Craze for skinny selfies 'is fuelling eating disorders': Priory psychiatrist warns competitive dieting 'diaries' trend is creating damaging pressures

  • Growing number of women are documenting weight loss with 'selfies'
  • Priory psychiatrist said competitive dieting can exacerbate anorexia
  • Dr Alex Yellowlees claims this creates damaging psychological pressures 
  • Geordie Shore stars and Millie Mackintosh all post 'skinny selfies'

By Harriet Sime for the Daily Mail

Published: 20:03 EST, 2 February 2015 | Updated: 05:14 EST, 3 February 2015

A growing number of young women are fuelling dangerous eating disorders by taking 'selfies' to document their weight loss, a leading expert has warned.

Dr Alex Yellowlees, medical director and consultant psychiatrist at the Priory hospital group, said more and more young women suffering from eating disorders are taking pictures of themselves and sharing them with friends.

This competitive selfie dieting 'diaries' trend, he says, is creating damaging psychological pressures that can exacerbate anorexia and other potentially fatal illnesses.

Selfies - a self-portrait photograph taken with a hand-held digital camera or camera phone - have become increasingly popular among social media users over the last few years.

Millie Mackintosh has been criticised by anorexia campaigners after her rapper husband Professor Green said a photograph of her was a 'thinspiration'

Millie Mackintosh has been criticised by anorexia campaigners after her rapper husband Professor Green said a photograph of her was a 'thinspiration'

Dr Yellowlees said: 'Some people will take repeated pictures of themselves at various stages of their illness, and send them to others.

'They want to keep a record of their illness and see for themselves, as it were, the progress they think they are making towards anorexia, but they will also transmit the images to other sufferers on occasions.

'It's the younger women doing this. They tend to be in their teens or in their twenties and really into their phones.

'It's only become very apparent to me in the last year. Patients have talked to me about it.

'It's a reflection of the social media age. Devices make it so easy to do and it is a way of people expressing themselves and their attitude towards the illness. It's a new and rising trend to me, and it's certainly happening among increasing numbers of young people.'

Student Holly Temple, who took 'thinspiration selfies' to track her dramatic weight loss, spoke out last year to warn others of the dangers.

The 17-year-old, from Woking, Surrey, uploaded pictures of her shrinking frame onto a password protected blog as motivation to continue to lose more weight.

Geordie Shore star Vicky Pattison regularly posts 'skinny selfies' documenting her dramatic wright loss 

She reached six stone and was on the verge of being hospitalised for the second time, before something finally 'clicked' and she began to regain weight.

Dr Yellowlees, who works at the Priory Hospital Glasgow, said in some cases, young women were encouraged to reduce their weight to dangerous levels by looking at so-called 'thinspiration' websites.

Thinspiration websites, some which display images of concave stomachs and protruding ribs, include blogs written by extreme dieters who upload their 'tips and tricks' to encourage others with eating disorders to lose more weight.

Some sites, and hashtags, promote the pursuit of the 'thigh gap', when women try to become so thin that their thighs do not touch even when their feet are together.

Disturbing photographs and internet blogs are often accompanied by 'thinspirational' messages such as 'food is the enemy' and 'starving for perfection'.

Holly Hagan regularly posts 'skinny selfies'

Holly Hagan (left) and Charlotte Crosby (right), who both starred in Geordie Shore, also regularly post pictures of themselves documenting their weight loss 

One site, for example, suggested that grumbling stomach noises were in fact 'applause' for self-starvation.

Dr Yellowlees's warning, ahead of Eating Disorders Awareness Week (23-27 February), came as the Priory Group, - the UK's largest provider of eating disorders treatments outside the NHS - disclosed it had seen a 15 per cent rise in adult patients admitted with eating disorders in just one year, increasing to 535 in 2014, up from 463 in 2013.

Although the largest group of patients were those aged between 18 and 25, with 169 admissions, the largest increase in admissions occurred between those aged 36 and 45 which almost doubled from 40 to 73.

Dr Yellowlees said that an increasing number of women in their thirties and forties were also seeking help for eating disorders, caused in part by the stress of juggling a career with a husband, home and children.

He told the Daily Mail: 'We are in the middle of an epidemic of women who are not satisfied with their body shape and women in middle age are increasingly vulnerable to developing an eating disorder.'

Some 1.6 million people in the UK are affected by an eating disorder, of which around 11 per cent are male.

Anorexia, one of a number of eating disorders, has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder, from medical complications associated with the illness as well as suicide. 

Comments (66)

Share what you think

 View all

The comments below have not been moderated.

 View all

The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.

We are no longer accepting comments on this article.

Who is this week's top commenter? Find out now