SerpApi.Org
When I first heard about the Cyclospora outbreak, I held my breath—not because I was worried about getting sick but because I knew that all the talk about diarrhea would inevitably spur conversations about another d-word: dieting.
Since the outbreak began last month, social media has been teeming with posts from people who say they want to contract cyclosporiasis to lose weight this summer. TikTokkers and Instagrammers who have gotten sick are posting before-and-afters crediting the ailment for their slimmer figures. Others are sharing videos of themselves eating or buying bagged salads, with a text overlay that reads “Losing 10–20 pounds with a parasite is sounding a little good right about now” or “I’m one parasite away from my goal weight.” Some of the posts are intended to be jokes, but that doesn’t make the underlying concept harmless.
People’s willingness to contract a severe parasitic infection that causes explosive diarrhea, cramping, fatigue, and nausea is just the latest example of what diet culture teaches us to believe: that the pursuit of the thin ideal is necessary, even if it means putting your body through hell to attain it.
Diet culture reframes illness as opportunity. Instead of asking, “How do I prevent myself from getting cyclosporiasis?,” many are led to wonder: Could this be an opportunity to lose weight?
I used to ask this same question whenever I got sick. After my mom died of cancer when I was 11, I developed anorexia and struggled with it for most of my adolescence and early adulthood. Anytime I got the flu or a stomach bug, I ate even less. But what’s the big deal? I’d think to myself. The culture all around me condoned it, after all.
When the movie Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion came out in 1997 (the same year I developed my eating disorder), I listened as Michele commented on how much weight Romy had lost for prom: “I was so lucky getting mono,” Romy replied. “That was, like, the best diet ever.”
Fast-forward to 2006, when Emily Blunt’s character in The Devil Wears Prada quipped, “I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight,” or to 2017, when Kim Kardashian tweeted, “The flu can be an amazing diet.” That same year, Cosmopolitan published a controversial story headlined “How This Woman Lost 44 Pounds Without ANY Exercise,” about a woman who lost weight from cancer, just like my mother had.
The idea that illness can be a shortcut to thinness came up during the COVID-19 pandemic too. When I got coronavirus and lost my sense of taste and smell, I had no motivation to eat. Although I had been in eating disorder recovery for many years, I fell back into food restriction and experienced a brief relapse. At the time, I remember seeing Facebook posts from people lamenting the loss of their sense of taste, only to add some version of “But at least I lost some weight!”
The cruel irony of people’s cyclosporiasis weight-loss efforts is that they’re mostly futile. “When someone gets diarrhea, they lose a lot of water in their bowel movements. It might result in a lower number on the scale, but it’s not a loss of body fat,” Mara Gordon, a family physician and author of the newsletter Your Doctor Friend, told me. “That weight loss is typically temporary and goes away as soon as you get rehydrated. Dehydration is no joke.”
Much of the “diarrhea diet” content is intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but that’s part of the problem; when we make light of wanting to get cyclosporiasis to lose weight, we risk causing harm to people of all body shapes and sizes.
“The message tells fat people that it is better to get an illness than to look like them. And it tells thin people that they better be afraid of gaining weight,” Rachel Millner, a clinical psychologist and fat activist, told me. “Diet culture—and patriarchy, misogyny, white supremacy, etc.—has already decided that it is better to die trying to be thin than to be fat. So Cyclospora becomes a way to move closer to the ideal.”
As someone who nearly lost my life to anorexia, I can’t help but think about all the ways we internalize messages telling us we’d be happier, better looking, and more worthy of love if only we lost more weight. While writing my memoir, I interviewed people in their 60s and 70s who had spent their lives chasing a lower number on the scale. I also spoke with several younger people who had sought medical help for eating disorders only to be prescribed weight loss. Some then resorted to even more extreme weight-loss behaviors to prove that they were sick enough to deserve care.
That’s why I don’t get mad so much as sad when I see content creators trying to make themselves sick by eating Taco Bell’s shredded lettuce, which has been linked to the outbreak. One TikTok, featuring two young women going to Taco Bell to get “#20poundslighter,” has been viewed over 200,000 times. Another video, of a woman hurriedly making herself a salad in hopes of contracting cyclosporiasis, has gotten more than 3 million views. The caption tags it #satire, making it difficult to tell where the joke ends and the endorsement begins.
On Instagram, registered dietitian Shana Minei Spence compared people trying to get sick with cyclosporiasis to 1990s dieters who knowingly ate potato chips with Olestra (a fat substitute that causes diarrhea). “When diet culture has a will, it will always find a way,” Spence posted. “This is also why I say weight loss and being healthy aren’t synonymous. Too many folks out there don’t actually care about health; they care about thinness only.”
It’s hard not to care about thinness—especially when it’s increasingly attainable through weight-loss drugs and filters that can slim and smooth our faces and bodies. When this warped ideal becomes the be-all and end-all objective, it’s easier to seek out and produce content that reinforces our goal. That so many of us readily internalize these posts suggests it’s easier to accept this ideal as “normal” than to resist it.
We don’t have to accept it, though. “The culture wants us to either agree with the messaging or for us to be gaslit into thinking these messages are no big deal,” Millner, the psychologist, said. “So name that they are a big deal and they are harmful. Once you’ve named the harm, it can be easier to separate yourself from the messaging.”
My younger self got swept away by diet culture, which was a nameless force throughout my adolescence. I now know what I didn’t then: There’s power in naming this force—to weaken its influence over us and, ultimately, over how we measure our worth.
