Body Conscious

No matter how much Janine DeMichele Baggett exercised and obsessed over her calorie intake, she never felt entirely satisfied with her body. Since high school, the 26-year-old actress and web designer had spent hours each week sweating it out at the gym and quietly berating herself for any deviation from her rigid diet. At 5-foot-2, she usually hovered around 120 pounds, with a figure that would be considered trim and healthy by almost any objective observer. But in her own eyes, all she saw were glaring differences between her body and those gracing the covers of women’s magazines.

A few years ago, Baggett stumbled on a burgeoning genre of online photographs expressly intended to inspire people to work out harder. Dubbed “fitspiration” or “fitspo,” the pictures showed women with exactly the kind of slender and toned physique she aspired to. She started following the photo streams on social media, thinking they would give her the mental push she needed to run an extra mile, grunt through another weight-training rep, or resist the bread basket at dinner. Instead, she found herself obsessing over the images that filled her feeds and feeling hopeless about her efforts.

“I would look at the accounts of women posting their perfect pictures and then stand in front of the mirror comparing myself,” Baggett says. “I never felt good enough, only that I should be working out harder. I was the leanest I’d ever been in my life, but I couldn’t recognize my progress because I was fixated on how far short I fell.”

Type “fitspiration” into any search engine and you’ll be inundated with images of glistening bodies—mostly women in tiny spandex shorts and sports bras, with rock-hard abs, pert behinds, sculpted arms, and thighs free of flab. The fitspiration phenomenon has grown rapidly on social media in recent years, with hundreds of Instagram feeds, Facebook pages, Pinterest boards, and Tumblr accounts streaming the photos to millions. Some show professional models, while others are essentially compendiums of selfies in which regular people show off the fruits of their fitness labor and catapult themselves to Internet stardom. The images are often overlaid with captions that range from the motivational (“IT DOESN’T GET EASIER, YOU JUST GET BETTER,”) to the antagonistic (“SUCK IT UP NOW SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO SUCK IT IN LATER,”) to the guilt inducing (“DO NOT REWARD YOURSELF WITH FOOD. YOU ARE NOT A DOG.”)

At first glance, fitspiration may seem like a healthy retort to so-called “thinspiration” images—a genre of online photos in which women and girls show off their extreme skinniness and, in some cases, explicitly endorse anorexia as a “lifestyle choice.” Thinspiration pictures have been broadly denounced for provoking disordered eating and low self-esteem. Fitspiration, on the other hand, is supposed to do the very thing that public health experts are constantly advocating for Americans, nearly 70 percent of whom are overweight or obese: motivate them to get off the couch, move their bodies, and break a sweat. But as it proliferates online, some researchers are finding that fitspiration may actually have more negative than positive effects.

To examine the influence on women of images of athletic female bodies, Bryan Karazsia, an associate professor of psychology at the College of Wooster in Ohio who studies body image, and his colleague, Catherine Benton, showed more than 300 young women a variety of pictures culled from popular magazines and exercise-oriented websites. The models all had a very low level of body fat but fell into three categories of muscularity: “hypermuscular,” like a bodybuilder; thin and athletic, with a moderate amount of muscle; and simply thin with little muscle. Their study, published earlier this year in the journal Body Image, reported that after viewing the first type of image, participants’ level of satisfaction with their own bodies didn’t really budge, but after seeing images in the latter two categories, their body satisfaction took a dive.

“They’ll look at a hypermuscular picture and think, That’s gross, and they’ll look at a thin model and think, I wish I looked like that, as they have for decades,” Karaszia says. “Now they also seem to be saying ‘I wish I looked like that’ with a new ideal of thin and muscular.” The new ideal, however, is just as unrealistic for most women as the wispy cover girl standard of yore, and Karaszia believes it has similarly detrimental effects.

“Body dissatisfaction is not linked with health,” he says. “It’s linked with a lot of negative things, like eating disorders, unhealthy exercise habits, low self-esteem, and depression.” The internalization of the thin-athletic body ideal is particularly worrisome, Karaszia adds, “because you have people trying to become thin through lack of nutrition and then exercising while not properly nourished. It’s dangerous.”

A previous study was slightly more nuanced about the impact of the thin-athletic ideal. Kristin Homan, an adjunct professor of psychology at Grove City College in Pennsylvania showed young women pictures of models with similar muscularity but varied levels of thinness. Homan found that exposure to pictures of ultrafit, ultrathin models increased the viewers’ own body dissatisfaction, although looking at ultrafit models with normal weight did not. Seeing a body that’s strong but not skinny, in other words, doesn’t take such a huge bite out of our mental well-being.

That might seem like a heartening defense of the athletic ideal until you consider a recent content analysis of fitspiration websites published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders by Leah Boepple, a graduate student at the University of South Florida who found that most of the pages showcased bodies that were both highly muscled and noticeably thin—the very body type that Homan’s work showed was most likely to dampen viewers’ self-image.

Boepple also catalogued the captions that accompany fitspiration images and found them rife with problematic messages about eating and body image. The combination of visual and verbal information holds the potential, she says, “to make people feel guilty about their bodies and encourage disordered thoughts surrounding food and exercise.”

Ironically, fitspiration and other media messages that promote a “push through the agony” concept of fitness and an ideal athletic body can in fact deter people from exercising. Research by Tanya Berry, an exercise psychologist at the University of Alberta, has confirmed what she considers an alienation effect: She found that watching clips of The Biggest Loser—a television show frequently lauded as motivating—actually decreased people’s inclination to work out; Berry concluded that participants were put off by the intensity of exercise depicted on the show and couldn’t imagine their own bodies undergoing such drastic changes.

“The problem with an appearance-based goal is that most people will never look that way, no matter how hard they try,” Karazsia says. “It’s healthier for people to accept that there is no one body standard and to engage in exercise for the purpose of attaining a health outcome. That’s not very sexy to talk about. But if our goal is health, we need to separate that from physical portrayals of the body.”

Image: Dean Drobot / Shutterstock