The skinny on skinny tea.

By Sami Taylor

“Summer is here in Australia, babes, and you know what that means … it’s teatox time.”

It’s difficult at any time of the year, but particularly during summer, for young women to scroll through Facebook or Instagram and not encounter advertisements bleating about #tanlines, #bodygoals and the need to #detox.

Summer is hunting season for “health” companies, and an opportunity to up the ante on marketing their fad diets. But while most fad diets are forgotten quickly, there’s one that just won’t go away. Tea detoxes, or ‘teatoxes’, are so-called “therapeutic” detox tea products that claim to help users shed kilos fast and get “the bikini body you’ve always dreamed of”.

The teatox trend took off in Australia a few years back, when local diet tea companies began emulating similar American products. Now, hundreds of thousands of young women follow skinny tea brands on social media with hopes of shedding “extra kilos” and looking like the tanned, toned Instagram models recruited to promote them.

Crash dieting through the ages

Of course, fad diets have been around forever. Dieting is something of a generational tradition — your grandmother probably tried to cut out carbs, you watched your mother crave sugar on the Atkins diet and your older sister once bought and suffered through a month’s worth of meal replacement shakes.

Young women grow up watching other women in their lives buy expensive quick-fixes, shed the kilos, and then put it all back on again.

So why do we persist with these gimmicks — often against medical advice — when we know crash dieting doesn’t work? We know that carefully marketed “diet teas” and detoxes are scams in pretty packaging.

We know that shame marketing — the kind that makes you loathe the thighs you were born with — is unhealthy and should be ignored. But somehow, teatoxes have slid through the cracks. Exactly what about diet tea is so alluring?

Admittedly, the aesthetic that detox tea companies spout — inspired by Instagram’s #fistpo and #wanderlust culture — is incredibly enticing. Even I have considered purchasing a teatox in the past as a fast way to lose weight; it’s hard not to be swept up in the quest for clear skin and perfect abs when they’re dominating your newsfeed.

The dangers of detox tea

The less-shareable reality, of course, is that detox teas can have dangerous side effects and leave many women feeling sick, tired and trapped in cycles of self-loathing.

Brittany, a 19-year-old student from Melbourne, initially began using detox tea to lose weight and reduce bloating, but has since sworn off it for good.

“At first, it did make me feel energised. But after doing it for a few days it made me pretty sick. I had really bad stomach cramps … and I couldn’t stop [going to the toilet],” Brittany says.

Unsurprisingly, medical experts have continually warned consumers about the dangers of using detox tea products, which typically contain a blend of herbs and antioxidants, as well as strong laxatives like senna.

The chair of the Australian Medical Association Council of General Practice (AMACGP), Brian Morton, says women should ignore “quick fix” marketing claims and avoid detox teas altogether.

“My first bit of advice is just don’t buy it [detox teas] … It’s a quick fix, and what you need [to lose weight] is a sustained fix,” Dr Morton told the ABC.

“Senna is going to cause diarrhoea and you’re going to lose a lot of fluid with it, so there’s a much higher risk of dehydration and also a loss of vitamins that our bodies really need,” he said.

Still, SkinnyMe Tea, a Melbourne-based “detox tea and weight loss” company with over 379,000 Instagram followers, refutes claims their products are unhealthy and dangerous.

“If critics did [their] research correctly they would see that we promote a healthy, balanced lifestyle and we are very proud of what we have created,” a Skinnyme Tea spokesperson told the ABC.

“We adhere to regulatory standards and are one of the only Teatox companies who has their product listed on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods. Because of these reasons we consider ourselves the safest Teatox on the market.”

Skinny tea may interfere with the contraceptive pill

In 2013, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that one SkinnyMe Tea customer had been hospitalised with severe stomach cramps after using the brand’s “colon cleanse” product.

And a quick browse through comments sections and web forums suggests many skinny tea drinkers have experienced abdominal pain, cramps and diarrhoea.

Others have accidentally fallen pregnant because the tea reduced the efficacy of the contraceptive pill. Indeed, in a disclaimer on its website, detox tea brand Bootea warns the laxative effect of its product “may affect the accuracy of the pill”.

So why, then, do we buy products that might make us feel ill — or worse, leave us unexpectedly pregnant? Is losing a few kilos of (what doctors say is mostly water weight) really worth it? Does a flatter stomach and a #bikinibody Instagram selfie mean so much?

Well, yes. It’s all about social media marketing, and the powerful allure of fitspo culture — weapons that were unavailable to diet companies of decades past.

Fuelled by fitspo

Flinders University Social Health Sciences lecturer and behavioural psychologist Ivanka Prichard says the highly sexualised, appearance-focused fitspo images often used to market teatox products can be just as dangerous as the teas themselves.

“The use of ‘fitspo’ images by detox tea brands sends the message … that drinking these teas is associated with health and fitness and reaching an appearance ideal,” Dr Prichard told the ABC.

“However, there is very little information about what is actually in any of the teas or any scientific information on why and how doing a teatox might work.”

SkinnyMe ambassador Kristina Tseprailidis, 20, lost 10 kilos on her first teatox, and now promotes SkinnyMe’s products via her personal Instagram account.

Still, she admits to feeling bad about herself when she sees other women’s transformation pictures on social media, and believes marketing campaigns promoting teatox products should be more realistic and inclusive of a broader range of shapes and sizes.

“Keep the skinny bodies, but incorporate some different body types in there, too,” she said. “Let all girls feel included and happy about themselves. What kind of world would it be if everyone was the same shape?”
But Dr Prichard says we need to educate young women about the reality of #fitspo images — the ways they might have been digitally altered, or the extreme lengths some models go to in order to look the way they do.

“We need to somehow help young people to be critical consumers of the information that they see on social media,” Dr Prichard said. “Building individual knowledge and self-confidence are key, as well as exercising for the right reasons.”

This post originally appeared on ABC News.

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