Scrolling through Facebook and Instagram, pictures of pre-made meals and girls in sports bras staring into smudged gym mirrors litter my feed. Captions brag about how far so-and-so has come, how easy it is to prepare the entire week’s meals ahead of time, and how with a strong enough mindset, I, too, can persevere and look like this aspiring body-builder. Oddly enough, I rarely feel encouragement from or admiration for these posts. Mostly, I feel sad.
It’s upsetting how many obsess over living a strictly-controlled lifestyle, and it’s even worse how often people feel the need to share with everyone else on the Internet. Not only is this a vain misplacement of our priorities, but it’s also unhealthy.
I will be the first to admit that I love social media, and am especially Instagram-obsessed. Am I a victim to vanity in some of my posts? Yes. Should I spend more time studying, reading important things, and interacting with real people than I do on social media? Yes. But I love seeing and posting pictures of beautiful scenery, friends and family together, beautiful vacation spots, funny or inspirational quotes, adorable pups, and the occasional donut. It is fun to connect with those you don’t see every day, and appreciate that which glorifies beauty in the world.
But what makes the “gym swolfie” epidemic so wrong is the culture it promotes, and the consequences it causes. The half-naked gym pics, by men and women alike, are distasteful, attention-seeking, and inappropriate. They lead to bikini and even undergarment pictures, which are now considered normal for Instagram, a perceived “private” social media feed. As the old saying goes, everything on the Internet is fair game.
Beside the issues of immodesty and downright annoyance, the entire mindset of working out and living a healthy lifestyle has been warped. Everyone with an Instagram account thinks she is a certified personal trainer and nutritionist, and it is dangerous.
People think that by rapidly losing weight — whether by over-exercising, under-eating, or both — and then posting pictures, they are mentoring others, who all have different body types and situations. They perceive likes as signs of affirmation, regardless of the actual health risks they are undergoing and endorsing. Instead of receiving professional consultation to lose weight or bulk up, people fall for supplement companies that troll their pages and take drastic weight-loss measures.
Instead of exercising and eating right for the sake of feeling happy and less-stressed, and for maintaining a healthy body, people take things to the extreme — working out for hours for that perfect gym photo and for acceptance by the fitness-crazed community. Before, we were the Supersized nation. Statistics show that obesity is still a huge problem, as two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, according to the Food Research and Action Center. But now, we have a new problem: The gym rat disease.
According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, “91 percent of women surveyed on a college campus had attempted to control their weight through dieting. 22 percent dieted ‘often’ or ‘always.’ 86 percent report onset of eating disorder by age 20; 43 percent report onset between ages of 16 and 20.” Eating disorders are a real problem on our campus as well, and I blame partly the social media culture for this statistic.
Let’s exercise not only to maintain a healthy figure, but let’s exercise to work hard, to feel good, to take a break from school, to have fun with friends, and to enjoy time to ourselves — away from our social media accounts. Let’s eat healthy meals because it’s important to put good things in our body. It’s vital to feeling alert, to preventing sickness, and to maintaining a healthy figure — which means something different for everyone.
It’s rewarding to realize that you can now run three miles instead of one, that you can now beat your friend in racquetball, and that you feel stronger. These should be our rewards, not 20 comments of ogglement at spandex-clad selfies. If we get back to promoting more natural, positively-driven, less-vain, healthy lifestyles, maybe we can decrease the attitude of eating and over-exercising disorders that plague our campus and our nation.
Stop the swolfies, people. And stop liking them.