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Tripods and cameras are scattered among the weights and benches at a Mississauga gym. It is common to find fitness influencers at First Health Club. I am filming a video of myself taking iron to post on social media.
Among them is Chelsea Berestek, 25. Chelsea Berestekki is a young mother who just started posting fitness content on TikTok and Instagram a few months ago, after consuming it for several years while trying to lose weight.
“When my son was born in 2017, I gained a lot of weight from pregnancy. I weighed 260 pounds,” she said. “Over the past four years, I’ve lost over 100 pounds.”
“Looking at all the TikTok influencers in the fitness industry, I feel like…that’s the life I want to live.”
She says those feelings often inspired her to eat healthier and go to the gym, even if she didn’t want to.
Just a few months after she started posting, she already has over 8,000 TikTok followers and counting.
While that was a positive thing for her, online fitness content often contains negative messages. The post may be misleading. At worst, they can actively cause harm by encouraging extreme diets or promoting exercises that are unsafe for everyone.
Despite the growing popularity of fitness influencers, their impact on health has not been well studied. Currently, there is a surge of research that fills this void and offers solutions.
One person’s meat, another person’s poison.
A recent study published in the journal Body Image offers one preliminary finding. Australian researchers examined 200 videos from popular TikTok fitness hashtags such as #fitness, #gymtok and #fittok and found that 60% of videos posted by fitness influencers contained misleading or harmful information. It turns out that it contains information.
According to the authors, the majority of people posting videos had not received any significant training on what they were posting. The majority of the videos also perpetuated negative messages such as sexualization, objectification (for both men and women), body shaming, and excessive dieting.
“The fact that it promotes a caloric deficit in general was very concerning,” said study lead author Samantha Pride, a PhD candidate at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. said. She said many of the videos promoted extreme calorie deficits below public health recommendations for weight loss.
A recent study of 200 TikToks by Australian researchers found that 60% of videos posted by fitness influencers contained misleading or harmful information. (Sergey Kozlove/Shutterstock)
“95% of the people who were posting videos didn’t actually have any relevant qualifications in health, fitness or nutrition,” she said.
Social media helps viewers feel like they have a personal connection with influencers. That artificial intimacy makes statements like “I did this to lose weight” or “This is what I ate in a day” sound like compelling personal advice. Pride said it could be heard.
“It’s like just a friend telling them, not some random person on TV or in a magazine,” Pride said.
Personal trainer and weightlifting coach Jennifer Mulgrew records herself doing exercises to demonstrate proper form to her clients. She says she feels anxious about some of the exercises she sees online. (Turgut Yetel/CBC News)
Personal trainer Jennifer Mulgrew, who trains on the other side of the gym in Mississauga, understands how powerful personalized advice can be. She sets up a tripod on the other side of the gym and records her workouts. Not to post on social media, but to send to the client as a reference for the appropriate form. She says she cringes when she sees some exercises posted online.
“You can see there’s a back injury or a shoulder injury going on,” she said.
Mulgrew says many influencers don’t do their homework to learn about different muscle groups and how they work together. “They wanted to be famous by posting tons of workouts on TikTok and going viral.”
But Mulgrew admits that she still scrolls through fitness hashtags on a regular basis. She finds some redeeming qualities.
“One of the things I love about the influencer world is that more and more people are turning to that healthy lifestyle,” she said.
body image concerns
The Australian study is the first to examine the credibility of fitness influencers and the content they post on TikTok. However, there are numerous studies that have investigated the influence of social media on healthy body image.
A 2023 study surveyed a sample of over 21,000 young people in Australia, Canada, Chile, Mexico, the UK, and the US and found that the more time they spend on social media, the more likely they are to be dissatisfied with their body. It turned out to be highly sexual.
“Our findings are not surprising to many people,” said Karen Hock, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in the School of Public Health Sciences at the University of Waterloo.
“If you see a fitness post online, and you don’t have the muscles you see in the images, you can associate it with body dissatisfaction because it doesn’t meet your ideal standards. “Sho,” she said. I’m watching online. ”
She wants to know more about how social media platforms choose which videos to show users, especially when the content is served without users having to search or click.
“More research is needed into social media algorithms themselves, as they may be reinforcing body image concerns.”
See | How social media affects teens’ body image:
The impact of social media on teens’ body image
Social media is fueling a movement of teens changing their appearance to meet unrealistic beauty standards, including editing their faces on apps and undergoing plastic surgery. .
influence influencers
However, it may be possible to encourage influencers to create less harmful content.
There’s data to suggest how that might work. A team from Harvard University’s TH Chan School of Public Health conducted an experiment last year. They trained them on best practices such as promoting evidence-based mental health information, sharing digital take-it, hosting virtual training sessions, and even inviting groups of influencers to become Influencers. People Summit held in Boston.
They then tracked how the video content changed over a period of about a month and compared the trained influencers to a control group of influencers who did not receive the same training. They found that those who attended training were much more likely to cover evidence-based content.
“We know that influencers have the ability to influence,” said Matt Motta, lead author of the study based on the results.
Researchers say fitness influencers could be encouraged to promote evidence-based health information on their sites. (Turgut Yetel/CBC News)
“We take the scientific evidence, we communicate it to people, and we know you’re not going to misinform,” said Motta, who is also a professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health.
“We found the creators to be very willing partners.”
Motta believes this model can be applied to the areas of diet and exercise. Despite the unique challenges, including support from companies selling products such as diet pills, Motta remains optimistic about the potential impact.
“This is a fixable problem,” he said.
“All we need is buy-in from all these partners.”
Other efforts are underway to promote evidence-based health information on social media. For example, the World Health Organization and TikTok last month announced a year-long collaboration to promote evidence-based health content and give creators access to training programs.
For content consumers, experts say moderation and skepticism are key when consuming fitness content.
“We spend a lot of time on social media for health, diet, and fitness information, but that in and of itself isn’t the problem,” said Pride, author of the TikTok content analysis.
“When you’re looking for that information, you need to find a reliable source.”
Fitness influencers like Berestecki themselves have adopted that approach.
“I take everything with a grain of salt.”
