'Thinspiration' Packages Eating Disorders as a Lifestyle Choice

Rachel Cowey calls her illness "Ursula." It helped to picture an enemy, the witch in The Little Mermaid who manipulates Ariel into giving up her voice.
The eating disorder had ravaged her body, leaving her with osteoporosis at 19. Cowey stares into the shaky camera in her bedroom. “I am not anorexia. I am Rachel,” she declares, as if staring Ursula square in the eye.
She’s broadcasting on the Team Recovery YouTube channel (video below), where Cowey and cofounders Sarah Robertson and Ali McPherson discuss the lows of battling an eating disorder and the highs of recovering from one.
The three women conceptualized Team Recovery after confronting the overwhelming mountain of online content that worships extreme thinness.
In recent years, the web has exploded with images, blogs and microsites that glorify dangerous weight loss at any cost. Photos of emaciated girls tagged with #thinspiration and #thinspo saturate Twitter feeds and Tumblrs. Waist-down shots picture girls in gym gear that hangs off their shrinking bodies. Pinterest photos depict women with #thighgap; they're so thin that, even with feet together, their thighs don’t touch, a genetic impossibility in most, but one that can occur in the dangerously thin.
In a sense, the phenomenon is nothing new. Similar photos have been online since the late '90s. But their volume and accessibility is unprecedented. One survey shows that between 2006 and 2008 alone, the number of such sites had increased by 470%. At the same time, dieters are getting younger. According to NEDA, 40-60% of girls aged 6-12 are concerned about their weight or about becoming too fat.