Student submission
Snap, post. New workout done, time for a protein shake. Flat belly and toned legs.
Social media has been a major platform for exchange and promotion of opinions. While talks on fitness, healthy living and diets are gaining an unprecedented momentum on social media, influencers and big brands are eager to jump on the health and fitness bandwagon to appeal to newly health-conscious consumers. For those users, social media serves as a journal to track fitness journeys, provides assorted workout options, or connects them to a supportive community with like-minded people.
Years on, more and more health-conscious social media users have joined the trend, which is named “fitspiration”, a combination of the words “fitness” and “inspiration”. Among them, myths on diet and nutritions seem especially enticing to the bewildered teengeers who are eager to build a healthier lifestyle. Everyone on the internet can be an expert giving nutritional advice without any qualification but a social media account. If you type how to lose weight in your search bar, billions of content will flood in. Cutting calories, cutting carbs, cutting fat, cutting sugar, eating only clean food. Each of them seem to be backed by a significant number of followers with their uplifting anecdotes and proclaimed scientific evidence. Further misguided by the overwhelming amount of likes and shares, you probably find it even harder to distinguish truths from myths, facts from clickbaits, and go astray. In fact, YouGov’s data shows that one in five (22%) Singaporeans are currently on a diet to lose weight. Notably, people under-25s, the most active group on social media, are twice as likely as those over 55s to be dieting (30% vs 15%). If you look around to see what your peers are eating at lunchtime, it is definitely not unusual to find someone who is on a diet.
When my eleven-year-old cousin stopped me from eating an ice-cream after dinner and said that there was too much fat and sugar content which would make me FAT so that no one would befriend me, I was only left with shock.
This generation has been bombarded with the message that there are certain “correct” and “ideal” lifestyles that we need to achieve for a more fulfilling life. The idealization of unrealistically fit body images as well as diet and workout routines are so commonly seen in the online fitness community.
Yet, seldom do those social media feeds emphasize the negative implications of missing out on important nutrients. Our social media algorithms naturally lead us to many obscure health trends, and dangerous restrictive diets. At first glance, the before-and-afters give us such a visual shock that easily hoodwinks people and gains popularity. But bear in mind that too much of a calorie deficit could be detrimental - headache, fatigue, dizziness, or even risks of dying of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes. We might be walking in the opposite direction from our goals, believe it or not.
Moreover, diet culture itself is an unfalsifiable concept. When you fail to reach your goal, you are only made to blame yourself for not trying hard enough, not being disciplined enough. I mean, if not, thousands of social media users have accomplished it, why can they do it but you cannot? With fitness-related content being so available like never before, some negative psychological impacts have also been identified - compulsive exercise, body dissatisfaction, appearance-related anxiety and excessive control of eating habits, you name it. For example, the illusions created by social media can readily lead to body dysmorphia by triggering obsessive thoughts about appearance. The feed full of people looking “perfect” turns out to be a constant reminder of peoples’ perceived flaws. This can lead to compulsive actions to try to remediate the issue, a war of us against our body.
I am not arguing against all the benefits that a healthy lifestyle, a balanced diet, and exercise routines can bring: they have been emphasized enough. Yet, too much of a focus on “healthiness” and “restriction” and a blind pursuit of an “ideal lifestyle” could be dangerous. The way we humans construct our identities and belief systems based on the messages we come across, knowingly or unknowingly, has rendered us highly susceptible to the rhetorics used by fitness culture. The pursuit of control and self-discipline, often promoted by those fitness bloggers, actually comes in a form of self-denial and punishment - we act as if we are "guilty" for enjoying the mundane pleasure in our lives so that we are “condemned” to the most stringent exercise and diet plans. It is often a suffering that we ask for ourselves.
More often than not, those images of lean bodies and sharings on highly restrictive diet prompt a feeling of inadequacy. Since young, we have been put into endless comparison with others, by society and by ourselves. This feeling of inadequacy is so inextricably woven into the fabric of our mind that many of us are not consciously aware of the everyday inundation. This fear of losing out to others, this aspiration of always striving for better, this worship of suffering are still overwhelmingly strong voices on the internet.
As much as we want to break free from the shackles by shutting down natural desires and see it as an antithesis of self-control, we are actually succumbing to another self-inflicted destructive force.
There is no standard answer to what we shall do to resist the toxic side of fitness culture. In fact, we are not waging a battle against the industry or the system, but ourselves. To all of us still trying to make peace with the broken pieces scattering in the turbulence of fitness culture: you have all the strength you need, you have always been enough.
References:
1. Carrotte, E. R., Prichard, I., & Lim, M. S. (2017). "Fitspiration" on Social Media: A Content Analysis of Gendered Images. Journal of medical Internet research, 19(3), e95. https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.6368
2. Ho, K. (n.d.). Two in five Singaporeans unhappy with their weight. YouGov. Retrieved March 23, 2022, from https://sg.yougov.com/en-sg/news/2019/06/12/two-five-singaporeans-unhappy-their-weight/
Written by: Hu Jiayu (21S7B)
Edited by: Hu Chenwei (21A15)
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