Social media as a fitness authority
For a great many people, Instagram and TikTok have become the default places to look for guidance on appearance, nutrition and exercise. Wellness influencers market rigid eating plans and workout routines while also promoting activewear, protein powders and other products. The faces behind these accounts tend to share a narrow set of traits: they are young, conventionally attractive, slim and muscular.
Accounts belonging to figures such as Sommer Ray, Tammy Hembrow and Kayla Itsines have drawn tens of millions of followers by offering carefully staged portrayals of health, happiness and success. Their reach means the standards they project travel far beyond their own profiles, shaping how audiences think about what a fit body is supposed to look like.
A study of 200 young New Zealand women
Newly published research by Francesca Kurghan and Holly Thorpe, written for The Conversation, set out to understand the body ideals young women encounter in online spaces. The team surveyed 200 young women in New Zealand, asking them to describe the physical standards they see promoted across their feeds.
The responses revealed not one ideal but a crowded and inconsistent set of them. Rather than converging on a single look, the online landscape pushes several at once — and some of them pull in opposite directions.
The ideals participants described
Those surveyed listed a mix of body types and attributes. Among them:
- Lean and toned
- Thin
- Curvy
- Fashionable
- Free of visible fat
- Muscular
- "Thick," with shapely buttocks and thighs
Some 57% said young women are under strong pressure to meet these standards. The difficulty, as participants themselves recognized, is that the list is not internally consistent. Being thin and being curvy are, for most bodies, competing goals. Yet both circulate online as desirable — sometimes within the same feed, sometimes within the same post.
Empowerment language, restrictive content
The study identified a second contradiction, this one woven into how online fitness culture frames itself. Trends such as "fitspiration" are frequently packaged in the language of empowerment, body positivity and self-love. The messaging suggests that working out and eating well are acts of self-care and confidence.
At the same time, much of the content encourages strict control over diet, exercise and other aspects of daily life. The result is a message that celebrates the body while prescribing constant management of it — a tension that can be hard for audiences to parse, particularly when a single account delivers both halves.
The toll on how women see themselves
For some participants, the effort to keep up with these ideals carried a cost. They described disappointment and difficult relationships with bodies that never seemed to measure up. A persistent sense of being "not enough" ran through their accounts.
Others said they feared gaining weight, or caught themselves continually searching for new perceived flaws to address. Because the targets kept shifting, the feeling of falling short rarely faded on its own.
Where social media helps
The picture is not entirely negative. Many young women find fitness influencers motivating and educational. Workout content can introduce routines and ideas that audiences would not otherwise encounter, and it can make exercise feel more approachable.
Social media also builds communities. People pursuing health and fitness goals can find support, encouragement and shared experience online — a function that matters especially for those who lack that kind of backing offline.
Credibility gaps and missing safeguards
Those benefits come alongside risks the authors highlight. Much of the advice originates from people whose qualifications are unclear or questionable. Major platforms, meanwhile, offer limited protection against unsupported health guidance. Content that looks authoritative can rest on little more than personal experience and a compelling aesthetic.
When an influencer's income depends on selling supplements, apparel or training programs, the line between advice and advertising blurs further. Audiences are left to sort credible guidance from marketing largely on their own.
What the findings suggest
The research points to a structural problem rather than a personal failing. Young women are not simply choosing between competing ideals; they are being served a set of ideals that cannot all be satisfied at once. The thin-and-curvy standard, or an empowerment message paired with restrictive control, sets up expectations that no individual body can fully meet.
Recognizing that contradiction may be a starting point. If the standards are impossible by design, then the difficulty lies less with the people chasing them than with the environment that promotes them. The authors situate the issue within a wider online ecosystem — one that rewards engagement, sells products and lacks consistent guardrails around health claims.
For readers, the findings raise practical questions: how to evaluate fitness advice, how to recognize when empowerment rhetoric masks restriction, and how platforms might better flag unsupported health content. The study does not offer a single fix. It does make clear that the pressures young women encounter online are varied, contradictory and, for many, genuinely costly.
This article is based on reporting by Phys.org. Read the original article.
Originally published on phys.org
