Modelmydiet.com: Bit Of Fun Or Really Dangerous?

At first glance, modelmydiet.com looks like an innocuous website. A bit of fun, something to play around on, something to give you motivation when you're on a diet and striving to achieve the 'perfect' body. Side note, if you've got a body, it's perfect. Enough said.

But there is something so, so wrong with websites like this, and it's part of the reason why our society is so obsessed with body image, and achieving the 'perfect' body. The media is fixated on women's weight and tearing someone in the public eye apart if they have the slightest bit of fat showing. I mean, no wonder are women of all ages so worried about their weight, and so obsessive about looking right when everywhere they turn they are being sold on what the 'right' body looks like, and ways and means to achieve this. And sadly, this can mean sliding right down the slippery slope into an eating disorder.

Anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, orthorexia, all are dangerous and destructive in their own ways. I have experience with an eating disorder myself. For as long as I can remember I've not had a good relationship with food or my body, fueled partly by the dance world I was so immersed in for so long, but also by the media I am surrounded by every day. I would give anything to be thin, to walk down the street and know that society would accept me, not immediately judge me and dismiss me for being a fat girl. And yes, I am fat. I'm trying not to shy away from that word anymore, to pretend it's anything other than a word.

And that's why websites like modelmydiet.com are so goddamn dangerous. I went on to the website just to have a look, and immediately got sucked down the rabbit hole of seeing how much 'better' I would look 50lbs, 70lbs, 100lbs, 150lbs lighter than what I am currently. The ED thoughts began to come back- 'if you'd just stop eating, you could look like that'. 'Imagine what you could do if you weighed 100lbs'. 'Starve tomorrow, it's for the best'. 'You're fat, and no one will ever love you'.

Thoughts I've been trying to get rid of for years flooded straight back into my mind. Poisonous. Festering. It took all the willpower I had to shut off the website and remind myself of why I love and embrace body positivity, and why I'm trying so hard to recover. But if 13 year old Beth had gone onto that website, I dread to think what damage it would have done to me.

Model My Diet is dangerous. Model My Diet is just another facet of the dangerous world of the internet for young, impressionable people. Model My Diet should not exist.

Have you any experience with this website, or any other like it?

Bethany