2 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. Instagram is one of the most popular online social networks, with 1.3 billion users globally in 2021 [4]. It is ranked as the third favourite social media platform across all ages (the favourite among females aged 16–34) [4], and shows high engagement compared with other platforms (i.e., 2–7% of users interact with each post on Instagram compared to 0.1–1.5% on Facebook) [5]. Fitspiration Instagram accounts (e.g., health and fitness influencers) share photos and videos of exercise and healthy eating and inspiring quotes to empower individuals to engage in healthy lifestyle choices [6]. Popular fitness inspiration hashtags on Instagram such as #fitspiration and #fitspo currently return over 100 million posts.

      This is what I was talking about with social media becoming the new thing and people creating fitness and health content. I know of a lot of people that look for workout, diets, or certain routines on social media and sometimes the content could be harmful and sometimes good depending on if it's realistic and manageable for others. Its important to do what works best for yourself, so trying things but then doing things that are good for you and not just doing things because you saw others do it online. Social media is kind of a mental thing because its easy to fall into rabbit holes when people aren't able to control themselves with what they are exposed to and its important to be careful of the type of content you are seeing and not building unhealthy habits that aren't good for you.

    2. While many popular Instagram fitspiration accounts offered credible content such as example workouts, many accounts contained sexualisation, objectification or promotion of unhealthy or unrealistic body shapes. The audit tool could be used by Instagram users to ensure the accounts they follow do not portray potentially harmful or unhealthy content. Future research could use the audit tool to identify credible fitspiration accounts and examine whether exposure to these accounts positively influences physical activity.

      This is becoming an upcoming problem because a lot of people are on social media and there are more and more fitness influencers such as body builders that are showing body image content. This becomes problematic because we got a lot of people comparing themselves to the content and they are creating unrealistic goals on becoming the way the influencers look like on filters or edited content. I fell for this at somepoint with bodybuilders and always found myself comparing how much weight I lifted and how much they lifted even if they were on steroids or just clearly had a lot more time in the gym than me.