She asked me what I thought my problem areas were. Whether I ever restricted food beyond normal dieting. Whether I ever felt bad about gaining weight. I sat there in the Zoom call, staring at her face on the screen, and I felt my stomach drop.
I’m an athlete in a communications master’s program. She needed one-on-one interviews for her dissertation on visual communication in fitness branding. I was one of her first three participants. I’d said yes because I thought it would be easy.
Simple. Help a classmate out. We were fifteen minutes in when she started showing me variations of the same ad. It was for a GLP-1 product, the kind of predatory knockoff Ozempic ads you see all over TikTok.
Clearly problematic content. The consent form had given me no warning this was coming. She just started asking if I’d buy it. I told her flat out I wouldn’t.
She didn’t like that. She pushed harder and harder, probing about my habits, my body, my athletic performance, what I’d want to fix. I’m currently struggling with a restrictive eating disorder on top of trying to keep up with my sport. Those questions hit exactly where I was weakest.
They sounded like the ones my doctor asked when I was being assessed. I ended the interview as quickly as I could. It was uncomfortable, and I just wanted out. Our school is purely a business and related disciplines institution.
No healthcare, no psychology departments. There’s no one qualified to oversee sensitive medical or mental health research. It never should have been asking those kinds of questions. After the call, I emailed her supervisor.
The consent form had his address on it, and it said to contact him if there were any issues. I told him her questions made me uncomfortable and that I wanted to flag it. That was it. Just a heads up.
I told my friend, honestly, when she asked how it went. She knows about my eating disorder. I just said it got into some uncomfortable body stuff and we moved on. I didn’t tell her what to do.
She told her teammate, and they dropped out themselves. Plus, I withdrew my responses. That left her three participants short. The next thing I knew, she was spamming the school WhatsApp groups begging for participants.
Then, after a couple of days, she went silent. Her supervisor told me he was looking into it. It wasn’t something he’d approved or been aware of. Three weeks later, I heard she’d been reviewed by the IRB and some other admin.
I felt sick about it. I’d only met her once or twice before this, and she’d seemed nice. She could easily figure out I was the one who reported her. There was a real chance she wouldn’t get her degree because of me.
But here’s the thing: I was told to contact the supervisor. That’s what the consent process instructed participants to do. I was taught not to confront a researcher directly because of the power dynamic and potential for social retaliation. I did exactly what the system told me to do, and I still felt guilty.
Then the comments started rolling in, and opinions got split. One person told me not to feel guilty. They said if her research was dangerous, speaking to the IRB and her supervisor and pulling my friends out was the right call. But they also pointed out that maybe the issue was just unclear questions and a bad interviewing style.
A project examining how GLP-1s are targeting athletes was actually timely and necessary, they said. But the whole point of consent is to warn you about possible triggering topics. If I wasn’t comfortable, things should have stopped immediately. A psychology PhD who researches body image and eating disorder prevention chimed in to say my instinct was correct.
The informed consent was missing crucial information, and the student needed more training on qualitative methodology. It was appropriate to go to the supervisor or IRB. They said if she had to redo her project, that wasn’t my fault. They’d blame the supervision she was getting, not the student herself.
Then came the harsher ones. “You were all adults,” one person wrote. “The proper way to handle this was interpersonally. Instead, you began gossiping with classmates and ran to admin.
” They said they’d battled with restrictive eating disorders too, and they would never let their own disorder dictate the course of another person’s life. They said I owed her a massive apology. I tried to defend myself. I didn’t gossip.
My friend asked, I gave a one-sentence answer, and we moved on. I didn’t tell anyone to drop out. I didn’t know they would. I followed the consent form’s own instructions.
Trying to confront her alone could have opened up more risks without a mediator. But they kept pushing. “You went nuclear. You could have educated her on why these marketing tactics are harmful.
You wouldn’t even have had to reveal your eating disorder. It was that simple. ”
“What kind of market research asks you what your problem areas are physically? ” I replied.
“Or asks if you’ve ever restricted or felt bad about weight gain? Those were similar to what my doctor asked me when I was assessing for an eating disorder. The ethics systems are in place, and her supervisor’s name was on the consent form for a reason. ”
It went back and forth like that for a while.
Some people got it. Some people never would. Then, the next day, everything shifted. I didn’t think I’d be one of those posters with an update, but here we are.
A few days before my original post, she’d created an Instagram group chat with me and the two participants who went before me. I hadn’t seen it because we don’t follow each other, and Instagram hides messages from people I haven’t added. In the chat, she gave a general apology. She thanked us for participating.
She told us the study wouldn’t be continuing, she was discarding all the data, and to let her know if we needed anything. She said she was picking a different dissertation topic from scratch. If we were around next term, she’d still love our insight because she was sticking with the fitness and sports sector. I’d already withdrawn my responses.
The apology was more for the other two. I thanked her for it and wished her all the best. So did the other participants. Overall, her degree is safe.
She’ll have to pick a different supervisor since hers is going on sabbatical, but if she’s doing advertising and marketing, the school has plenty of faculty for that. She’ll get there eventually. I won’t be around to see it. Graduation, new job, moving on.
But I did take one thing from the whole mess. The study compounded the stress I was already under, and I finally worked up the courage to text my coach about my eating disorder that morning. Martial arts is largely individual, so I don’t have to worry about pushing myself beyond what I can handle to support a team. He and I met up before training and came up with a tailored plan.
My girlfriend, a gym rat, has been helping me with meal planning. I’m still seeing a dietitian and a talk therapist. One commenter mentioned some free resources from Eating Disorders Anonymous, and even though I’m in the UK and most of their in-person meetings are in the US, I said I’d look into it just in case they have anything here. Some people in the comments argued I should report her more, pointing out that her Instagram group chat revealed who the other participants were, which was a privacy violation.
Others said she was getting off easy. Maybe she was. But the question she asked about problem areas and restriction should have been flagged by her advisor long before I got there. She shouldn’t have been allowed to get that far without someone stepping in.
In a way, I might have saved her some time by alerting her advisor before she sank too much work into a doomed project. But I didn’t do it to save her. I did it because I was uncomfortable, and the consent form told me to. As for her, I hope she figures it out.
I only met her once or twice, and she seemed nice. She was just out of her depth, asking questions she had no business asking. I hope she learned from it.
And I hope I beat this.
