Could Dating Apps Be Giving You An Eating Disorder?

Newly released Harvard research, published this Friday in the Journal of Eating Disorders, found a staggering surge in ‘unhealthy’ weight control tactics in adults who use dating apps compared to the general population. Lead author of the study, Dr. Alvin Tran, looked at the behaviour of app users vs that of the Tinder-phobic, and found that the former are significantly more likely to engage in 6 specific, damaging strategies to stay slim: namely, vomiting, using laxatives, fasting, and using diet pills, muscle-building supplements, or anabolic steroids.

Unsurprisingly, the arena of romance-by-algorithm looks to be propping up tired gender tropes in association with its body-policing – Tran noted that male users are more likely to be striving for lean and muscular physiques, while women studied were largely aiming for thinness. Similarly unlikely to draw any gasps, female users were particularly vulnerable to the disordered behaviours linked to dating app use – while on average and across genders, those studied were 2.7 to 16.2 times more likely to have an eating disorder, the women’s odds of suffering from one were up to 26.9 times higher than average.

The fascinating – and alarming – link could be owing to the image-focused nature of apps like Tinder, where physical appearance is built in as a key facet of the selection process; however, the factors at play behind the findings remain a bit of a mystery. Do people who are image conscious gravitate to digital dating? Does swiping left/right in itself provoke unhealthy obsessions with other peoples’ appearances, and encourage an unforgiving attitude to one’s own? Or maybe it’s an age thing – i.e., you’re more likely to use Bumble than your mum, and eating disorders tend to rear their heads in early adulthood? IDK and neither does Tran, who said ‘While we do not know if the people in our study were already engaging in these weight control behaviours before using dating apps, we worry that the use of these image and appearance-focused services could exacerbate those behaviours.” Hear hear, Dr. Tran – let us swipe no more. Whatever happened to blind dates, anyway?

READ MORE: Instagram Account Exposes Women's Online Dating Horror Stories