“Fitspo”: Helpful or Harmful?
“Fitspo”, “thinspiration”, “gymtok”. These three terms are all related to a popular trend among social media platforms in which users post workouts, meal preps, progress pics, and more. I, myself, am one to love this type of content: I will take workouts or meals from the videos or posts that these influencers create. With the combination of “rabbit hole” algorithms, algorithmic biases, and the spreading of misinformation, “fitspo” content is creating a harmful environment on social media especially for those struggling with body dissatisfaction and/or eating disorders.
It may come to no surprise that throughout time social media has had a negative impact on the body image of many adolescents and young adults. However, with the rise of “fitspo” and other health related trends on social media, it has only gotten worse and is especially dangerous for users who may be recovering from an eating disorder or currently struggling with an eating disorder. As the study that the Wall Street Journal article showed, TikTok’s algorithm can funnel a user’s for you page into a dark rabbit hole that can be hard to come out of. If someone is struggling with body dissatisfaction, the chances of them being interested in “fitspo” content is high, which in turn, due to the nature of TikTok’s algorithm, can lead to their “for you” page being flooded with this content. This content can include incredibly unrealistic or difficult to achieve bodies, not to mention that everyones body is different and there is no true way to know how they “achieved” their thin body. Additionally, a trend that falls under this category is the “what i eat in a day” trend, in which users who have this traditionally “perfect” body will post what they ate in a day, from breakfast to dinner. I have seen a number of these posts and some of them depict an incredibly unhealthy lifestyle in which they skip entire meals. With “What I Eat in a Day’’ videos, comes a lot of misinformation in terms of health as well which Justine Topham and Naomi Smith talk about in their article, “One day of eating: Tracing misinformation in ‘What I Eat in a Day’ videos”. In general, social media is a very popular spot for spreading misinformation, both harmful and harmless. In this article, Topham and Smith mention the phenomenon of influencers taking on the role of health coaches on social media. By doing so they state their experiences with certain diets and the health benefits they believe they got from these diets as fact and are walking the line between sharing their experiences and spreading health information as misinformation. It is possible that some of these influencers are leveraging these experiences to gain attention, as the definition of media manipulation states “as the sociotechnical process whereby motivated actors leverage specific conditions or features within an information ecosystem in an attempt to generate public attention and influence public discourse.” In the case of the “fitspo” content, it is possible that these influencers are using their potential natural given thinness as leverage to gain views as they are spreading misinformation surrounding their diets and the health benefits of these diets. As followers of these influencers trust them and trust what they are saying, they may take what they are saying as fact and begin to try these unhealthy diets in order to gain the supposed health benefits. Some influencers also use appealing words to describe how a certain diet makes them feel. Victoria’s Secret model, Sanne Vloet, uses the words “light”, “airy”, “clean”, and “clear” to describe the way her diet makes her feel in videos. Words like these emphase benefits of mental clarity which can be especially appealing to viewers struggling with mental health. Similarly, the article mentions that “In 1983, the food and diet industry came up with the effective marketing ploy of introducing ‘lite’ fat-reduced or calorie-reduced foods, which resulted in the consumer equating ‘lightness’ with ‘health’.” This is exactly what influencers are doing when they use this type of language in their videos and by reinforcing this idea of “the lighter, the healthier”, viewers may fall into an incredibly unhealthy trend of disordered eating to achieve this. Viewing this type of content can be extremely dangerous for users, especially considering TikTok’s user base is mostly adolescents, and can also lead to higher body dissatisfaction and unfortunately disordered eating.
Throughout my time on social media, I have been lucky enough to not be greatly affected by the impact it has on body image. That is, until TikTok came around. When TikTok rose during quarantine, I found my “For You” page covered with “How I stay fit during quarantine” posts which included planned workouts, meals, and, of course, progress pictures. During an especially difficult time in everyone’s life, I found it hard not to compare myself to these creators and found myself trying the workouts and meals they posted and as I continuously interacted with these videos, more appeared until it seemed as if that was the only content that TikTok was suggesting. When a month had passed and I had seen no difference in myself, the comparison only got worse and I found myself in a self-deprecating hole not knowing how to dig myself out. I found that the only way that I could stop is by completely removing the content from my life which in turn meant deleting the app all together. I have since re-downloaded TikTok, however, I have experienced the effect it can have on one’s body dissatisfaction first hand.
Along with the nature of TikTok’s algorithm, I also believe that algorithmic bias is a factor. As mentioned in “When Bias Emerges” by the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies, biases most commonly emerge “When the data used to train models is unrepresentative of the population that the model will ultimately serve, models will perform poorly for those groups left out of the data.” With the beauty standard being incredibly thin, model-like bodies, there have been algorithms that have favored those bodies over others, which can make this “fitspo” and “thinspo” content incredibly prevalent. In 2021, a student actually proved that twitter’s algorithm preferred younger, slimmer faces with lighter skin.
In addition, in an article called “‘An Immaculate Keeper of My Social Media Feed’: Social Media Usage in Body Justice Communities During the COVID-19 Pandemic”, many of their participants said that they noticed algorithmic bias that promoted diet culture within their social media. One participant mentioned how even when they begin to click on makeup related recommendations, they will continue scrolling and then suddenly begin to get a surplus of dieting ads. Another participant, who is recovering from an eating disorder, mentions that despite their constant efforts to avoid it, they “can never get away from any kind of fitness post”. Even though these biases are clearly harmful to the general user base of all social media platforms, they never seem to really go away. In turn, companies need to do a better job of using a more inclusive training set as well as removing any and all content relating to disordered eating in order to keep their users safe.
This all being said, I find “fitspo” content as entertaining as the next person, however, the damaging effects could outweigh the good. The algorithmic nature of social media, especially TikTok, has a tendency to put users into a “rabbit hole” which is extremely dangerous for users who are struggling with body dissatisfaction and eating disorders. Additionally, as these social media companies say they are removing all content that could be harmful to their users, there still seems to be a surplus of this content, even content that supports eating disorders. Unfortunately, there is also evidence that algorithmic bias could be playing a factor. There have been certain social media algorithms that have been proved to prefer slimmer bodies. If companies were more transparent with how their algorithm works as well as using bodies of all shapes and sizes for their training dataset, this content may have less of a damaging effect on their users body image. However, the blame can not be put all on algorithms, it is also important that influencers begin to be more transparent with their diet and their background. While not to discredit the influencers who truly did crack the code to losing weight, many influencers are simply born with a slimmer body and by posting “what I eat in a day” videos and “my workout routine” videos without this transparency can be spreading misinformation and what works for them could be a dangerous diet for someone else. Influencers must also stop using language such as “light” to describe the way that their diet makes them feel, equating lightness to healthiness is wrong and can promote disordered eating as well as feed into the societal beauty standard of thinness which needs to be changed. All bodies are beautiful and as long as we are all taking care of ourselves and our health, that should be celebrated rather than encouraged to change.
