Are fitness influencers setting unrealistic body goals?

Social media has made fitness look incredibly glamorous. Open Instagram or TikTok and there is always someone lifting heavy weights, running before sunrise, preparing a colourful protein bowl or showing off a body that looks as if it was sculpted by an artist with unlimited patience.

Then you look at yourself and wonder why your stomach still looks the same after going to the gym for two weeks.

The problem is not fitness itself. Exercise can improve strength, stamina, energy and overall wellbeing, but the way fitness is packaged online can make it feel like a beauty contest. Fitness content often mixes exercise with carefully presented beauty ideals, and research has found that exposure to this type of content can increase body dissatisfaction and appearance comparisons.

That does not mean you need to delete every fitness account from your phone and return to watching cooking videos in peace. It simply means learning how to consume fitness content without allowing it to bully you into believing your body is a failed project.

Here are five ways to do it.

Follow real people

A useful fitness account should give you more than a collection of impressive mirror selfies

Look for people who show their workouts, mistakes, rest days, ordinary meals and the occasional day when they simply cannot be bothered to exercise. Real progress is rarely as neat as social media makes it appear.

Someone who has been training for five years will naturally look different from someone who has just bought their first pair of gym shoes. Comparing the two is like comparing a finished house with a pile of bricks and asking why the bricks are not looking more impressive.

Pay attention to creators who talk about strength, mobility, endurance, recovery and healthy habits rather than constantly presenting one particular body shape as the ultimate goal.

Clean your feed

Your social media feed is not something that simply happens to you. The more you interact with certain content, the more similar content the platforms tend to show you.

If your entire feed consists of tiny waists, six-pack abs, dramatic weight-loss transformations and people proudly announcing that they have not eaten sugar since 2019, it is hardly surprising when you start feeling inadequate.

Unfollow, mute or simply stop engaging with accounts that consistently make you feel bad about yourself.

Instead, add variety. Follow trainers, runners, dancers, athletes, beginners, mobility coaches and people who promote realistic approaches to exercise.

Your feed should motivate you to move, not make you want to hide under a blanket.

Stop comparing

One of the easiest traps to fall into is believing that your body should eventually look like the body of the person whose workout you are following.

It does not work that way.

Genetics, age, hormones, lifestyle, training history, diet, sleep and countless other factors influence how people look. Two people can follow the same workout programme for months and still develop very different bodies.

Research has found that viewing highly idealised fitness images can increase negative feelings and body dissatisfaction without necessarily making people more likely to exercise.

Instead of asking whether you look like an influencer, ask better questions. Are you getting stronger? Can you walk farther? Are you recovering faster? Do you have more energy? Can you lift something that used to feel impossible?

Those are fitness achievements too.

Question food videos

There is something strangely fascinating about watching strangers eat breakfast, lunch and dinner on the internet.

One minute you are innocently watching a woman make a smoothie, and the next you are calculating whether you too should be eating chia seeds at 6am.

Food content can provide useful ideas, but copying somebody else’s diet simply because they have the body you want is not necessarily sensible. People have different nutritional needs, lifestyles, budgets and activity levels.

Be particularly cautious about extremely restrictive diets, dramatic calorie cuts or claims that eliminating one food will completely transform your body.

A fitness influencer can be entertaining and motivating without being qualified to give personalised nutrition advice. When the advice becomes extreme, it is worth stepping away from the comment section and seeking guidance from a qualified professional.

Keep it real

This may be the most important rule of all.

Social media is designed to show selected moments. You see the successful workout, the impressive lift, the flattering photograph and the incredible transformation. You do not necessarily see the tired mornings, missed sessions, difficult periods, ordinary meals or years of work behind that image.

Fitness content can encourage people to compare themselves with idealised bodies, particularly when appearance becomes the main focus.

So enjoy the content, but keep it in perspective.

A fitness video should be a source of information or inspiration, not a daily reminder that you do not look like somebody else.

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