How Taylor Swift promotes healthy body image among fans

Taylor Swift’s past struggles with body image, disordered eating, and objectification have positively influenced her fans’ attitudes on these issues, according to a new study by University of Vermont (UVM) researchers.

Published in Social Science & Medicine, the study analyzed the top 200 TikTok and Reddit posts, including over 8,300 comments, about Swift, eating disorders, and body image to determine the impact of her disclosures about her past eating disorder on her fans.

“Our findings suggest that fans who felt highly connected to Swift were influenced to positively change their behaviors or attitudes around eating or their body image because of Swift’s disclosures and messages in her music,” says Associate Prof. Lizzy Pope of UVM’s Nutrition and Food Sciences Department.

“Fans seemed to take inspiration from the fact that Swift had recovered from disordered eating and subsequently appeared to be thriving,” adds Kelsey Rose, a UVM Clinical Assistant Professor specializing in eating disorder treatment.

The researchers identified several positive themes from the online comments, the most significant being that fans viewed Taylor Swift as a role model for eating disorder recovery. Her story and music inspired many to pursue their own recoveries.

Swift has addressed disordered eating and body image pressures in her songs and openly discussed her struggles in her 2020 film, Miss Americana. These disclosures challenge societal norms that perpetuate diet culture, often driven by celebrity influence, according to the researchers.

Swift’s transparency helped decrease stigma around eating disorders among her fans. This is crucial because stigma-related shame can reduce help-seeking behaviors and negatively impact health outcomes.

However, despite Taylor Swift's overall positive impact, fans often continued to objectify her body. Researchers found conflicted discourse regarding her artistic decision to display the word “fat” on a scale in her “Anti-Hero” video.

“Although in Miss Americana Swift says, ‘I'm so sick of being objectified, and it's driven me to disordered eating,’ fans were still commenting on her body,” Pope noted. “Even if it was meant to be positive, fans would still comment, which means that they didn't completely internalize her message of, ‘please do not comment on people's bodies anymore.’”

Inspired by the influence Swift has on students vulnerable to diet culture, Pope and Rose explored the impact of her disclosures on fans’ relationships with disordered eating, their own bodies, and diet culture.

The study shows that Swift’s public disclosure of her struggles with disordered eating and diet culture has empowered her fans and highlighted the limitations of individual disclosures in addressing broader systemic issues like anti-fat bias. Fans of all body sizes self-identified in comments, reflecting how Swift’s honesty helped them with their relationships with food and body image. Swift’s Eras Tour features a diverse cast of dancers, challenging the notion that expert dancers come in only one body size.

The researchers hope their study will encourage Swift and other celebrities to use their influence for societal change.

“Taylor Swift can do more to change attitudes with a few sentences than we can do in our entire careers,” said Pope. “It’s important to study people that have that kind of impact. There is little doubt that if she chooses to be, Swift can be a powerful voice for health, wellness, and more weight-inclusive practices that may move society closer to the idea of body liberation.”

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