Pop stars & diets: Lady Gaga stirs up Twitter with #PopSingersDontEat

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. [caption id=“attachment_276073” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“s. In a message to her nearly 23million followers the 26-year-old singer said that while eating a ‘healthy’ salad, she was dreaming about cheeseburger. Reuters”]  [/caption] But it upset those who recalled her admitting earlier this year to having suffered from bulimia as a student and imploring people to stop obsessing 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 also 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. #PopSingersDontEat” 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.” Many believe that eating disorders should never be joked about, although some fans are applauding the transparency of her comment, saying it raises awareness of the constant struggle in popular culture for women to convey a perfect body image. One of her fans responded on Twitter, writing: “@ladygaga why would you even promote a message like that? Disgusting that you’d joke about such a serious illness.” Others, though, found her comment refreshing, showing fans that she is a ‘normal’ woman who had a problem, has faced that problem, but also has a human tendency to desire foods we are told are bad for us. 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. Other singers like Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato have come out in the past and spoken against eating disorders, calling it a a serious issue. Agencies