Associate Professor at Flinders University Ivanka Prichard, one of the study’s co-authors, says its findings “raise concerns” that many accounts claiming to promote health and fitness post images that are “objectified and sexualised in nature” and unrelated to fitness.LoadingShe explains that a culture of thinness in the media has affected the types of images we see in the health and wellness space. “We’ve internalised this thin ideal and equate thinness with health.”“But we know that all types of body shapes can be healthy,” she continues. “It’s more about the behaviour of what we do rather than how we look, like engaging in healthy levels of exercise and having a healthy diet.”Prichard adds that finding a high proportion of sexualised images is also concerning. “When women self-objectify they come to value themselves for their appearance. People see this and might think it is normative and that they need to be posting [this type of content] to get likes or followers.”Lauren Calvin, founder of the National Women’s Fitness Academy, is trying to expand this narrow thinking around what a healthy body looks like in the fitness industry. She started the academy after struggling to find a coach who understood pregnancy fitness.“The lack of body diversity in fitness media made me feel like I had to look a certain way to be taken seriously which fuelled my eating disorder, and the lack of support I could find during pregnancy and postpartum made me realise there was a huge hole in the education provided to personal trainers about women.”The National Women’s Fitness Academy.Calvin, who suffered from bulimia as a child, says this developed into another eating disorder when she discovered the online fitness world in her teens. “I discovered clean eating and fitness, which gave me a sense of control. I switched that eating disorder for another one – orthorexia, an obsession with clean eating.”The academy’s social media promotes body diversity, as well as sharing information about everything from lifting weights while pregnant to training during Ramadan.“It’s all toned, tanned young, perfect bodies. Ads for PT courses were usually a young fit male coaching a fit woman. It really annoyed me. I felt like I had to look a certain way to be considered knowledgeable.”Loading“People will say we are promoting obesity, but that is not the case at all. Overweight people deserve to feel safe and comfortable at the gym, not judged and discriminated against,” says Calvin.Graduates of the academy receive their Certificate III and IV in Fitness, but are also “educated in body image, disordered eating, pregnancy and postpartum, the menstrual cycle, hormonal conditions like PCOS [polycystic ovarian syndrome] and endometriosis, gut health, menopause and business.”So what can Instagram users do to protect themselves against potentially harmful content?Associate professor Gemma Sharp is head of the Body Image and Eating Disorders Research Group at Monash University and Senior Clinical Psychologist at Alfred Health. She says the “concept [of the audit tool] is fantastic, helping people to be more savvy in how they consume this content.”Sharp, who has written extensively about the effects of social media on body image, suggests employing a method called “protective filtering”, which is about taking control of your social media experience by unfollowing or blocking content that provokes negative feelings about one’s body.But the Instagram algorithm, a mechanism that recommends new content to users using machine learning, can make this tricky. Instagram has always kept information about how its algorithm works closely guarded, and the behaviours and types of content it rewards are always changing. As Sharp acknowledges, “there are limitations of what the individual can do when you have the power of the algorithm at play.”In December 2022, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner called for “greater transparency and robust risk management from social media platforms and online services around the dangers their recommender algorithms pose to users, particularly children.” While it acknowledged that there can be positive benefits to recommender algorithms, it stressed the potentially negative mental health impacts on vulnerable groups, including those struggling with body image or eating disorders.Sharp adds that the responsibility should not be solely on the individual user. “It would be great if you had Instagram rewarding body positive fitness influencers.” Co-design, she says, with users and companies working together, would help develop an effective solution to this problem.Butterfly National Helpline 1800 33 4673.Make the most of your health, relationships, fitness and nutrition with our Live Well newsletter. Get it in your inbox every Monday.
https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/more-than-half-of-instagram-s-top-fitness-influencers-promote-dubious-information-20230509-p5d71k.html
Instagram influencers promoting ‘dubious’ health information
