The Anti-Diet Echo Chamber: How Abbey Sharp’s Crusade Misses The Bigger Picture

Abbey Sharp is a registered dietitian, founder of Abbey’s Kitchen, and runs an educational YouTube channel with over 730,000 subscribers at the time of writing this article. Sharp’s channel is a blend of evidence-based nutrition advice, healthy food recipes, and myth-busting. She’s best known for her reaction videos critiquing other content creators’ “What I Eat in a Day” content and calling out what she perceives to be questionable and/or harmful diet and fitness advice. She describes herself as a “No-B.S. dietitian” who “dismantles diet culture daily.”

Sharp’s commentary is heavily informed by her scientific background, history of disordered eating, and opposition to diet culture that places heavy emphasis on women having skinny bodies. To say that Sharp’s content is all bad would be disingenuous. There is a lot of pseudoscience and misinformation that circulates in health and fitness circles because of the coveting of quick and easy fixes. Sharp’s appeal to science rather than vibes is refreshing in a heavily vibes-based content economy. 

But where she loses the plot is in her anti-diet culture hypervigilance. Dieting, desiring thinness, and prioritizing physique optimization have all been unfairly demonized by Sharp for perpetuating fatphobia, disordered eating, and unattainable beauty standards. Sharp loves taking on a pedantic, moralizing tone in these videos, often relying on credentialism to immediately skew the reliability of information in her favor and to dismiss perfectly valid concerns as ones of a petty, misinformed nature.

Sharp’s Nutrition Double Standards

Sharp’s bias is evident in her uncharitable critiques of (usually female) content creators who are visibly thin and openly maintain that physique through effort and strategy. She often implies disordered eating or the promotion of it, finding arbitrary faults in their diet and fitness routines. Her unsolicited “What I Eat in a Day” reviews, which are by far her top-performing content, frequently misrepresent the people she critiques. 

Take her video on Ellen Fisher, a vegan mother in Maui who documents her family’s self-sufficient, vegan lifestyle. Sharp’s review was full of surface-level criticisms that could’ve been easily debunked by watching any recent video. Her concern about Fisher’s kids lacking nutrients like B12 and lacking certain food textures was not only misinformed but played into broader patterns of online mom-shaming. 

Other content creators have pointed out that Sharp suspiciously cherry-picked a two-year old video at the time of upload, and excluded an entire meal time where the bulk of their nutrients is sourced from, rather than any of the numerous other uploads that would dispel any of the concerns she brought up in her analysis, in the two years following. Rather than depict Fisher and her family’s diet accurately and in good faith, Sharp seemed more triggered by Fisher’s clean eating ethos, which clashes with her own food philosophy of intuitive eating and “food freedom.” On some level this is understandable. Sharp has shared her journey of struggling with severe orthorexia and just how difficult it was to heal her relationship with food. This is the reason she got into this industry in the first place. But what becomes a problem is when we start projecting our own past disordered relationships with food onto other people, or try to overcorrect for them. Sharp is hypercritical of diet culture—the pressure put on women to adhere to “unrealistic” beauty standards, namely the coveting of thinness. 

But in the process, she creates a glaring bias in favor of heavy creators who self-identify as proudly fat or who indulge in unhealthy foods, and present a much more charitable interpretation of their dietary habits. Sharp tends to bend over backwards to defend the “healthy, balanced” lifestyle of food content creators like KarissaEats, who gorge themselves on high calorie, processed, unhealthy foods for entertainment. She even appears conspicuously concerned when health conscious creators and influencers are (what she deems) too preoccupied with health, and don’t incorporate enough “unhealthy” foods into their diet.

Personally, I don’t think these content creators have to eat healthy diets. They’re free to live a suboptimal lifestyle. I don’t point out this suboptimal, unhealthy lifestyle to be moralistic, but it is illustrious of Sharp’s double-standard. While Sharp has criticized the mukbang genre for promoting binge-eating and a disordered relationship with food—especially creators who participate in fake eating by secretly spitting out their food between takes—she regularly defends content creators whose entire shtick is eating unhealthy food, while being nitpicky about literally everyone else’s diet, taking issue with the most bizarre of details, like preparing meals that require too much chopping or eating too many liquid breakfasts.

The argument always seems to come back to this belief that the diet being shown must, for some reason, be applicable to every single viewer. It’s peak Bean Soup Effect (a recipe video for bean soup turned into a viral meme when one user commented what they should do if they don’t like beans; it’s become representative of a particularly grating self-involved tendency to insist that all content must be catered to you specifically.) And these comments aren’t just unreasonably pedantic, either. They’re snide. Sharp's comments like, "I just want you to know that you don't have to become a professional sous chef chopping up vegetables all day long to have a balanced diet,” aren’t substantive, they’re annoyingly fussy.

But when reviewing someone whose entire diet consists of fast food and restaurant slop, the extrapolation onto a broader audience and moralizing suddenly disappears. They’re suddenly super balanced and “listening to their body.” In KarissaEats’ video about what a week of eating and working out looks like for her as a food content creator, she starts the video with a disclaimer. "You can be healthy at any weight, the scale literally means nothing, and all bodies are beautiful,” which Sharp endorses, and claims is important in at least setting the stage that weight loss isn’t necessarily her priority or goal, as if being unconcerned with vanity, via weight and body size, makes you morally superior. 

The Anti-Diet Culture Bias & Its Casualties

Sharp’s double standards are symptomatic of her passive aggression towards people she perceives to be living a hyper-optimized, aesthetic, overly disciplined lifestyle, whether or not that lifestyle causes them any personal distress or disorder. She takes issue with extremely arbitrary personal preferences that clearly work for that person, and makes it an issue by extrapolating it onto a broader audience, and saying, “this is unrealistic for most people.” She creates such a rigid standard for people who are clearly in the top 99% threshold for healthy living, insisting “That’s too much chopping, you’re drinking too much of your calories.” These overly critical videos always feature body builders, models, ballerinas, and stereotypically attractive, thin influencers.

While Sharp claims having aesthetic preferences and wanting to lose weight isn’t inherently problematic, her reactions to such content paint a different story. With comments like, “the idea of a skinny hack is just gross” and “equating skinny with feeling confident? No babe, those are not, like, synonyms.” According to whom? Who gets to decide what makes someone feel confident? So much for being entitled to your aesthetic preferences. Sharp takes issue with content creators who rely on a more aggressive, no-BS approach to fitness, and while I can understand why such an approach would be triggering to someone with a history of disordered eating, not everyone responds to the same approaches in the same way. More importantly, not everything is for you. If you’re triggered by certain content, it’s your responsibility not to watch it. It’s not everyone else’s responsibility to avoid any possibility of triggering you. 

Content creators like Liv Schmidt (who I would say is on the more extreme end of this scale) and Minazalie need to be held to account for promoting toxic diet culture on Skinny Tok but a morbidly obese woman dubbed “donut mom” who feeds her children nothing but donuts and processed food is modeling a healthy relationship with food according to Sharp. This is the problem. Sharp loves to defer to scientism and credentialism so that people automatically take her opinion more seriously, but virtually all of her arguments are fueled by emotion (hence why she’s wildly inconsistent). 

She once made a video “debunking” women’s health concerns about birth control—serious health concerns like an increased risk of depression, blood clots, stroke, loss of libido, and yes, weight gain. While Sharp took the scientific literature on the connection between birth control and weight gain to task, she conveniently skimmed across all of the other previously mentioned, much more serious concerns. Even worse than skimming over them, she creates a doofy bimbo caricature of people who voice these concerns, as if they’re completely irrational.

Sharp’s main objection to the popularization of “skinny content” on TikTok, including tips and anecdotes about women’s personal journeys finally shedding the excess pounds, is that it leads to internalized fatphobia (coveting thinness is bad, but being fat and proud is valid). According to Sharp, skinny content is harmful because it influences impressionable young women to starve themselves. Body checks imply that if you eat like her, you can look like her, and wanting to look skinny is, of course, invalid. Sharp does curiously have her own video about how she’s stayed the same weight since her 20s, with a series of body checks featured in the thumbnails, but I suppose that’s different, somehow. 

Sharp’s content isn’t just reactive and emotionally-charged, it’s misleading and unhelpful for people who actually struggle to maintain their weight, which is the leading dietary issue in the west. This issue is twofold. Sharp’s food freedom philosophy may be useful for eating disorder recovery, but her insistence on forcing those ideas onto the general population is incredibly unhelpful. Sharp outright misrepresents science to fit her own agenda, insisting that we can’t dichotomize foods as “good” or “bad” because this gives them moral value, and implies that we are good or bad based on what food decision we make. This language, she suggests, is at the root of orthorexic thinking, and is why it’s important that we avoid such language because it's a slippery slope into obsessive and disordered eating. 

Of course, this is only really the case for people with disordered eating habits and black-and-white thinking. This insistence that society cater all scientific and nutritional information to a small subset of the population who are prone to eating disorders does a disservice to the overwhelming majority of people whose problem is over eating and over indulging in unhealthy foods. If you subscribe to Sharp and the broader intuitive eating community’s food philosophy, however, you begin to pathologize nutritional information wherever you see it. All advice—even just personal dietary habits that can pass as “influence” have to adhere to anti-dieting language and philosophy. 

The Intuitive Eating & Food Freedom Communities’ Confused Priorities

It’s curious to me, too, why Sharp’s bias is stacked in the opposite direction of our most pressing issues on the population level, which are undoubtedly an overrepresentation of obesity, eating too many calories, and being undiscerning with your food choices. We aren’t living in an epidemic of undernourishment. According to the CDC, about 74% of the United States is overweight, but 10% of those people don’t perceive themselves as so. When 2 in 5 Americans are obese, I hardly think that the most prevalent issue at large is over-restriction. While eating disorders remain prevalent for adolescent girls, by far the most common eating disorder is binge eating, and we’re not even talking about binge eating as part of a binge-restrict or binge-purge cycle. 

If you were to watch Sharp’s content, however, you’d be under the impression that virtually every household is struggling with tyrannical calorie restriction that causes life-long anorexia—that this is the most pressing issue of our time, and that we all must alter our lifestyles to prevent the spread. I’m not opposed to everyone having their own hill to die on, no matter how niche, but when you step out of that niche and try to project your own struggles onto people who aren’t struggling, and diagnose them with issues they don’t have, that’s projection.

This has manifested in an unreasonable aversion to dieting, calorie tracking, and restriction-based diets, in all their forms, including veganism, which is an ethical philosophy, not a diet. Some content creators have taken issue with Sharp’s hypocrisy. Her over-analysis of what other people eat, developing videos that pick apart the tiniest details of their diet, without ever asking for it, feels contradictory to her criticisms of diet culture. 

For as much as she criticizes celebrities and influencers for hawking unnecessary wellness products, her audience was surprised by her announcement that she developed and was releasing her own line of protein powder. While Sharp stated she wanted to make “meeting your protein goals accessible to all” the steep $65 price tag, as well as a $39 “essential” shaker, is hardly accessible. Her decision to market the product as “a daily dose of self care” is curious, as well, suggesting that by buying her (very expensive) protein powder, her audience can achieve “food freedom.” As much as she presents herself as the rational debunker of pseudoscience who myth-busts things like superfoods, which she claims don’t exist, she turns around and does sponsorships with products like Pique Tea, which are explicitly marketed as superfoods.

Her insistence that calorie counting is “bad science” overemphasizes the extent to which calories are an inaccurate tool for weight loss, as well as its potential for creating a toxic relationship with food. Most people use calorie tracking as just another tool to understand how much they’re consuming, and it’s certainly more reliable and accurate than the alternative that Sharp promotes—intuitive eating. As much as she critiques calorie tracking and diet culture, she often does an unsolicited calorie count of the people whose diets she’s analyzing. 

Sharp’s channel often picks apart the diets of celebrities, influencers, athletes, and models. The angle of these videos is usually to determine whether these people are modeling a sufficiently balanced, properly fueled diet full of adequate nutrients and whether they’re eating enough. However, Sharp makes no secret of her food philosophy—that restriction, in all of its forms, is problematic. A quick glance at Sharp’s channel and you’ll find videos that paint a 1500 calorie day of eating as “extreme.” Sharp explicitly takes aim at the calories total for being too low, without sufficient information to determine whether that is the case. Not everyone has the same caloric needs, and 1500 calories is certainly adequate for a short, sedentary person. 

You would think that for someone who advocates so loudly for “food freedom” that she’d be more tolerant of people’s personal dietary decisions, but Sharp’s behavior indicates an uncompromising aversion to any reasonable limitation on hedonic consumption, even if for entirely valid health reasons or food intolerances. Sharp has made countless impassioned videos insisting that body builders like Greg Doucette are advocating orthorexia for making unobjectionable comments like apples are healthier than chocolate bars, or accusing people who exclude oil from their diet based on the scientific literature on heart health as likewise overly restrictive. Her biases cloud her judgment in the face of uncontroversial advice from experts like Dr. Mike, who refuses to sugarcoat the fact that obesity is associated with significant health risks.

Though Sharp doesn’t deny this, she certainly makes efforts to underplay it, and give credence to the idea that you can be metabolically healthy while being overweight (a sharp contrast to the fearmongering she spreads about a slightly underweight ballerina) and accuses Dr. Mike of using diet culture language such as “clean,” “low calorie,” “superfoods,” and "cheat meal.” This is, yet again, another pathologization of uncontroversial health advice. Most people are over eating, not under eating, some foods are objectively better than other foods, and some people respond well to the psychology of having a “cheat meal.” 

She goes to great lengths to emphasize how important honoring your hunger cues is, but what if your hunger cues are miscalibrated? This is something I never see intuitive eaters address. If you’re overweight, chances are you’re too kind to yourself, you honor too many of your cravings, you’re a slave to your impulses. People creating content that help people break the cycle of food noise, overconsumption, and sloth are not part of the problem. Why is it so difficult for eating disorder recovery communities and “diet culture” casualties to realize that while for them, the countercultural, incredibly necessary messaging they needed was that it’s okay to feed yourself, to give in to cravings, and to eat foods that aren’t stereotypically “clean,” people with the opposite problem probably require the opposite messaging. 

In a response video to Abbey Sharp, Unnatural Vegan makes a valid objection to this paranoia concerning reasonable dieting practices like calorie tracking and moderate restriction. "To me, it's like criticizing someone for saying peanuts are healthy because some people are allergic to peanuts. I'm just afraid that this focus on eating disorders within the intuitive eating community could lead people to believe that they are way more common than they actually are, that restricting food inevitably leads to binge eating or bulimia."

Sharp argues, "I also don't think we should be talking about short term weight loss, period, when we know that statistically, most people who lose weight in the short run, stop the diet and gain the weight right back. We also know that this weight cycling can put someone at risk for detrimental health effects such as insulin resistance, heart disease, blood pressure, inflammation, and an increased risk of mortality overall." However, a 2016 narrative review published in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, found inconsistent evidence linking weight cycling to increased mortality risk, concluding that despite weight regain being common, there's insufficient reason to discourage repeated weight-loss attempts given obesity's clear impact on health and mortality.

According to self-reported data from the USDA, during the 1977-2018 period, Americans reported calorie intake increased by 15% from 1,807 calories per day to 2,093 calories per day. According to the loss-adjusted USDA food availability data, daily per capita intake of calories increased by 617 calories between 1970 and 2008, and the three largest contributors to this increased caloric intake were added fats and oils, responsible for 34% of increased calories, flour and cereal products (31%) and caloric sweeteners (9%). While the precise numbers vary depending on the study and methodology, the upward trend is indisputable. Americans are eating too much, and those increased calories without compensatory activity are responsible for the rising rates of obesity and excess body weight. 

The increased calorie consumption is also disproportionately sourced from empty, nutrient-void calories, like added oils, so it’s confusing why Sharp is so comfortable throwing emotionally loaded jabs at ballerinas like Theresa Farrell who make uncontroversial observations like the fact that a tablespoon of olive oil is much more calorie dense and lacking the same nutrient density and satiety of something of comparative calories. When she picks up a spoon at a restaurant and notes that a tablespoon of olive oil is 120 calories, which is about the same as the big slab of steak she measured out earlier. She notes that if you only need to cut back 250 calories per day to lose half a pound per week, that’s essentially just two tablespoons of olive oil. Sharp reacts with mockery, sarcastically remarking that she’d be a “fun dinner guest” for pointing out these caloric and satiety disparities in a video that is explicitly about that, as if she just barged into your kitchen and started policing your dietary choices. 

In a video titled Dietitian Reviews Ballerina Theresa Ferrel (The calorie counting has gotten EXTREME), Sharp characterizes a ballerina who's eating 2,250 calories per day on a cut, as underfueling, despite this being considerably more calories than ballerinas typically eat, and she characterizes her meticulous calorie tracking to lose weight as “extreme.” It’s not clear what exactly about Farrell’s calorie tracking is extreme, as it’s a pretty standard method of weight loss which Farrell makes clear doesn’t create an unhealthy or obsessive relationship with food for her. In fact, she says the opposite—it helps her stay on track so that she can create a modest deficit (not a crash diet) to achieve her performance goal weight and allows food to run in the background rather than controlling her because she knows exactly how much she’s eating. 

Sharp, however, makes snarky comments doubting how simple and “in the background” it is, painting calorie counting as a Sisphyean task that’s all-consuming and a huge mental burden. As Bane once said, “For you.” She does, however, praise Farrell for consuming foods that aren't the typical "diet-y foods," and says it's refreshing to see someone starting their day without the typical lemon water, celery juice, and avocado toast like everybody else on YouTube. For reference, Farrell starts her day with an unconventional food for a competitive ballerina on a diet: a corn dog. But making this comment feels a little unnecessarily passive aggressive and passionately disdainful towards people who may just like avocado toast. If the goal is to be “not like other girls” then I guess it’s great that Farrell starts her day with a less nutrient dense and objectively unhealthier breakfast just because it owns the diet industry? It seems like you can’t win with Sharp, so long as she forms preconceived notions about the sort of person you are and what you aesthetically represent. 

It’s vital for people recovered from eating disorders and who are sensitive to what they perceive to be “diet culture” to remember that not everyone responds well to a hyper-feminized approach to fitness. Some of us need tough love, not excuses. Calorie tracking and weight loss aren’t inherently disordered, nor are the various methods one can use to achieve their physique goals.