South Africa is living inside a cultural pressure cooker where appearance has become currency, validation is a metric, and self-worth is measured in filters, follows, and “body goals.” Eating disorders are not developing in a vacuum,  they are developing in a world that demands constant self-monitoring, relentless comparison, and a level of self-critique the human brain was never designed to withstand. Modern culture hasn’t just normalised obsession with weight, shape, food, and fitness, it has industrialised it. Algorithms reward it. Influencers monetise it. Apps track it. And for people who are already emotionally overloaded, insecure, anxious, traumatised, perfectionistic, or simply trying to find their place in an unstable world, this digital environment becomes the fuel that accelerates an eating disorder from a coping mechanism into a full-scale compulsion. The result is a generation of South Africans who look confident online while privately collapsing under the weight of impossible expectations.

The Rise of Self-Surveillance

Social media has turned the human body into a daily project. People are inspecting themselves more often, more intensely, and more critically than any previous generation. The phone becomes a mirror, but sharper, harsher, and less forgiving. Every angle is analysed. Every photo is compared. Every video is scrutinised. What used to be a passing insecurity becomes a full-time internal monitoring system. Eating disorders thrive in self-surveillance. They feed on hyper-awareness, hyper-criticism, and the obsession with control. The more someone monitors themselves, the more they begin to distrust and disconnect from their body. They start to live through the lens rather than lived experience. This creates the perfect psychological environment for restriction, bingeing, purging, or compulsive exercise to take root. The person begins policing their food the same way they’ve been trained to police their appearance.

Filters Rewrite Reality, and the Brain Adapts

Filters flatten skin, shrink waistlines, sharpen jawlines, brighten eyes, and create an unrealistic version of the self. With repeated exposure, this filtered identity becomes the person’s internal benchmark. The real body begins to feel wrong, flawed, or unacceptable. This is not vanity,  this is physiological conditioning. The brain adjusts its expectations based on repeated images. If someone views a filtered version of themselves more often than reality, the real body feels like a failure, something to fix, reduce, sculpt, or control. Young people are especially vulnerable because their sense of identity is still forming. But adults experience it too. Women who never struggled with body image in their twenties collapse under comparison culture in their thirties. Men who only cared about fitness for health become obsessed with shredded influencers online. Eating disorders slip into this gap between real self and filtered self. The more distorted the internal standard, the more extreme the behaviours that follow.

Influencer Wellness Culture Disguises Pathology as Discipline

The biggest accelerant of eating disorders today is not fashion modelling or celebrity culture, it’s “wellness.” Influencers preach fasting, detoxes, transformation challenges, “clean eating,” low-carb lifestyles, calorie deficits, and gym obsession under the disguise of mental strength and “healthy” habits. But wellness culture is often repackaged pathology. The rules, rigidity, guilt, and anxiety associated with these lifestyles mirror eating disorder psychology almost exactly. The language has shifted from “thinness” to “health,” but the emotional damage is identical. South Africans see influencers with abs, green smoothies, and impossible routines and assume these are admirable goals. What they don’t see is the obsession, emotional instability, and constant hunger that lifestyle requires. Eating disorders flourish when dangerous behaviour is socially rewarded. In today’s world, pathology is rewarded with likes, praise, admiration, and money.

How Algorithms Trap Vulnerable Minds

Social media algorithms are not neutral. They detect what you linger on. A person pauses to look at a fitness influencer once, and suddenly their entire feed becomes gym culture, diet hacks, calorie-tracking tutorials, and body transformations. Someone who watches one ED-adjacent video gets pulled into an entire ecosystem of “What I eat in a day,” “Calorie deficit tricks,” “Fasted workouts,” and “Body recomp.” Vulnerable users, especially teenagers, anxious adults, people with trauma histories, or those struggling with self-esteem, become trapped in a feedback loop where their internal insecurities are reinforced every single time they open their phone. What starts as curiosity becomes obsession. What begins as inspiration becomes pressure. Eventually, the algorithm knows the user better than they know themselves, and it continues feeding the very content that destabilises them emotionally. Eating disorders love predictable patterns and constant reinforcement. Social media provides both in endless supply.

The Collapse Between Fitness and Punishment

South Africa has fully embraced gym culture. From CrossFit boxes to bodybuilding communities to bootcamps, fitness has become a status signal. This would be harmless if it weren’t for the emotional distortion that many people carry into these spaces. Exercise, for many with eating disorders, stops being movement and becomes punishment. Burn off guilt. Earn food. Make up for a binge. Control anxiety. Silence shame. Escape feelings. The gym becomes a place to regulate emotions violently, not a place to build strength. Fitness influencers fuel this psychology by celebrating extreme discipline, low body fat, and punishing routines that ignore the emotional cost. Exercise addiction is one of the most overlooked forms of eating disorder behaviour in South Africa. High-functioning adults disguise it as commitment. Teens hide it as “sports performance.” Parents misinterpret it as responsibility. What they don’t see is the emotional desperation underneath.

Why Comparison Culture Hits South Africa Harder 

South Africa is a country built on inequality, instability, and extreme social pressure. People live in daily comparison, between neighbourhoods, schools, bodies, lifestyles, cars, fashion, and class. Social media intensifies those comparisons by collapsing the distance between your reality and someone else’s curated highlight reel. You do not compare yourself to your neighbour anymore,  you compare yourself to influencers in Dubai, models in Cape Town, personal trainers in LA, and curated perfection from all over the world. This relentless comparison widens the psychological gap between who you are and who you think you should be. Eating disorders feed on that gap. The bigger the gap, the stronger the disorder becomes. For South Africans already dealing with stress, trauma, financial pressure, relationship instability, or emotional overload, comparison culture becomes the final blow that sends them into pathological coping patterns.

The Mental Routine No One Sees

Eating disorders begin long before food changes. They begin with body checking. Looking at the reflection in every shop window. Pinching the waist. Running hands over ribs. Pulling clothing tighter. Adjusting angles in photos. Zooming in. Becoming hyper-aware of the stomach, thighs, chin, and arms. This self-scanning becomes automatic, a background mental process that never switches off. Social media trains this behaviour through constant exposure to idealised bodies. The more someone checks themselves, the more dissatisfied they feel. The more dissatisfied they feel, the more likely they are to turn to food control as a solution. These internal rituals are silent. They don’t look dramatic. No one notices them. But they are the earliest signs of a developing eating disorder.

Why “Healthy Tracking” Apps Often Lead to Unhealthy Obsession

Calorie-tracking apps, step counters, macro calculators, and body-fat scanners claim to promote health. But for vulnerable individuals, they become obsessive tools, digital extensions of emotional instability. Tracking becomes ritual. Numbers become morality. Breaking a streak feels like failure. Hitting the algorithm’s targets delivers relief. These apps provide the illusion of control, certainty, and predictability, exactly what emotionally overloaded people crave. The more someone tracks, the more their self-worth becomes tied to numbers. And once numbers become identity, disordered eating is not far behind.

The Pandemic Accelerated Everything

COVID-19 broke routines, isolated people, destabilised mental health, and forced millions into online spaces where comparison culture exploded. People were left alone with their thoughts, their bodies, their insecurities, and their screens. Eating disorders skyrocketed globally, and South Africa was no exception. Without structure, many turned to food or restriction to regulate emotions. Without social contact, online appearance became the primary measure of self-worth. Without stability, compulsive routines became the only predictable part of the day. The pandemic didn’t create eating disorders,  it accelerated the psychological vulnerabilities that already existed.

Why Calling It “Influencer Pressure” Misses the Point

Families often blame influencers, but that oversimplifies the problem. The real issue is not the influencer,  it is the internal fragility that social media exploits. People struggling with trauma, anxiety, low self-esteem, emotional instability, or chronic stress are primed for comparison. They were vulnerable long before the algorithm found them. Eating disorders emerge when internal vulnerability meets external pressure. Social media is not the cause, it is the amplifier.

Eating Disorders Thrive in Digital Environments 

An eating disorder does not need starvation to grow. It needs emotional instability. Exhaustion. Shame. Pressure. Disconnection. Social media delivers all of these. The platform becomes the emotional backdrop shaping how people see themselves. The digital world rewards unhealthy behaviour, punishes imperfection, and glamorises extremes. It creates a mental ecosystem where a person’s sense of self becomes dangerously fragile. Eating disorders step into that fragility and offer a solution, a distorted, obsessive, destructive solution, but a solution nonetheless.

Breaking the Addiction to Self-Surveillance 

Families often tell their loved ones to “just delete the app.” That is naïve. Eating disorders do not disappear when the phone is switched off. The internal critic remains. The self-surveillance continues. The rituals and compulsions stay alive. What treatment does is help the person build internal capacity so the external world loses its power. It teaches them emotional regulation so they no longer rely on food or control as coping tools. It rebuilds identity so appearance is no longer the core of self-worth. It stabilises their emotional system so comparison does not break them. Social media becomes less dangerous not because it changes, but because the person becomes stronger.

The World Won’t Slow Down

The digital world will only become more intense, more curated, and more demanding. South Africans cannot wait for social media to become healthier. They need to build emotional resilience now. Eating disorder treatment gives people the tools to disconnect from comparison culture without collapsing. It teaches them how to exist in a world of filters without needing to become one. It reconnects them to real life, real food, real bodies, real relationships, and real emotional capacity. In a world obsessed with how people look, eating disorder treatment focuses on what the person feels and why they feel it. That shift is what saves lives.