I think now more than ever, social media does contribute to body issues. As college students we spend an extreme amount of time on apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and Tiktok. With this, we follow influencers that seem to be living these luxurious lifestyles, and they all seem to be healthy, skinny ,or enjoying life in general.
Along with this, there are influencers on the app that are constantly posting about them at the gym, or what their diet is, and showing how “fit” they are to the public. We see models on the app that can promote an “unhealthy” lifestyle as well. This is what we see on social media while we are aimlessly scrolling in between classes, or during homework breaks.
Not only are we seeing it, but there are students in high school and middle school that are seeing the same things we see on social media. This can cause extreme insecurity to kids so young, ultimately leading or contributing to body issues. Social media can cause us to compare ourselves to others online whether they are our friends or simply people that we follow. As a generation that grew up with social media, it can lead us to compare how we look to someone on the internet, and make us wish that we looked like them. This can lead us to want to change our appearance and even our bodies.
Social media glorifies diet culture, the idea of a calorie deficit, and lifting is what can make you be healthy and skinny or look good. But it can be unhealthy for the younger generations to be watching these kinds of things. Obviously we all want to be healthy, but when we are constantly comparing our bodies to others, it causes body dysmorphia and insecurity.
Social media can lead us to have a negative image of ourselves, leading us to obsess with our self-image. Along with this, social media and obsessing with our self-image can lead to eating disorders. This is something that can be very serious, especially if you are following people that glorify not eating. It can cause us to become unhealthy, and look sick, simply because we want to look good. But not eating doesn’t make you healthy, it just lowers your health. Some people on social media apps encourage only eating healthy foods to help you lose weight, but we should be able to eat what we want while living a healthy lifestyle.
Finally, social media gives us unrealistic beauty standards of how we should look. We should be skinny, fit, always happy is what it implies; always looking our best and dressing our best. But realistically, we are perfect the way we are, we should be happy with who we are, and can obviously change small things. Social media puts the idea that we have to fit into these beauty standards in our brains which is why it causes body issues or can contribute to it. A way to help steer away from the unhealthiness around social media is to simply just spend less time following the unhealthy following. If these people that you are following are causing you to feel insecure or not enough, then you shouldn’t be following them. We should work on promoting positivity and that we are perfect the way we are. We don’t need to be a size 0 to be pretty, we need to be kind to ourselves even on our hardest days.
