, but in truth it simply changed its language. The new vocabulary belongs to wellness and what looks like self-care, functions as a command. We don’t see ‘thinsipration’ but ‘clean girls’, beneath the rebrand, however, the same directive sticks – that to control hunger is to control yourself. This control is not moral, but profitable. And mass dissemination through social media platforms give ample opportunity for monetising aspiration.

If the invention of the camera gave us modern vanity, then mass media commodified it. Starting with 90s ‘heroin chic’, this era did not necessarily intend to glamorise cadaverous bodies, but it was saturation that turned this into something darker. Davide Sorrenti, the zeitgeist of this aesthetic, meant to create a raw documentation of the grunge era. This was swept into a cultural current that rewarded frailty and cigarettes with commercial success. The nihilistic undertones of 90s grunge—its disinterest in conforming, its distrust of the mainstream—have since been sanitised and repurposed for the new digital age. What once questioned beauty norms now fuels a subtler pressure: this is expressed through phrases like “listen to your body”, “eat intuitively”, “try intermittent fasting” and “optimise your health.” Each principle on its own can be genuinely supportive, but online, nothing stays neutral for long.

This shift from subculture to mainstream was accelerated by reality television and fashion-related media in the 2000s. Shows like America’s Next Top Model (2003) popularised the ultra-thin look. This turned what had been an edgy, niche aesthetic into a broadly recognised standard of aspiration. The subversive, grunge-inflected fragility of the 90s became a blueprint for mainstream desirability, showing audiences that thinness was not only fashionable, but commercially and culturally rewarded.

Unhealthy habits have been rebranded as a new form of wellness, under this guise they can enter the mainstream and maximise profits.

The global wellness economy, for example, is forecast to hit $9 trillion by 2028. When we are being shown what someone eats in a day and that person’s appearance is presented as desirable, we will buy what they sell. The online sphere has become more than a platform to provide an image of aspiration, but a tool to achieve it.