Of course, any diet, whether it’s calorie counting or something else, can be taken to an unhealthy extreme. And one cannot spontaneously develop an eating disorder from looking at CICO memes and pictures of raw broccoli. But it isn’t lost on the group that the same principles that form the diet it espouses might also attract, and even enable, people obsessed with minimizing their intake, providing a healthier-seeming cover for dangerous eating patterns.

For those predisposed to eating disorders, any restrictive diet could easily tip the scales, says Dr. Steven Crawford, co-director of the Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt, a psychiatric hospital in Maryland. “If you are an individual who would be genetically vulnerable to develop an eating disorder, these types of behaviors can trigger the illness to start,” he says. “You could have the gene and go your entire life and never develop it, but dieting would be one particular precursor to leading someone down the path to develop a full-blown eating disorder.”

Even without a genetic predisposition, an intense calorie fixation could still push someone casually interested in losing five pounds over the line to more problematic behavior.

“The more rigid the diet behavior, the more likely we are to see disordered behavior develop,” says Stacey Rosenfeld, a clinical psychologist in Miami who specializes in treating eating disorders. CICO is particularly ripe for obsession, thanks to its easily quantifiable definitions of success and failure. “Counting calories is a pretty black-and-white diet behavior: Either you meet your caloric goal or you don’t,” she says. “I’ve actually worked with individuals who’ve reported that their eating disorder symptoms began with the use of calorie-counting apps.”

If a diet has a tendency to trigger problematic behaviors, online communities built around that diet can make matters worse.

Overall, experts agree that a diet becomes problematic when it begins to dictate someone’s real-world functions and interactions. “I haven’t met a single person who is calorie counting and tracking food that isn’t missing out on other areas of life,” says Rachael Hartley, a dietitian and nutrition therapist in Columbia, South Carolina. Hartley’s practice specializes in counseling clients in intuitive eating, a set of principles that eschews restrictive practices in favor of listening to hunger and satiety cues.

Like the other experts I spoke with, Hartley finds that restrictive diets can often serve as a source of anxiety and shame, and calorie counting in particular can fuel obsession. “Getting numbers involved with eating can be incredibly triggering for those who are genetically at risk for an eating disorder,” she says. “Even for those who aren’t, calorie counting can trigger disordered thoughts and behaviors around food.”

If a diet has a tendency to trigger problematic behaviors, online communities built around that diet can make matters worse. “Counting calories, for an individual who is obsessive and perfectionistic, sets them up to consistently compete with themselves to get further and further down the path of eating less and less,” says Crawford. “And getting online to share ideas and suggestions for how to lose weight in, at times, very unhealthy ways, really puts that population at great risk.”

A diet ruled by hard numbers makes for an alluring comparison trap: Seeing peers post about restricting their caloric intake could inspire someone to winnow their own diet down even further.

Christopher Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University in Florida, published an analysis of the correlation between disordered eating and media consumption in 2014. His research, which focused on teenage girls, found that competition with peers was a predictor of body dissatisfaction and disturbed eating habits — more so than seeing idealized images of actresses or models. “In our study, social media ended up being a space where [subjects] would compete with peers, and in some cases, that was associated with later body dissatisfaction,” Ferguson says.

And an online community dedicated to the shared experience of calorie counting is a space built for comparison. “Dieting and weight loss accountability groups have a lot in common with pro-ana [anorexia] communities,” says Rosenfeld.

One Redditor made a similar observation last year, referencing a quarantined subreddit (one that’s had its visibility restricted by Reddit) where those with eating disorders share photos of the food they eat: “r/EDfood and r/1200isplenty are the same.” And on r/ProEDMemes, a now-banned subreddit for those suffering from eating disorders, r/1200isplenty users were called out for being in denial about disordered eating.

“I hope you have the self-awareness to keep at an awesome diet and improve your health and fitness without falling into disordered quicksand,” one user wrote in a discussion about whether r/1200isplenty was a “gateway” for disordered eating. “It’s really fucking insidious and you don’t even notice it until something bad happens, like the frog in water… Keep a really close-ass eye on yourself.”

Update: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the home city of Stacey Rosenfeld. She lives in Miami, Florida.