Katie Couric on Battling Disordered Eating, the Toxic Effects of Diet Culture, and Reframing New Year’s Resolutions

Where does social media figure into all of this? There have been reports of its negative impact on body image, particularly among younger women. And unlike when magazines were our main source of information and images, the stream now is more constant than ever before.

Couric: It’s hard. The social media influence on our self-perception is ubiquitous. I’ve seen women on Instagram that I’m pretty convinced are all taking that Hollywood [drug] Ozempic because their weight loss is so dramatic in a short period of time. I’m almost 66 years old, so I feel like I have enough life experience that I can observe it all but not have it infiltrate my psyche. But for a lot of younger women, that’s really hard, and the pressure to look a certain way and be a certain weight is really powerful and very destructive. I think we have to give young women coping skills not to feel defined by all these images that they’re accosted by on a daily, even hourly, basis.

Erin, do you have any strategies or tools you like to suggest for how to navigate the social media landscape?

Parks: It’s redundant, but I always go back with people to how they want to feel: How do you want to feel when you’re on Instagram, and how you want to feel when you get off it? If you’re exhausted and want to turn your brain off for a little bit, sit on the couch and scroll, what you want to feel is calm, relaxed, and not overwhelmed. Now, if when you leave Instagram, you feel shame, unattractive, or not worthy, something’s wrong. There is so much great content out there, so I advise people to be intentional with their social media consumption: Think about how you want to feel and then curate your feed around it.

Sometimes the language we hear emerging from the wellness industry, with words like detoxing, feels like it can actually have a toxic effect, especially when it comes to eating and body image.

Parks: What’s really at the heart of everything from diet culture to the wellness industry is the thought that if I do things correctly, then I can prevent bad things from happening to me. I think the wellness industry can use marketing techniques that really feed into this desire for us to think we can control things when we really don’t have that much control.