52 Comments

This is a tough one for me. I was an unathletic kid and felt totally discouraged by the adults around me from pursuing sports or fitness because I “wasn’t good at it.” It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized I could actually learn and improve at various exercise activities on my own terms and for my own benefit, even if I was never going to be “the best” at anything athletic. I do credit social media a lot for helping me find find fun and safe ways to exercise and helping me change my thoughts around food and fitness (Casey Johnston is a favorite follow of mine!), and I love seeing people find joy and fulfillment in exercise. So many hobbies have kind of weird virtue stuff wrapped up in them — side hustles, reading challenges, that kind of thing — and while I do think exercise has more baggage attached, I think it’s something we should really actively be trying to separate from food and thinness on social media, rather than erasing fitness content from social media until we can make the necessary cultural changes for it to be okay again. I agree with one of the other posters here that the issue is more with the algorithms and the platforms than with individual users.

Expand full comment

I relate to a lot of this. (And am absolutely guilty of the performative reading challenge thing!) Despite the headline of this piece, I'm really much more interested in helping folks consider WHY we post than in telling people to stop posting. There is a ton of nuance here. And it's also true that something can be good for us personally and not good for people following us, and I think we have to sort of wrestle with that. (But yes to blaming the platforms first and foremost!)

Expand full comment

I personally find a big difference in my experience between random social media people who post content I don't want to see and people I actually know in real life.

Like, I'm just not going to follow a lot of fitness influencers. Or if some interior designer I follow starts posting exercise content in a way that doesn't work for me, I just unfollow without a lot of drama. But it feels much more fraught to do that with actual friends/family (not least because it *was* fraught when I unfollowed/hid/etc. people whose COVID lifestyle was stressing me out).

I don't think the answer is trying to please all the people all the time, but I do think that most people want to be kind to their online friends and that this is an opportunity to think about how to do that.

Expand full comment

Like you have been reading my mind. A friend/former colleague on Instagram started posting pictures of her epic walks. Just feet or scenery. But I started waiting..knowing it would come. Because she had lost a lot of weight several years ago, then gained a lot back with two kids, and I just knew this was going to be the start of weight loss posts. After several months it finally came a week or so ago. It was staggering how much it hurt. All the “congrats” with the body picture and weight loss number. And I was like: I genuinely have to unfollow this. And of course the chorus in my mind singing: see, if you just tried harder…

Expand full comment

I'm glad you unfollowed. She is where she is, but her journey doesn't need to cause you harm.

Expand full comment

I almost hesitate to write this because I don’t want to come off as one of those “I don’t even own a tv!” types. And I acknowledge that for some folks, maintaining an active social media presence is necessary for their careers, or the only way to maintain connection with far-flung people.

That said… I have to say that my mental health, ability to focus, and just general well-being improved significantly when I decided to basically just stop posting on social media. At some point I realized that I was getting more concerned with the number of likes/comments an Instagram picture would get, and that I was generally always in a worse mood after scrolling the feed. It occurred to me that it was weird that I cared so much about what literal or practical (what else would you call a person you last spoke to in 2002) strangers thought.

I haven’t been able to completely abandon it - I still read Twitter - but I limit my Facebook or Instagram viewing to only when I’m in the bathroom (really great way to limit it!), and it just feels like my life is better for it.

Expand full comment

Limiting Facebook to the bathroom is quite possibly genius!

Expand full comment

I don't think the issue is individual behavior. The issue is the social media sites themselves, baked into their very design in the way they predate on human behavior. I don't think you can fix the issue by doing anything other than disengaging entirely. Forbidding thin people from posting workout selfies (assuming that's even an achievable goal) will only create a new aspirational hierarchy from what is then posted (I also think it's questionable to tell people "no, you're not allowed to be visible" in what amounts to a public square).

Social media is advertising. They cannot be disentangled from each other. And advertising creates problems so that it can sell you the solution. You can't escape its effects by attempting to change what it's advertising; it's the advertising itself that must go away.

Expand full comment

Excellent points. I agree, policing who gets to be visible is not the solution.

Expand full comment

Thanks for this. I'm deeply immersed in the running community and it's hard to know sometimes what content is motivating for me and what is harmful until it's too late. There are more body-positive runners in my feed than not, but every once in a while you get someone who references running to eat more (a massive pet peeve of mine) over and over, and it's an instant unfollow. It is hard. I have many friendships tied up in these posts, many long runs and deep talks, and while I usually say running is the best thing I do for my mental health besides the Zoloft, sometimes I wonder when I look at my feed.

Expand full comment

It's fascinating to me how the physical act of running can clearly be profoundly beneficial and yet the CULTURE of running can be so toxic.

Expand full comment

The culture of road cycling is like this as well. I don't ride with people anymore. Their workout selfies ain't nothing to the way they humblebrag about their stats when they're all together. ... I guess it's random vent, but it just occurred to me that this kind of performative stuff also happens IRL .

Expand full comment

Oh my gosh, this! "We are also taught to place moral value on exercise; to revere both the hard work and the pleasure of physical activity as somehow better than any other kind of work or pleasure." My body does not excel at exercise, like you said. My body excels and sitting still and thinking, but according to many people (especially my MIL) this is not nearly as important, good, or healthy. It's taking me a long time to accept the idea that my health and fitness are not a reflection of my character. I mean, it's an excellent idea and I love it - but the other way is just SO ingrained.

Expand full comment

I've been unpacking this for years. It's so hard.

Expand full comment

I am a person who benefits from thin privilege who has and does at times share my workout selfies, but try hard not to share counts, distance, times. Mainly because it’s something important to me as something that brings me joy, that is and has been often belittled by family members in ways that led me as a child who deeply benefitted from motion (I have ADHD that was not identified until I was in my thirties) to see my body as inferior and wrong, because it didn’t and doesn’t fit the picture of what was once deemed “poster child” shapes for what I did and do.

What I internalized wasn’t that moving my body was a privilege but that moving my body for anything but thinness was the wrong reason, and it took me years to undo that mental messaging.

Things I don’t discuss but should when I post a face-selfie after a run now, beyond the thankful feeling for the privilege of being able to move/run/walk/bike/yoga/whatever is that yes I am doing this and yes I am showing this as a thin person but I also have very mild prolapse I had to work to “correct” after childbirth that made it feel like my vag was going to come my

Börthøle (autocorrect on that one— I’m tired of fighting how I have to write that to keep from getting zucced in “this cat is INNOCENT” on Facebook) for 18 months post birth whenever I tried to do more than grocery shop..so to run now feels like a big accomplishment whether it’s tag or light saber battles with my six year old or an unnamed but short and slow distance on a paved trail near my home.

I also am SO fed up with hearing all about sugar and it’s evils in my life. My son received literal pounds of candy for Easter. I’ve been told more than once I need to “eliminate” it from the house and j shut that down like a door caught in a crossbreeze every time. Food is not evil. Kit Kat bars are DELICIOUS. And Not Evil.

Expand full comment

Appreciate all of this! Thanks for sharing.

Expand full comment

Idk what it is with runners and their need to post their stats but that shit seems almost as exhausting as actually running.

Expand full comment

As a runner, yes. There is a culture among some runners that you are not a “real” runner unless you can go a certain pace/distance/in spandex/while pooping yourself and Yanno I just yeeted that idea from my life because if I am moving faster than a brisk walk I am running. PERIOD.

Expand full comment

WHILE POOPING YOURSELF. Such a neat hobby! (I know/love a lot of runners, I get it.)

Expand full comment

I’ve only sharted once while running. It’s when I decided peanut butter toast before a run was a LIE

Expand full comment

Snark aside, I do appreciate that I’ve spent the last like 20+ minutes thinking about this after reading the newsletter twice.

Expand full comment

LOVE hearing that.

Expand full comment

I thought a lot about why a photo of someone on a hike doesn’t bother me the way a gym-bod post-workout photo does, and I think some of it is just context. A selfie of you on a hike in cool scenery that’s part of several images of cool stuff you saw? That’s neat. It registers more like travel to me, whereas the “look at my sweat” or “look at my pose in my thin body” stuff is often just that. It’s the difference between influencers in the wild and someone posting their painted toes on the beach.

Expand full comment

I immediately thought of Roxane Gay's workout selfies when I read this and then got to your mention of her! I appreciate that it's just a part of her stories with much less mention than food.

Expand full comment

Yes her food content is Glorious and the workouts are just, This Happened.

Expand full comment

Also I want to add that I enjoy seeing anyone doing movement that brings them joy and makes them feel good, regardless of their body size—when it's totally without the pretense of earning or validating worth, or related to weight or food. I think we all need more of that since it's just so hard to come by.

Expand full comment

I do agree. More of this please! (The question is just -- how do we get it and preserve it when the body size/value stuff creeps in so easily.)

Expand full comment

I don't know but it's the same with so many other content types on social (food, clothing, etc).

Expand full comment

YES a thousand times. Our bodies really are designed to move and finding ways that free great is one of the gifts of being human.

Expand full comment

This is a lot to think about, thanks. I keep starting to type more, but ... I'm thinking! (FWIW, never posted a workout selfie. Not real big on selfies in general. But I do post text about workouts occasionally.)

Expand full comment

Yay for thinking! (And I welcome pushback/conversation here, so always feel free to think and type. But I also get just wanting to ponder.)

Expand full comment

I very much appreciate you putting these concepts into words. As a person who has healed her disordered relationship with food, and sort of with exercise, this not only reinforced my ideas, but pushed me past onto new ground. I’ve never thought about why I have been sharing my peloton yoga classes before. I feel like I am so happy with the progress that I have made in functionality, but I need to sort through this idea…. Thank you for a very thought provoking piece.

Expand full comment

It's all in the sorting through! (And I'm right there, sorting with you.)

Expand full comment

Virginia, as always, I had no idea how much I needed this post. You are doing such important work. Thank you so much.

Expand full comment

I've been thinking a lot about the role of external validation/motivation when it comes to movement/exercise. I'm not a fan of fitness trackers for the general public for a variety of reasons, including the way it externalizes and quantifies a complex experience that is happening, literally, inside your own body and in ways that can never be fully captured on a Fitbit screen or Peloton report. Then posting that in public--for praise/encouragement, for "accountability," for bragging rights--externalizes it one step further. If you wouldn't do your workout if you couldn't post about it, then maybe that's something to look into? It's like we've completely lost touch with the physical, visceral, more-than-numbers (and even more-than-words) aspect of the experience. Thanks, diet culture!

And of course there is so much nuance--someone training for an event who shares stats with their private running group? Great! Someone doing some seriously challenging PT to regain lost strength/flexibility/endurance who could use a little boost to keep going? Seems fine to me.

Like you said, Virginia, it's really about why you're posting and whether you've considered the unintended impact of these kinds of posts.

Expand full comment

Yes. I agree with all of this. Our responsibility is to consider intention, audience and impact. We might still decide to post! It might be valuable to post! But it's worth taking that beat.

Expand full comment

I love this and want to get it tattooed on my forehead: "Completing a marathon or having a Netflix marathon are morally equivalent activities."

Expand full comment

Look, Ally Love's classes ARE pretty great:)

Expand full comment

So I’ve been told! 😂

Expand full comment

I’m really not at all an ally fan- especially her instagram content. I’ll take Christine and Sam. :)

Expand full comment