Eating disorders have been rebranded as ‘fasting’. But they are as dangerous as ever

CupcakKe is a 22-year-old Chicago rapper famous for highly explicit sex-positive songs, including one about SpongeBob SquarePants. She has also been upfront about her various mental health issues. In September, CupcakKe (née Elizabeth Harris) abruptly announced she was retiring from music in an Instagram Live stream in which she said she was worried about “corrupting the youth” and that the music industry would never accept her because of her size.

After a hiatus from social media, CupcakKe reappeared last week. “Jesus fasted for 40 days & so did I …” she posted on Twitter. She followed this a couple of days later with a picture of herself and the caption: “Water fast for past month & here’s my results.”

Many of CupcakKe’s more than 511,000 Twitter followers were alarmed at her drastic dieting – and told her as much. The British actor and activist Jameela Jamil, who seems to feel obliged to weigh in on every single body-image issue, swooped in to comment. “Please take this down,” she urged. “It’s just very unsafe.” Jamil later apologised for being judgmental, telling CupcakKe: “I should have done more to protect you rather than bring you stress.”

Jamil may have been somewhat insensitive, but she was right: fasting for a month is extremely unsafe – and advertising your extreme fast to hundreds of thousands of impressionable fans is irresponsible. Even more alarming is the fact that CupcakKe isn’t the first celebrity to go on a water fast; they are very much in vogue. And while Jesus may have been an early adopter, we can’t blame Him for their popularity. Credit should actually go to the gods of Silicon Valley. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder, has been vocal about his experiments with extreme fasting. And Pavel Durov, the founder of the messaging app Telegram, has also sung the praises of self-starvation. Male tech gurus, abetted by the media, have glamorised, monetised and rebranded eating disorders as some sort of innovative path to self-knowledge. But there’s nothing innovative about starving yourself.