Why is my Instagram doing keto?
Jasmine Garcha (she/they) // Contributor
Sophia Spanos McGill (she/her) // Illustrator
My feed on the app formerly known as Twitter and my Instagram Explore page have both been littered with diet fads and food videos that are almost unhealthily healthy. Not only this, but discussions of how to best lose weight have been thrown in my face as well, and as a recovered anorexic, I’m extremely unappreciative.
I don’t even diet or work out anymore so I have no idea why I’m being targeted with dangerous fitness tips. Plus, I thought we’d left the caloric deficit talk back in 2012 at the same time that we shunned pro-ana from mainstream content.
If you don’t know, pro-ana (pro-anorexia) is a community online where people who suffer from and wish not to recover from anorexia, a food-restrictive eating disorder, gather to promote the disorder within each other to lose weight faster.
A lot of the content I’ve been seeing about dieting, losing weight, or ‘healthy’ eating has truly resembled thinly veiled pro-anorexia content. Even the way I’ve heard people within the dieting community talk about their dieting tips or techniques gives me flashbacks to Tumblr in 2014. I once overheard someone tell a person who was trying to lose weight, “You can never eat until you’re full. You have to always be at least a little hungry.” I was speechless. The calorie restriction community seriously needs to hire in-house therapists to work at their gyms.
Does caloric deficit truly help you lose weight if it’s meant to be done for a short period of time before you resume a regular diet? Is it healthy and sustainable in the long term if you choose to keep at it?
When you start eating regularly after a caloric deficit, you regain the weight you lost. So what if you just… keep going? Well, long-term calorie restriction can cause malnutrition, specifically deficiencies in iron, folate, and B12 vitamins, which can slow down your metabolism and possibly be the cause of weight gain once you stop restricting. Restricting can also cause issues in your bowels, increase fatigue and nausea, and decrease fertility and reproductive hormones. Basically, it causes many of the same long-term effects as anorexia.
While we’re talking about long-term effects, let’s discuss keto. The ketogenic diet isn’t meant for the average person; it was introduced as a treatment for epilepsy in the 1920s and was even abandoned as a practice for that purpose. Keto can cause low blood pressure, kidney stones, and a risk of heart disease.
So, why not just eat healthier without giving up everything except kale? Crash diets can be so harmful but you can absolutely still lose weight (if that is your goal) while eating the required calorie intake that is needed to maintain your health. You don’t need to give up your favourite foods in order to eat healthy.here are actually many Instagram pages out there that promote healthy eating without calorie restrictions or dangerous diets.
Some of my personal favourites include @dr.vegan and @plantyou who both include vegan recipes; the former specializes in German dishes while the latter specializes in ‘scrappy’ cooking (making dishes out of leftover scraps). Another vegan creator is @doctorbowl, who creates Indian fusion dishes.
As for non-vegan creators, @dishingouthealth is a registered dietitian and former food journalist who now posts her healthy food recipes on Instagram. For high-protein foods, there’s @jalalsamfit whose food actually looks so good I want to jump through the screen and attack it. If you’re looking for healthy fast food alternatives, there’s @_aussiefitness who recreates popular menu items from fast food chains. McDonald’s could never.