In a sea of smug "wellness" boasts, a carb-loving revolt is happening on Instagram with people hash-tagging pictures of themselves eating pizza, burgers and such with #GirlsLoveGluten.
This girl sees your #avotoast (on gluten-free rye, duh), and raises you, a sweet, sweet doughnut.
#GirlsWithGluten was started by an Instagram account of the same name and features submissions that use the hashtag as well as celebrities enjoying normal, hearty food.
There's a whole lot of people eating pizza.
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Because who doesn't love pizza?
Gisele loves pizza. ❤️🍕
"Have your cake and eat it, too 🍰," the bio reads.
The account is affiliated with soon-to-be-launched, Dirty Lemon Detox, whose motto is #yestomore and seems to promote a balance of detox foods with treats like doughnuts using a series of people enjoying both on its Instagram.
Thanks to the popularity of sites like Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, the concept of “wellness” has grown massively in recent years, but the movement is beginning to experience a backlash.
In April, popular wellness blogger Belle Gibson, who had built her popularity on the basis that her clean-living lifestyle had helped cure cancer, was outed as a fraud. The 23-year-old Australian was due to publish a cookbook The Whole Pantry, after her app of the same name was downloaded over 300,000 times on iTunes.
Journalist Hadley Freeman recently wrote in The Guardian that the pursuit of "wellness" was less about health, and more about "that crucial point on the Venn diagram between aspiration, self-love and slimness."
Speaking to a registered dietician on the common assumption that gluten is bad for you, particularly in relation to modern wheat crops, Freeman found that, "there is some evidence that there are strains of wheat that cause a reaction in those who have a sensitivity, and older-fashioned strains of wheat can be better for those who have a sensitivity. But the numbers are still very low."
TL;DR, you should totally just go ahead and eat pizza unless you have a medically diagnosed wheat intolerance.
While the response to #GirlsWithGluten is mostly positive, there is an inevitable crossover with another popular Instagram account, YouDidNotEatThat.
YouDidNotEatThat calls bullshit on pictures of very thin women appearing to eat fattening foods, implying that they never eat the foods, "in this mixed up world of too many macarons and ice cream cones used as props."
Whichever way you look at it, an Instagram feed free from smoothie bowls, where pizza is queen, can't be a bad thing.
