Is ‘Fitspiration’ Helping or Harming Women’s Health?
It’s the New Year, the Black Friday of the fitness industry, and with it has come the predictable barrage of messages promoting weight loss and the adoption of lifestyle changes in the name of health and fitness. These messages, alongside images of lean, toned, muscular bodies, are commonplace on most people’s social media feed but the jury is out about whether this content is in fact beneficial to our health.
#Fitspiration is one of the most popular hashtags on Instagram, with over 19 million posts depicting slim, muscular gym goers posing and flexing for the camera or in front of a mirror, alongside motivational captions. The recent rise in fitspiration content reflects an important change in the way that women’s bodies are portrayed in the media. A new appearance ideal has come to the fore — the fit ideal — based on the idea that ‘strong is the new skinny’.
In theory, fitspiration content has the potential to be a useful tool to positively influence women’s health by promoting engagement in healthy behaviours. People who follow the hashtag ‘fitspiration’ do report that these images inspire them to exercise and eat healthily (Raggatt et al., 2018). Fitspiration posts are used to foster a sense of community and as a source of shared inspiration (Deighton-Smith & Bell, 2018). A supportive community can help people to achieve their health-related goals and social support is important in increasing physical activity levels. In addition, fitspiration posts offer a source of health and fitness information. However, individuals’ ability to discern reliable information from misleading information is unclear and increased health knowledge is not usually enough to change an individual’s behaviour.
To test whether exposure to fitspiration content led to an increase in exercise behaviour, Prichard and colleagues (2020) asked women to rate their mood and satisfaction with their bodies following exposure to either fitspiration or travel inspiration images. Half the women were then asked to exercise on a treadmill and the other half were asked to play an iPad game for 10 minutes, the women then rated their mood and body satisfaction again. Those who exercised also rated their subjective physical exertion (how hard they felt they worked during the exercise). Viewing fitspiration images did not lead to greater physical activity, suggesting that although fitspiration may motivate us to be healthier, this is not translated into actual changes to behaviour. In addition, the researchers found that fitspiration exposure led to greater subjective physical exertion ratings. In other words, the women perceived that the same physical exertion required greater effort, indicating that exposure to fitspiration even has the potential to worsen exercise performance.
Analyses of the content of fitspiration posts indicates some concerning trends, which may have negative effects on women’s body image and mental wellbeing. Firstly, fitspiration posts tend to only show one type of body (Tiggemann & Zaccardo, 2018). Rather than creating a healthy alternative body ideal to an unattainable level of thinness, the fit ideal adds a layer of muscular tone. Inevitably, this increases appearance demands on women by emphasising both muscularity and thinness. Fitspiration serves to gate-keep fitness by reserving ‘health’ for those whose bodies conform to the fit ideal and by looking down on those who do not. This is reflected in the accompanying captions, often referring to individuals who do not share their health and aesthetic goals as ‘haters’ (Deighton-Smith & Bell, 2018).
Secondly, fitspiration posts emphasise appearance and promote exercise to achieve aesthetic-based goals, offering a socially acceptable way of pursuing thinness, under the guise of health and fitness (Holland & Tiggemann, 2016). Women who use appearance-related reasons as motivation for exercise, as opposed to health-and functionality-related reasons are more likely to be dissatisfied with their bodies, engage in unhealthy eating patterns and have lower self-esteem (Gonçalves & Gomes, 2012; Vartanian et al., 2012).
Lastly, fitspiration images of women are often sexualised, which could increase self-objectification. Self-objectification occurs when an individual internalises a view of themselves through an objectified lens and places a greater value on their body’s appearance than functioning. It is associated with increased feelings of body shame and reduced sensitivity to bodily cues, such as ignoring hunger (Moradi & Huang, 2008). The evidence points to detrimental effects of fitspiration content on women’s body image and mental wellbeing. Women are more likely to compare their bodies with others and feel more dissatisfied with their bodies following exposure to fitspiration (Dignard & Jarry, 2021; Prichard et al., 2020), which increases the risk of engaging in negative patterns of eating and compulsive exercise.
There is a lot of fitspiration content on social media, some of it may be beneficial in educating, inspiring and motivating people to exercise more and eat healthily, whereas some of it is likely to have negative effects on women’s body image and mental wellbeing. Images and videos that depict people with diverse bodies actively engaging in exercise may be a less harmful way of engaging with fitspiration content. It is important for people to remember that exercise should be more about feeling good and less about chasing (often unattainable) appearance goals.
