Does #Fitspiration Help You or Hurt You?

If you search for #fitspiration on Instagram, you'll find literally millions of images. I just searched and got 18,520,901 hits, which is 500 more than I saw two hours ago. All of them are photos of muscular, slim, and flexible folks (mixed in with a few jokesters) and even fewer professional athletes. Many of the photos come with motivational quotes like “Win the morning, and you win the day” or “Your goals don’t care about your excuses” or a long lists of advice about how “You, too, can turn your life around” ... often with a hefty dose of product endorsement thrown in. 

Does scrolling through endless highly curated photos of people caught at their absolute best do anything for our own motivation, happiness, fitness or mental health?

Motivation is supposed to be the point of these images—the good old “if I can do it then so can you” idea. But do they work? Does scrolling through endless highly curated photos of people caught at their absolute best do anything for our motivation, happiness, fitness or mental health?

That is what the folks at the Shape Research Centre at Flinders University aimed to find out. They asked: Do these images succeed in inspiring women to exercise and live that #fitlife, or do they make them feel worse about themselves and their bodies?

You've probably already guessed from my tone that despite the popularity of #fitspiration images and the (assumed) positive intentions of the people posting them, the researchers at Flinders University's College of Nursing and Health Sciences found their effect to be the opposite of "inspirational."

But it’s not quite as simple as that. Let's have a closer look.

The Fitspiration Study

In the paper titled The effect of Instagram #fitspiration images on young women’s mood, body image, and exercise behaviour, researchers experimentally examined the effects of viewing fitspiration images on Instagram using these criteria: body dissatisfaction, mood, and exercise behavior. 

Lead author of the study, Dr. Ivanka Prichard, who is Co-Deputy Director of the SHAPE Research Centre, told Eureka Alert:

Close to 90 percent of young Australians use some form of social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or Snap-Chat. Young women's rapidly growing...

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