Social Media Use and Body Checking Behaviors: The Roles of Stress, Emotional Eating, and Self-Esteem

Social media (SM) use has been associated with increased body image dissatisfaction and body checking behaviors. Repetitive exposure to idealized images and interaction with appearance-related content may be the cause of this relationship. The present study used a cross-sectional survey to examine the associations between body checking behaviors and SM use, emotional eating, perceived stress, and self-esteem among adults (n = 423; aged 18-50 years, 71.9 percent female). Results showed that the number of online friends/followers, emotional eating, perceived stress, and general SM use significantly correlated with higher body checking scores. Conversely, self-esteem was negatively correlated with these scores. In multivariate regression analyses, perceived stress (B = 0.94, p < 0.001), emotional eating (B = 0.60, p < 0.001), general SM use (B = 0.18, p = 0.002), and lower educational level (B = -2.17, p = 0.011) independently predicted higher body checking scores, explaining 31.7 percent of the variance. These findings indicate that interventions focusing on media literacy and the management of stress and emotional eating may help mitigate the adverse effects of SM on body image and body-checking behaviors.