Zara,

What I appreciate so much about your piece is not just the calling out of the Instagrammer bullshit — for me, just folks making money off others stupidity and gullibility- but the simple truth that any damned fool can throw together something in their kitchen sink and call it a magic cure for toe jam.

Gag me with a fucking spoon, will you please.

As someone who battled eating disorders for forty years, who abused laxatives and lost all my natural teeth to the evils of the compulsion to be thin at all costs, this kind of monumental crap hoisted upon people far too foolish to do their own research is part of what I hate about the Internet and Instagram in particular.

I’m reminded of a story I heard about a friend’s daughter (this is not made up) who has a school age friend of 15. Said friend has an Instagram account that shows her before and after. The before is precisely what she looks like now, and always has. The after is carefully airbrushed, the acne gone, the wide hips slimmed down (a la Beyonce). She has thousands of teenage followers who breathlessly believe this is real. No. This shit is dangerous. The other piece is the mental burden this kid carries because she knows she is a fraud, and when she is eventually found out that’s going to be devastating.

This kind of dishonesty fobbed off on mothers- and this is the part I hate most- who hate their bodies because they look fat- is going to result, ultimately, in damaged babies. While I can’t prove that now, let the industry develop for a while. In the same way that the supplement business pushes worthless pills on us for promised cures for all that ails us, and there is no regulatory body that gives a shit (thank you kindly to Senator Orrin Hatch and his entire bloodsucking family) we will likely see more teas sold as miracle cures.

When babies get born with problems someone is going to start a lawsuit. Where is the lawsuit against gullibility and stupidity? Where is the protection against stupid damned fool mothers who drink, smoke and eat shit food during their pregnancies because how they look is more important than a healthy baby?

Call me stupid, call me callous, but that sounds like child abuse to me. When your being thin trumps a baby’s development, that is dangerous behavior.

I can’t recall the name of the celeb right now, but this was a model who married an ancient billionaire, who shortly died. She had a kid, and was purported to be deeply concerned that the baby “looked fat.”

Of course the little girl looked fat. It’s called baby fat, you moron. Chubby kids are normal. While obese kids aren’t, this was different. Her little girl was in perfect shape, and yet she was obsessing about the kid’s body while she was still a toddler.

Imagine growing up in that kind of household. I can. I did. And it cost me forty years of gazing into toilet bowls.

This compulsive, mindless, idiotic need to be thin AT ALL COSTS, costs. Those of us who live inside the prison of public opinion about our bodies are nothing more than pawns. Then we pawn our deadly fears off onto our kids.

There. Is. No. Excuse. For this.

I realize that trying to reason with people who are completely and utterly determined to do what it takes to look a certain way, despite the damage it may do to those who depend on them. I am fortunate I never had kids. I fear that I might well have done the same thing. What a statement about our society, what a set of beliefs, that we are nothing unless we look a certain way.

Sure sells a lot of tea, doesn’t it.