Social Media and Body Image

​We often talk about how society and mass media distort the image of health and give us false information in order to fill their pockets with our money. We are also told that we need to look a certain way, wear a specific size of jeans, and use all kinds of luxury products to feel better, happier, and more fulfilled. At the same time we are flooded with images of unrealistically perfect looking, artificially happy people that we compare ourselves with, labeled as inspirational photos, while all they do is make us feel not good enough for today’s beauty standards. We are pressured to try our best to meet the expectations of other people, and in the process of reaching this impossible goal, we damage our health for the sake of a lower number on the scale.

Pictures of super skinny models, hashtags like #thighgap and #bikinibridge, quotes that promote calorie restriction and chronic over exercising – all these things are like a weapon of mass destruction aimed by advertisers, and by our liking, sharing, and reposting these images we are the ones unintentionally pulling the trigger. One innocent click on the like button can have a huge impact, one negative comment can ruin your whole day, one second of comparing yourself to that photoshopped body in the magazine can completely turn you against your own body and mind, and the impact can be drastic. Let’s talk about social media and the impact it can have on our thinking, behavior, daily actions, and mental health.

This post is not meant to bash social media in general. We use social networks to our advantage to reach as many people as possible with our message ourselves, and as an individual, I very much appreciate the option to contact my family and friends that live a few hours (or even a few countries) away from me with just one click. But there are some aspects of social media consumption that can have a devastating effect on our lives. There is a reason for the age restriction on social networks like Facebook or Youtube (13 years with both these services, not that anyone really follows these rules), because of how dangerous navigating an online reality can be for children, and I am not talking about child pornography here. We as adults are exposed to so much shady content on the internet, just like kids are, but we often don’t realize the impact these things have on us because we are grown ups, able to make rational decisions (but are we really?).

SOCIAL CIRCLE, VIRTUALIZED

Humans are social creatures, no doubt about it. We thrive in the company of others, we like to surround ourselves with people we get along with, we value friendships and romantic relationships, we don’t like feeling lonely or rejected, we like to engage with group activities, from board games, to dance clubs and parties, to sports events in crowded stadiums. The energy of the crowd is overwhelming. If you have ever watched a group of football or hockey fans, you might notice the almost contagious vibe (in both good and bad ways), these people, gathered together over their common interest, forget all their past arguments and possible differences, and for the duration of the match, they act like a horde, almost like a family. Unfortunately things can get ugly sometimes when groups of fans of different teams clash and we suddenly see the darker side of contagious group behavior.

A very long time ago, when people still lived in small tribes, spending their evenings sitting around the fire, engaging in conversations, these social groups were much smaller, often not larger than 10 to 15 people. As people started building villages and later small towns, these social groups got bigger and bigger. Before social media came into the game, our social circles were not as big as they are today. Our closest people included our spouses, children, family members, a few good friends, and maybe even a co-worker we spend all day with in the office. When we talked about a friend, it was most likely someone we knew well for a long time, whom we trusted and had a lot in common with. I like to say that to me, a friend is someone who I would be willing to help if he or she called me in the middle of the night and needed to talk/borrow money/take them to the doctor/cry their heart out, and who I know would be willing to do the same for me. In my personal life, I can count these people on one hand and I still have fingers left. This might sound sad, but I always preferred quality over quantity in life, friendships included. To realize how quickly things changed with the arrival of social networking, go to your Facebook profile and notice how many people you have in your friends list. Now ask yourself, how many of these people you know in real life, met at least once, have had a meaningful conversation with, and know something more about them than their name (or the things posted on their wall). How many birth dates are you able to assign to those names? What kind of memories are connected to them? Do these virtual friendships have any value in your real life?

I go through my friends list several times a year and ask myself these questions. In the past, I was okay with adding people just because they sent me a request and their name sounded familiar to me (usually it was someone I used to go to school with twenty years ago, but hadn’t seen since then, not to mention that they never even messaged me or called me after I accepted their virtual friend request). At one point I had over 200 people in my friends list, but nobody to call when I was feeling lonely and wanted to hang out, chat over a cup of coffee, or to prevent me from going to a farmers market alone again. When I was 12, I got a pen pal from Lithuania and we exchanged handwritten letters for almost ten years, we were even planning on meeting each other. When we both got our Facebook profiles and connected online, we stopped sending letters and in less than six months, our communication completely perished. In my old job, a guy who worked in the same building added me to his friends list and the next day when we met in the hallway, he didn’t even say hi.

That day, I came home, opened my Facebook profile and simply deleted around 80% of my so-called friends. Some of them were on my friends list for years and had never messaged me, but the day after I deleted them, I got some private messages like “why did you delete me? I did nothing wrong!” or “we are not friends anymore?” No! I wanted to shout back, we never even were friends! This really made me re-evaluate the importance of social connections in our lives and the way we have approached this social media boom that has been unfolding over recent years with the emergence of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tinder, and other online services for connecting people. We have so many virtual friends, but for some reason a lot of us become more and more lonely and isolated instead of more connected.

When we were little and wanted to play outside with our friend, we had to actually go to their house, ring the doorbell and ask Mrs. Norman if Sally can come out to play. Today, all we need to do is check social media to see if Sally is online and available to talk. And why leave the house anyway! Why not stay home and just chat online?! It seems like a luxury, an advantage, a convenience. We can watch a YouTube video on the left side of the screen and still chat with Sally in the right corner and still stay in our PJs. What a life! We exchanged all the benefits of real life human interactions, face time with real people, for a more comfortable option: turning on our electronic devices. It doesn’t have to be a computer or a laptop, our phones also have an app for that. Many of us have a cellphone in our hand the second our alarm clock goes off, and it is very often the last thing we have our eyes on before we go to sleep (read here why this is not a good idea, no matter what you use that phone for).

“LIKE” HUNTING SOCIETY

Long before social media appeared, people used online blogs to share their thoughts, stories, and ideas. These online journals began to be slowly outshadowed by social networks. Facebook allows you to instantly share a photo of your vacation, Twitter enables you to express your impulsive idea in 140 characters or less, and the newest Instagram feature lets you snap a 10 second video that is immediately live (who knows why they think we need another social media app). Silly Snapchat filters that add animal ears to your face are a wonderful example of people wasting time, energy, and technology. We say that we don’t share every minute of our lives for other people, but we do. We do it for popularity and as many click on the like button from “friends” and complete strangers as possible. Likes are almost like a new currency in the online world. Likes make us feel good about ourselves. If somebody adds a heart to our Instagram selfie, it works as a little confidence boost for our mind. If you think that is absurd, think about this: do more likes on your picture make you feel better, or worse? We started as hunter-gatherers and turned into like-hunters. We used to hunt to survive, why do wehunt today?

We put stuff online only to get feedback from other people, most of the time people that have no impact on our personal life. Why do we seek approval from complete strangers? Why is it so important to us that everyone compliments us on our new haircut, outfit of the day, or snap of our lunch? Because we are driven by an external motivation and seeking instant gratification from our actions. I used to post a picture of every meal I cooked and carefully arranged on the plate. I had to take a picture and put it online before I was able to grab a fork and eat it (very often the meal was already getting cold and my boyfriend always patiently waited for me to upload the image online, poor hungry guy). I don’t run a food blog, I don’t do food styling, and I don’t make money by taking pictures of food, all I wanted was likes, hearts, and thumbs ups. I was disappointed when I only received three or four notifications, and I was thinking “what am I doing wrong? Bad lightning? Too many hashtags? Wrong timing?” I am in a different time zone than most people I am connected with on Instagram, so I suspected they were all still asleep, and once they were awake and online, my pictures would already be buried somewhere way down their timeline. But that was not my problem. My problem was that whole behavior.

I thought I needed to share selfies of me and my boyfriend, so people would see how happy and in love we are. I believed that posting snaps of my meals would make people think I am responsible and disciplined with my diet (and they will admire that). I secretly hoped people would notice me, like my photos, share my thoughts, and I would become social media famous, so I would be like one of the people I admired online (food bloggers, authors, health and wellness influencers, etc). Every time I took a picture of the book I was currently reading, I always mentioned the author and their social media profile and I would hope they would get a notification, notice me, and like my photo. It happened many times and it always made me so happy, for a moment. This presumed happiness never lasted. It was an instant of gratification achieved through my superficial external motivation. If you read our post on Challenges, goals and happiness, you know that seeking instant gratification can get pretty messy and turn into something we call the Hedonic Adaptation, a mental process that makes any positive (or negative) feelings fade with time, making us hungry for more and more quick fixes. If your think buying something nice will make you happier, you are most likely to fall into this hedonic trap.

Very often we turn to social media for inspiration and motivation. This is perfectly okay, many of us need some kind of boost from the outside world in order to stay motivated, feel credible, or get inspired. Problems start to seep in when the only thing that is driving us forward is what we called extrinsic motivation, meaning we only seek motivation and inspiration in other people; we tend to compare ourselves with others, oftentimes forgetting about our own goals, challenges and limitations. This might actually be damaging, to not just our self-esteem, but to both mental and physical health. How can we avoid the damage and at the same time find our motivation in the right place? 

​What do you turn to when you need to be motivated? What inspires you, what drives you forward? What makes you want to improve professionally, reach a fitness milestone, lose ten pounds, or improve your foreign language skills? Each of us is motivated by different incentives and we are all driven by different forces. My goals will be different from yours, but even if we share a common goal, we will both live with different circumstances and conditions, different challenges and obstacles, different ways of looking at things, and probably also differences in the speed at which we will decide to go forward. Some of us like to wade into things slowly, while others like to approach things by diving into them head-first. When I quit smoking, I did it cold turkey, but for my father, this didn’t work when he wanted to ditch nicotine; he had to slowly cut back on the number of cigarettes until he finally reached zero. Our reasons were different too. He quit when I was 12 years old, because I asked him to (and then I started three years later, duh) and I quit when I was 25 because I wanted to be healthy. The source of motivation was different for both of us.

TYPES OF MOTIVATION

There are generally two types of motivation – extrinsic and intrinsic. How they work is pretty self-explanatory: my dad was driven by an extrinsic motivation (somebody else made/encouraged him to quit, he did it mostly because of an external stimuli), while my decision was based on an internal drive, I did it for myself, to get healthier, to live longer and with a higher quality of life, the idea came from my own mind. Neither of these types of motivation is wrong per se, even though being motivated intrinsically is ultimately the better option, and I will explain why in a second. What matters the most with external motivation is the source and the reasoning behind it. Sometimes extrinsic motivation can literally save us. For example, when our lifestyle related behavior is damaging our health and well being, we very often take it very lightly, until a doctor shocks us with some bad news. Unfortunately, very often this type of warning from the outside comes when it already is too late. We feel unstoppable when we are young, not giving a thought to how our actions today will impact our life tomorrow (or some ten or twenty years later).

Many of us realize that how we treat our bodies today will determine how our bodies will treat us in return in the future. We obviously know and understand the importance of eating a healthy, balanced diet, smart movement, and certain lifestyle changes, but many of us lack the intrinsic motivation to actually apply these obvious truths to our lives. We are either too busy, too overwhelmed with information, or simply not inspired. And it is natural that in cases like this we seek inspiration and motivation from somewhere else, because we can’t find it within ourselves. There is nothing wrong with that, the problem comes when we stumble upon the wrong source of external motivation. Unfortunately, social media channels are interlaced with profiles that are meant to motivate and inspire us, but in reality most of them are harmful to our minds and bodies.

FITSPO AND CO.

It is normal and perfectly healthy to have an idol, at least in the sense of someone we can look up to. Problems appear when instead of being inspired and motivated by the actions of that individual, we focus strictly on their looks. I admire one of my friends for her dedication and strength, and I know that if I was training as consistently as her, I could achieve the same level of fitness. But I know I will never have her body; my hips are way wider, my shoulders not broad enough, and I am not willing to sacrifice my health and menstrual cycle to lower my bodyfat low enough to get a visible six pack that yes, looks pretty badass, but has no functional purpose. Of course, sometimes I can’t help but imagine myself walking around in cropped t-shirt with sculpted abs for everyone to see and the words I want those long legs run through my mind, but I realize there is a difference between being inspired by and comparing myself with someone else, which is unfortunately what most of us do with our idols.

In the last few years, many people have become obsessed with fitness and pursuing the perfect body. But this new fitness culture has a very distorted image, where the goal is being thin and shredded, but not necessarily healthy and functionally strong. People are advised to do chronic cardio exercises or very intense crossfit workouts in order to get physically perfect, because in their eyes, physical perfection means being good enough to succeed in this society. People who train hard every day, spend hours in the gym, get up very early in the morning to squeeze a workout in before breakfast, these people are glorified and seen as heroes. And we tend to compare ourselves with these real life heroes – we want to be like them, we want those abs, those slender legs, that perfect hair, and size 0 jeans. We feel like seeing these perfect people is a great reminder of what we want to achieve, so we start collecting photos of perfectly shaped men and women, because we see them as inspiration. And based on this behavior, FITSPO, short for fitness inspiration, was born with the rise of social media, followed by THINSPO (thinspiration) and nonsensical hashtags like #thighgap, #bikinibridge, or quotes similar to “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”, accompanied by an image of an emaciated, unhealthy looking model with an empty expression on her face that always makes me want to scream “somebody, give that girl a donut!”

Sometimes you see a nice looking inspirational picture on Facebook and you might think: “This sounds pretty reasonable,” and you click the Follow button without even thinking about it. If you do this multiple times, you later find your feed full of pictures you never intentionally subscribed to. For these fitspo boards, follow us on Facebook actually means let us invade your social media feed (and thereby your mind). There were times when my own Facebook wall was covered with quotes like Unless you faint, puke or die, keep pushing! or Sweat is the fat crying. When I think about it now, those were also the times when I was doing chronic cardio sessions every day, followed by a very restrictive, low carb and low fat diet. I had a picture of my favorite fitness model as the desktop wallpaper on my computer, damn, I even printed that picture at work and posted it to my fridge door to remind myself not to eat! My self esteem was so low, and I was chasing that unrealistic image of looking like somebody else, because in my head, I was not good enough. The mirror and the scale were my best friends and worst enemies at the same time (because the number was not decreasing fast enough and my abs were still nowhere to be seen) and I organized my whole day around my workouts. I was a mess – in both my body and mindset.

INSPIRATION VS. COMPARISON

Sometimes, when we think about getting better at something, our brains translate it into something like: “you are not good enough and you have to change that.” The inspirational pictures we are looking at show us someone who is, in our minds, better than us and this motivates us to chase that unrealistic image. And if we constantly surround ourselves (both physically and through our social media feeds, which is where we tend to spend way too much time) with photos of perfect bodies, our self-esteem suffers, and our health suffers. The worst case scenario is when you don’t feel particularly good about your body in the first place. For you, these sources of external motivation actually turn you into an unhappy person with low self-esteem, who can easily fall into the trap of starvation, chronic excessive exercise that leads to injury or chronic stress and gland damage, self loathing and negative self talk, chasing an unrealistic body by chasing endorphins in the gym instead of health and well being – all that for the sake of a lower percentage of body fat?! We mistake unhealthy obsession for dedication and discipline and we admire those who train hard every day, who deprive themselves of food, who sacrifice their sleep only to get more hours in the gym every day, and then we watch them post inspirational pictures on Instagram of their showing collar bones and ribs along with hashtags like #whatisyourexcuse. There is actually a study proving that “more time on Facebook was associated with higher levels of disordered eating. Women who placed greater importance on receiving comments and “likes” on their status updates and were more likely to untag photos of themselves and compare their own photos to friends’ posted photos reported the highest levels of disordered eating.”

The fitness models you see online, and maybe even look up to, have very different lives, goals, and challenges. Probably none of them have a regular nine-to-five job, three kids to take care of, or certain medical restrictions. Just like regular models or actors, they look good for a living. If a supermodel gained twenty pounds, she would probably not get booked ever again, because her career is basically built on her skinny physique, almost childlike figure, and hollow cheeks. This morning, I saw an article about Jessica Alba stating that she doesn’t need diets to get skinny, all she needs is chronic stress, so she simply forgets to eat. Hugh Jackman would never have gotten the role of Wolverine if he wasn’t willing to train for hours every day, along with following a super strict diet. In reality, he doesn’t look like Wolverine outside filming – that body shape is just not sustainable long term, just like extreme leanness you can see on female fitness models. It is not realistic, and deep down in our hearts, we know this. What is very often blocking our way to accepting these facts is a lack of healthy self love.

Drastic changes in body shape, quick muscle gains, and rapid body fat drops are possible, but only via unhealthy and unsustainable shortcuts that only bring short term results and they come with a price. When a bikini model needs to get ready for a competition in just a few weeks, she does it via extreme dieting and a training schedule. It is very hard work, there is no doubt about it. Bodybuilders, fitness models, and actors work very hard to get where they need to be, but it is still their job. In general, they are not the healthiest people on the planet. Big muscles don’t always mean big strength and a slim waist doesn’t necessarily mean good metabolic health. Many of us dislike or even hate at least one thing about our bodies and we focus on that one little thing so much that we tend to ignore the rest, the more important and invisible things like our character, values, personality, spirituality, creativity, and capacity to love. Sacrificing mental and physical health in order to look a certain way, only to get approval from other people is not motivational or inspirational behavior, and you can never escape the consequences of sabotaging your health.

UNSUBSCRIBE

When I started to have big problems with my sugar addiction, I decided to unfollow all the Facebook feeds that often share dessert recipes and content that further provoked my sugar cravings. When I stopped seeing cupcakes and cookies all over my social media feeds, it was strangely liberating. You know the saying, out of sight, out of mind? It worked exactly like that. Before I clicked unfollow on each profile, I asked myself a question: Does this page provide any real value to my everyday life and my goals? And just like when I was evaluating my list of virtual friends, when the answer was not immediately YES, I unsubscribed. I completely agree that not all fitness sites are a bad influence or cause self-loathing, but ask yourself the following question: Is it making me more fit or is it making me feel less good about myself? Real inspiration should give you power, and a desire to become a better version of who you already are, not to turn yourself into someone else, into somebody who in your eyes is more worthy of love and attention. A good source of inspiration should never bring your down, it should never tell you to push through the pain, or make you feel not good enough. You are ultimately perfect the way you are right now. Each of us is so incredibly unique; there is nobody else in the world that is like you, so why would you want to be like somebody else? There are already plenty of Angelina Jolie wannabes walking around, but there is only one YOU. Amazing, wonderful, and beautiful you. Yes, with those hips.