Are you being ‘thinspired’ on Facebook?

According to a new study, watching images of extremely thin women on Facebook can trigger feelings of body dissatisfaction and eating disorders.

A lot of these images are often cropped to focus on just specific body parts, leading young women to think that is how they should ideally look. If a girl looks for terms like attractive, pretty or fit, she will find images which may give her an inferiority complex.

‘She will likely find images of headless, scantily clad, sexualized women and their body parts onsocial media,’ said Jannath Ghaznavi from the University of California, Davis.  

For the study, Ghaznavi and associate professor Laramie Taylor examined about 300 images from Twitter and Pinterest postings that used the terms ‘thinspiration’ and ‘thinspo’ to tag images and ideas promoting extreme thinness and often casting eating disorders in a positive light.

Images from Twitter, popular among younger audiences, were most likely to be cropped to remove heads and focus on specific body parts compared to Pinterest.

‘This could prompt these girls and women to resort to extreme dieting, excessive exercise or other harmful behaviours in order to achieve this thin ideal,’ Ghaznavi added. 

This is indeed a cause for concern, which parents and teachers should address whenever a girl child is in her teenage years.