Lady Gaga stirs up Twitter

Some of pop singer’s followers have interpreted her comments as encouragement to avoid eating in order to lose weight.

LOS ANGELES:

Lady Gaga has stirred a debate over pop stars, diets and eating disorders with a tweet that some of her millions of fans have interpreted as insensitive.

On Tuesday, the “Born This Way” singer tweeted “Just killed back to back spin classes. Eating a salad dreaming of a cheeseburger.” She then added the hashtag #PopSingersDontEat.

Some of her followers interpreted the inclusion of the hashtag as encouraging fans to avoid eating in order to become thin. But it upset those who recalled her admitting earlier this year to having suffered from bulimia as a student and imploring people to stop an obsession with being overly thin.

“I’m gonna say this about girls: the dieting wars have got to stop. Everyone just knock it off,” Gaga said at the conference held in Los Angeles and hosted by former California First Lady Maria Shriver.

The singer has been an outspoken advocate for empowering youth who feel like outsiders, and the irony between what the singer has said in the past and her tweet was not lost on her more than 22.7 million followers in the Twitterverse.

One post from @StuddedBlack on Friday read “I was on the verge of becoming bulimic and now I just might because of YOU.

Others, like this from @fluffness said, “People are taking the #PopSingersDontEat thing way too seriously! Acting like Gaga promotes that. She didn’t mean it that way...”

A separate blog post on proud2beme.org, which is affiliated with the National Eating Disorders Association, said “If it was meant to be a joke, there are plenty of people who aren’t finding it so funny.”

Since the April 10 tweet, Lady Gaga has failed to address the flood of comments. She has only tweeted a few times, telling fans about listening to Radiohead and thanking them for buying tickets to her shows.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 16^th, 2012.