I recently saw an article from the NY Post titled “Bye-bye booty: Heroin chic is back” doing the rounds on social media.

I took the time to carefully read the article. More than once. The headline appears, to me anyway, to be with the intention of being click-bait. Online authors are rewarded for creating content that will get as many eyes on it as possible. The headline certainly has done that. The response has been almost entirely scathing of the article. The article doesn’t explicitly celebrate the idea of “heroin chic”, but it certainly doesn’t do enough to critique it for my liking. It mostly discusses the origin of “heroin chic”, body shapes and the weight of various celebrities.

Within the piece Kim Kardashian’s recent weight loss gets discussed. It’s claimed in the article that she lost sixteen pounds in three weeks. As someone with many years of experience in the fitness industry, I can promise you that is so drastically unhealthy it doesn’t bear thinking about. With no attempt to debunk this insane claim, the NY Post has shared an article that has potential to be unbelievably damaging.

One in seven men and one in five women experience an eating disorder by forty, with 95% of those cases beginning before the age of twenty-five. Couple this with the fact that the NHS is now treating more young people for eating disorders than ever before, we can start to see why this article could be problematic. We have an already particularly susceptible demographic, struggling because of the pandemic, now reading that “heroin chic” is back.

I’ve worked with many people, mostly women, who have had or continue to have various eating disorders. The NY Post’s distasteful attempt to get eyes on its article has left a bitter taste in my mouth. As a personal trainer, I know the lie of how much weight can be lost. As a counsellor, I know the mental health impact of eating disorders.

It feels like we need to be less concerned with people’s size and more concerned with the online content we’re subjecting them to.