More than HALF of fitness influencers are pushing oversexualization and unhealthy body standards
A first-of-its-kind study found that more than half of popular fitness influencers on Instagram push harmful content about body ideals, food and exercise.
The study examined 100 of the most followed Instagram accounts that regularly post fitness-related content. It found that the majority of them contained sexualization, objectification, and promotion of unhealthy or unrealistic body types.
Most of these accounts show thin and athletic women promoting exercise, fitness and healthy eating. The study’s team called the content “fitspiration.” Some have men with chiseled abs and bodybuilder-like physiques.
The majority of teens report using Instagram, and other researchers are concerned about social media causing body issues in young people.
This Instagram post by Jen Selter is a possible example of a fitness inspiration/motivation culture of objectification
Brian Johnson (pictured), 45, is a social media fitness influencer who goes by the name ‘Liver King’. He promotes eating raw meat and living a ‘primal life’
At first glance, this kind of inspiration should stimulate movement [behavior] and help improve well-being,” researchers wrote in their study, published in March in the journal BMC Public Health.
However, there is a relatively small but growing body of evidence that has examined the short-term effects of Instagram fitness content and exercise inspiration, mood and body image, suggesting that this may not be the case.”
Experts warn of body dysmorphia due to influencers who have recently become popular.
For example, Jen Selter has 13.8 million followers on Instagram. She posts videos of herself regularly showing off her abs and buttocks in a sexualizing way.
Also known as the Liver King, Brian Johnson has five million followers across all of his social media platforms.
He regularly shows himself shirtless to accentuate his chiseled abs. The emergence of his, and others of his type, have been linked to increasing body dysmorphia in young men.
The researchers checked the 15 most recent posts from 100 leading fitspiration accounts on Instagram.
“Fifteen posts were chosen because this is the number of posts visible in Instagram’s native grid format and visible when you first click on an account,” the researchers wrote.
The authors decided that the 15 most recent posts should contain at least four pieces of fitness-related content to ensure that the accounts regularly showed viewers that type of content.
The researchers examined the 40 most followed fitness accounts.
The researchers in the March study, published in the journal BMJ Public Health, selected users whose fitness-related content accounted for four of the most recent 15 posts. This chart shows how many of them post workout videos, fitness motivation, and example workouts, among other things
They videotaped each account owner’s biography and their most recent 15 posts from September 24-26, 2019.
They developed an audit tool to screen content in two phases.
The first phase involved screening the tool’s content without opening individual messages to look for images of nudity, sexualization, objectification, and extreme body types.
The second step involved the tool individually searching the 15 most recent posts to examine captions and hashtags.
Posts were reviewed to see if there was evidence of editing the poster’s appearance, “thinspiration” content – which praises excessive weight loss, disordered eating, negative connotations of being overweight or thin – unhealthy or excessive attitudes to the body and exercise, or displays hashtags such as #thinspo and #thinspiration.
“This is the first published study attempting to develop an evidence-based audit tool for Instagram fitspiration accounts,” the study authors wrote.
Accounts that passed both screening phases were considered not malicious. Only 41 percent of them met these standards.
In the highlighted accounts, researchers found high levels of objectification around parts of women’s bodies, including the abs and buttocks.
“Given the links between exposure to these types of images and concerns about mood and body image… the number of accounts containing such images is alarming,” the study authors wrote.
Other recent research has shed light on these harmful effects.
A February study in the journal New Media & Societyfound, for example, that people who viewed fitspiration images daily for 28 days were more likely to have negative moods and compare their bodies to those in the posts.
Also a 2022 study from the journal Body image found that women who often viewed these messages internalized the need to be thin and were more likely to have disordered eating.
There are more than 1.6 billion Instagram users around the world, according to social media management company Hootsuite.
On Instagram alone, fitness hashtags like #fitspiration and #fitspo have over 100 million posts.
Many of these users are under the age of 18, raising concerns from parents and lawmakers about viewing inappropriate content.
According to a Pew research survey from last year, 73 percent of teens ages 15 to 17 said they’d used Instagram at some point.
Utah lawmakers passed a law this year requiring children under 18 to get parental consent before signing up for social media sites like Instagram and TikTok.
Arkansas will have the same requirement in September.
The researchers believe the same tool could be tested on fitness accounts on TikTok, where posts under #FitTok have been viewed more than 53 billion times.