Heard of 'oatzempic'? How the rise of harmful fad diets online is driving eating disorders

The sun had yet to rise and everyone else at home was asleep, but teenager Joy Ng was already up, working out to an exercise video on social media.

This might sound like a healthy start to a day, but she was doing this while suffering from anorexia nervosa, a type of eating disorder and a mental illness.

People who have anorexia have a distorted image of their bodies, thinking they are fat even when they are underweight. They typically exercise excessively, do not eat enough food, take laxatives or make themselves vomit, to the point that they can begin to starve.

Miss Ng, 19, is now on the road to recovery, but the polytechnic student recalled how it had all begun with a well-meaning thought, before it gradually spiralled into a toxic situation.

In 2020, as a healthy and active teenager, she wanted to shed some weight after being cooped up at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, so she began working out and eating less.

Then, as she began to cut her weight, she became increasingly obsessed with the numbers on the weighing scale.

She would spend all her free time exercising and looking for exercise tips and diets on social media platforms such as Twitter, now known as X.

The efforts took a dark turn as she got sucked into groups where members encourage each other to starve for an unrealistically slender body. Food, to her, slowly became akin to poison.