None of Us Are “That Girl” (And That’s Okay

by Mara Logan

Our generation is good at mental health. More than that, we are self-care experts: girlboss, gaslight, gatekeep, seven-step skincare routine. Repeat.

We are experts at the illusionary.

“Who doesn’t fetishize being a glamorous, productive, perfect version of themselves?” journalist Ruchira Sharma asks. And who doesn’t? I certainly did.

I graduated highschool in May of 2019, and in the summer months that followed, I fell into the algorithm of the Instagram explore page. For years I’d wavered on the brink of the chasm— diet propaganda posts popping up here and there on my feed—but this time I went over the edge. I saved a meal prep post, liked an influencer’s photo, and soon my explore page was inundated with thinspo content showing the calorie counts on different-sized bowls of carrots.

Social media in that form was a critical part of pushing me to develop bulimia and orthorexia.

The first time I purged, I told myself that this was my wakeup call. I realized I had pushed myself (my body) too far; I took a step back. The calorie counting, Fitbit obsession, and diet account worship didn’t stop all at once, but I became more conscious of “bad” behaviors. When I saw calorie counts and workout videos displayed shamelessly on my explore page, I intentionally avoided them, desperately trying to cultivate a social media experience that didn’t fuel my eating disorder.

A month later, in September of 2019, I began my first month of college.

For the better part of a year I purged “only” occasionally; I told myself I was okay. house, my room, with only my phone and social media. But my Instagram explore page looked different, and I believed I had outsmarted my disease.

Still, my mindset, my self image, how I defined my worth—that was all the same as it had been six months earlier. My disease hadn’t disappeared; it had just adapted.

I started spending hours each day on social media—sometimes Instagram, but mostly Pinterest. I created board after board depicting the ideal that I sought. Not just images of thin bodies, but a life and lifestyle that I imagined was perfect but could only be lived by people who looked like that.

It was at this point that my bulimia reached its peak. I was isolated by the pandemic and my own behavior, and I convinced myself that I would come out of this experience new, different, and better.

I see my journey through my eating disorder as a microcosm of the larger battle between our generation, social media, and mental health.

When editing this article, one of my friends pointed out something to me—the language I used when talking about my disease inherently placed blame upon me. I made Pinterest boards. I consumed content. I purged, again and again.

It’s true, these are all actions that I took. But this is also the lie that social media tells us. It is the excuse frequently used by companies like Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest when they are forced to defend themselves against horrifying statistics like the one published in WSJ’s recent whistleblower piece1: “thirtytwo percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.” The line from social companies again and again is that “consumers can tailor their own content”, but this ignores the reality of these platforms’ algorithms and the reality of consumers’ limited agency.

To make a choice about the content we consume, we have to understand what we’re consuming.

Consumer agency is the lie that social media tells us and the lie we tell ourselves. As consumers, we often fail to recognize how so much of the content on our feed caters to the racist, fatphobic, and misogynistic structure of our society. When I use Pinterest, I have to fight to find images of women who are not white and thin because that is the platform’s default.

These toxic standards are still pervasive in the newest avenue for diet culture marketing: the “That Girl” trend, a TikTok and IG trend that focuses on self care and “being your best self”, supposedly through building a health-centered routine.

On her blog Lifestyle by Stephanie2, Stephanie shares with her followers:

“I want to become ‘that girl’. The girl who prioritizes her health and well being. Do you want to as well? I’m a true believer in that we should just get started. Stop talking about it. Start doing. So let’s start with optimizing our morning routine.”

She goes on to share a routine that begins with waking up an hour earlier than usual and is followed by drinking water, exercise, showering, meditation, and breakfast. Stephanie concludes her post as chipper as she begins it: “Get to work, studying, or whatever thing you’d like to accomplish. I hope you’re feeling great.”

On the surface the “that girl” trend is focused on taking care of all aspects of yourself, designed to help you reach a higher level of productivity and happiness. But in reality, the trend is marketing the same thing diet culture has been promising women for the last hundred years: the perfect life, made possible by the perfect body. Refinery29 author Ruchira Sharma begins her article on the routine3 by sharing a brief but horrifying tweet from Dahyuni, a young teen who writes: “All that the ‘that girl’ trend did to me is give me an eating disorder and made me hate my life.”

Sharma continues, describing the videos as “blending classic wellness tropes like avocado on toast and early morning yoga with self-optimisation and hustle porn. In these videos, thin, predominantly white women wake up, work out, eat, write their goals for the day and drink an iced coffee, all before 7am. Crucially, they make it look beautiful and serene. Everything – from the depiction of meals to the perfectly laid out workout set – has a minimalist aesthetic, resembling a moving Pinterest board.”

In her article4 “Why the ‘That Girl’ routine is more sinister than it seems,” Jasmine Wallis explains, “While the That Girl trend isn’t as obviously damaging, it’s only because of our recent awareness around mental health that this content is marketed as aspirational ‘self-care’ rather than toxic thinspo content.”

The bottom line? Gen Z recognizes the toxicity of the diets sold on the covers of magazines in the grocery store checkout lines, but we fail to realize that new content that’s replaced them is really selling more of the same—it just perpetuates the same harm in a prettier, clickable package. And the algorithms used by socials like Instagram, TikTok, VSCO, and Pinterest are aggressive in filling our feeds with either—or both—streams of toxic content.

I went from seeing social media feeds filled with blatant diet culture propaganda to Pinterest boards filled with thin, white women. Although the latter may appear less harmful on the surface, in both cases, my eating disorder was fueled by the content I consumed.

We have exchanged the glaring for the subtle by creating an illusion of acceptance, positivity, and healing. But the same structural problems—diet culture, racism, misogyny, classism— are still integral to upholding that illusion. We’ve just hidden these problems in a new, more aesthetic form, all the more malicious for the guise it wears.

I have come a long way in my ED recovery. In terms of body image, I’m in an infinitely better place than I was two years ago, or even last year. I haven’t purged in a year and a half, and I’m proud of that. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about it; it doesn’t mean I haven’t wanted to. The thoughts I used to entertain openly still lurk and occasionally make an appearance. I have to be careful, conscious about the food I eat, the method and frequency of my exercise, and the social media content I consume.

But the most difficult part about avoiding or navigating social media is that it feels inescapable. There are two social pressures:

the pressure to use platforms like Instagram and Pinterest and, once you’re on the platforms, the pressure to consume aestheticized content and become the ideal you see on your page.

The truth is, I’m not going to stop using social media; for all its toxicity, I like it. The post-high school world is big, and for better or worse, social media can make it feel smaller. As social companies preach, and as Instagram stated in response to WSJ’s recent whistleblowing, social media isn’t good or bad, it’s both. The question is, does one outweigh the other? And that’s something every individual has to decide for themselves.

A second truth: As long as I’m on social media, some of that toxicity will continue to manifest in my feed.

I’m writing about the That Girl routine now because although it wasn’t the original trigger for my eating disorders, seeing videos earlier this year sparked feelings and consumption habits that felt dangerous. Because on the surface, what the That Girl routine promotes isn’t an eating disorder, it’s “health”, presented in its most aesthetic form.

That terrifies me because what allowed me to stay engaged with my eating disorder for so long was the belief that I was ultimately helping myself. I thought I was making myself healthier.

What finally allowed me to stop engaging was witnessing the negative effects that purging began to have on my body: acid reflux, cavities. It was only then that I was able to recognize I was harming rather than helping my body.

A few weeks ago, I saw a TikTok of a girl in a university dorm, captioned “when you get ‘that girl’ as a roommate”, followed by clips of her roommate doing yoga on their dorm room floor. The comments were almost exclusively from other girls instructing the maker of the video to join her roommate in the That Girl routine, thereby fixing her life and saving her mental health.

The content out there scares me because it’s dangerous. Videos and algorithms tell children, teens, and adults that the way to be healthy, to solve your physical insecurities and mental health challenges, is to subscribe to a “health” regimen. But in today’s social media culture, “health regimen” or “health routine” are just coded words for a diet, and they have the same negative impacts.

Although a routine may be what some individuals need, it isn’t a secret fix for serious mental health challenges like depression or anxiety. Worse, presenting routines as a viable avenue to solve mental health struggles implies that individuals who aren’t able to overcome their challenges through this method are inherently flawed, when in reality the flaws are with the routine, social media and its algorithms, and our pervasive diet culture.

Essentially, “health regimens” may contribute to and drive, rather than fix, disordered eating, low self-esteem, and negative mental health.

What we need to do, what I need to do, what social media companies need to do is stop placing the blame on individual consumers, whether ourselves or others. Our problem is a collective one: Through social media trends like That Girl, consumers pressure each other to be perfect. But when those pressures inevitably lead to negative effects like EDs, platforms refuse to take responsibility for promoting toxic content, placing the blame on the consumer. Ultimately, we end up harmed and isolated, simultaneously hating ourselves, and blaming ourselves for the hatred.

By now it is well established that social platforms’ promotion of diet culture drives the development of eating disorders and damages mental health. It’s time to recognize that its replacement with the supposedly health-oriented That Girl routine is only more of the same—it is diet culture in a new and perhaps more dangerous manifestation.

Instead of buying into another destructive social media trend, we need to stop hating ourselves and lying to each other. None of us are That Girl, no matter how much we may want to be, no matter how much we may pretend. I like romanticizing my life as much as the next person, but now it’s critical to acknowledge the realities of all of our days: the exhaustion, the body dysmorphia, the chaos, the imperfection.