Health experts have warned that an increasing number of young women are getting competitive about losing weight and are using social media to document their weight loss with pictures. This phenomenon is leading to anorexia and other serious eating disorders.

DR Alex Yellowlees,who is the medical director and consultant psychiatrist at Priory Hospital Glasgow, noted that competitive selfie dieting updates on social media is leading to eating disorders and potentially fatal illnesses. He said that this dangerous trend is fuelled by social networking sites and so-called “thinspiration” websites

DR Yellowlees said, “Some people will take repeated pictures of themselves at various stages of their illness, and send them to others.They want to keep a record of their illness to see for themselves, as it were, the progress they think they are making towards anorexia but they will also transmit the images to other sufferers on occasions.”

He described the pictures of lean women with stick-like legs and protruding ribs as “particularly malignant”. Some of the sites stooped so low that they are encouraging women to have what is called a “thigh gap” where women become so thin that their thighs don’t touch even when their feet are together.