Did Tyra Banks Give Me an Eating Disorder?
- Laura Berlinsky-Schine
- 1 hour ago
- 5 min read
I’ve grappled with an eating disorder for most of my life. As a millennial, I grew up in a skinny-centric culture and watched shows like America’s Next Top Model, where aspiring models were berated for being anything more than size 0. And I berated myself for every pound I gained or failed to lose. In my 30s, I stand on the scale every day. On many days, I do it multiple times.
Like other millennials, I grew up watching cycle after cycle of Tyra Banks chastising young women, calling size 6s “plus size” and encouraging them to curb their eating. Like many other teenagers, I internalised her critique. Always considered thin by most standards, I began a lifelong battle with food before America’s Next Top Model (ANTM) premiered in 2003. I first applied the word “fat” to myself while looking down at my slightly rounded belly in the shower. I was eight. But I still didn’t translate that into dieting or avoiding the things I wanted to eat.
The mean girls in middle school were thin across the board. I sat on the outskirts of the social sphere, with no friends at my school. Isolated and lonely, I began altering my eating without even realising it. Instead of eating lunch in the bathroom to avoid the cafeteria, I stopped eating lunch altogether. I was 12. I was never overweight or even chubby. However, when I cut back on calories, I began paying closer attention to what I was eating and what I wasn’t. I counted calories. I weighed my food. And I became very skinny.
ANTM Enters a Fatphobic Landscape
At a time when research showed that mass media “promulgate a slender ideal that elicits body dissatisfaction,” ANTM premiered. The modelling competition reality show was created and executive-produced by supermodel Tyra Banks, who also served as the face of the series. Banks claimed that with ANTM, she wanted to champion diversity, including different body types. Yet the show still glorified extreme, unhealthy thinness, even conducting weigh-ins of the models on camera and in front of the other contestants.
This was the peak of my own eating disorder. At age 14, I binged ANTM like I binged food, watching cycle after cycle well into my early 20s. I watched it as I attempted to stop scrutinising my body, gorged on cheesecake and nachos at the campus dining hall, then shed the pounds after a difficult breakup, then regained the weight, then dieted back down, and so on. Just as the show went through cycles, so did my body.
Tyra Banks stayed on screen, calling size 6 models plus-size or, most cringe-inducingly, “fiercely real.” Meanwhile, she gave the “regular” models—those who weren’t considered plus-size—her version of tough love, critiquing their eating and minimal weight gain. Keenyah Hill (Cycle 4) was portrayed as a contestant who couldn’t control her eating. The camera would pan to her barely-there stomach, showing it jiggle ever so slightly in slow motion. In one episode, the contestants modelled as the seven deadly sins. Hill was assigned gluttony and lounged around, holding a doughnut. The panel critiqued her weight gain, with Janice Dickinson, who was a judge on the show, calling her look “piggy chic.”
Throughout the cycles, contestants occasionally faced criticism and were dismissed for being too thin. Anamaria Mirdita (Cycle 15), for example, was eliminated for supposedly being a poor example for others. While this may seem like Banks and her fellow judges were promoting healthier eating and a more positive image, the true message was likely more damning: there is an extremely narrow ideal of the perfect body. If your weight is too low, you’re a bad role model for other women. If it’s too high, you’re grotesque. Balance is an impossible standard to achieve.
A “Reality Check” on the Culture of Extreme Thinness
A recent study finds that 9% of the population, about 30 million Americans, will have an eating disorder during their lives. Mine has been a lifelong battle. At age 30, I suffered through a traumatic, long-distance situationship and lost every pound I had slowly gained in my mid-late 20s and then some. My face looked gaunt. Clothes hung off me. I didn’t look good. I hadn’t weighed myself more than once or twice a week in years. But now that I was “thin” again, I began weighing myself two, three, even four times per day.
Although ANTM ended its 24-cycle run in 2018, thin would never not be in style. GLP-1 agonists, originally used to treat diabetes, are now mainstream and prescribed to patients for weight loss. The side effects can range from annoying (diarrhoea and nausea) to bad (“Ozempic face,” giving patients a sunken look) to life-threatening (kidney failure, pancreatitis, and gallbladder disease). People at healthy weights may be eligible for the drug—again, promoting a culture of unhealthy obsession with thinness. I see ads peppered across Instagram and Facebook saying size 4s can take it. And I always take a second look.
“We have to recognise that society has brainwashed us all to certain beauty standards that are not always in alignment with health standards,” Dr Andrew Kraftson, a clinical associate professor at the University of Michigan Medical School, told The New York Times. “Just because someone can starve themselves to get down to a lower weight doesn’t mean that we should make that easier by giving them an injection to promote anorexia.”
In this landscape, Netflix released Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. The three-part docuseries is a reckoning of sorts. Banks makes empty and backhanded apologies, such as failing to call Hill by name, instead saying, “Boo Boo. I am so sorry.” Among other truly horrifying toxic actions, from filming a woman’s sexual assault to painting models as other ethnicities and races, the Reality Check shines a light on ANTM’s aggressive body shaming. Nobody interviewed for the docuseries, including Banks, took responsibility; they instead chalked it up to a product of the times. It wasn’t okay then, and it’s not okay now.
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A Not-So-Personal Phenomenon
Did Tyra Banks give me an eating disorder? I can’t put the blame entirely on one woman, an individual I don’t know personally. But I did respond to a culture that promoted extreme thinness, one that persists to this day. Reality Check has resurfaced feelings I still grapple with every day.
I’m responsible for the anxiety of eating every morsel, for the two pounds I gain and lose here and there. But the toxicity in my relationship with food and my weight has roots in a culture that glorifies unhealthy thinness and suggests that my body is other people’s business. And I’m responsible for encouraging the notion of thinness as better. When I, an objectively thin woman, fixate on my weight, telling others—sometimes heavier people—that I’m not happy with my size, I’m suggesting they, too, should be aspiring to a certain aesthetic ideal, even if I think they look great.
Our fatphobic culture is as toxic as America’s Next Top Model was. It’s not just Tyra Banks who is complicit; we all are.