How can influencers just change their mind?
And what happens to those who believed in diet culture messaging before it morphed?
If you scrolled through Instagram fitness content in 2015, you’d see a lot of rippled abs and butts backed into mirrors for selfies. You’d also see many videos of burpees and jump squats that came labelled as ‘fat burning exercises’, best done before breakfast if you wanted to ‘tone’.
If you scroll now you’d see, well, likely pretty similar. But you’d also see the same people from before now moving their bodies at a tennis court, or on a mountain, or taking up a bit more space in the gym. Their videos would be captioned with reasons why their chosen movement was so valuable for reasons beyond the aesthetic - the strength training that made them feel ready to take on the world, or the lower-intensity Pilates to support their hormone health.
It’s definitely a change - one that could easily be argued as inauthentic. I personally prefer to believe it is legitimate. But when I think too much about the gulf between the messages, I always think: how did we let these people so brazenly change their mind?
It’s a hard question to ask because of course everyone is allowed to learn new information, take on a different perspective and change their beliefs. We should be encouraging that kind of growth - it is much healthier than someone rooting down in their reality and refusing to acknowledge how the landscape around them is morphing. But we aren’t talking about the kind of opinions you might share with friends over a bottle of wine: we are talking about people who encouraged entire lives to change. Influencers get their name because they are said to have just that - influence - over their followers that their advice, lifestyles and habits morph into our own. And in the fitness world, they made us all form patterns of thought about our bodies which they then turned around and said, ‘by the way, that was all horribly wrong.’
I think I care a lot about this question because I felt betrayed by this backtracking. For years, I hung on the advice I found in digital squares from women who sold themselves as the epitome of health. I listened to how many grams of carbs they ate a day, how much HIIT they did a week, how important fat burning training and logging your macros were. I believed them.
Their messaging changed slowly - no one could go from saying ‘try fasted cardio and beast mode workouts for chiseled abs!’ to ‘find a form of movement you love and food freedom to be your healthiest self’ within one scroll of the thumb. It was more leisurely, more nuanced. Maybe it started with a post about how they’d taken a holiday off training which turned into discourse around why it’s OK to rest. Perhaps their gorging cheat days turned into the 80/20 rule, giving themselves a little bit of chocolate each day rather than a blow out tray of brownies once a week, which further spanned into intuitive eating.
My mind changed too. Was I gullibly soaking in the gradually gentler messaging by osmosis? Perhaps. But I also think I’d hit rock bottom (75g of carbs on a ‘high carb’ day will do that to you) and had no choice but to ease myself out of the pit of exhaustion with some dry research from genuine experts that said living like this was actually not aspirational. (I could see why the influencers went viral and not this sensible advice: messages of grit and determination were much more exciting.)
I grew to like how we were collectively over the idea that workouts had to exhaust you, meals had to leave you hungry, being the smallest version of yourself was the best version and strength meant treating your body like shit, all disguised under the vale of ‘health’. I thought I’d grown on this journey with the people I followed, that we’d all learned together. That was until I saw a post from one influencer sharing a ‘before and after’ of her journey out of diet culture and into eating normal food where she threw ‘lols’ and ‘hahas’ in the caption about how disordered she’d been in the past. She was talking about how she’d had no period, no life, no body fat - and laughing at the blackness of it all. I suddenly thought: what the fuck? How dare you laugh at the things you shared, the image you created, the standards you set for your followers?
I held in quite a lot of rage about that for a while. About how these people who rose to fame for their body goals and shared how to be exactly like them could then turn around and say, ‘I had an eating disorder, whoops’, as though they didn’t, by default, encourage their followers to fuck up their own relationship with food too. It was not just their own bodies they ruined, I thought. It was mine!
Again, my mind has changed - kind of. Not that I don’t think there’s no responsibility to be had. But I think we have to be realistic about how much blame we can put on an individual at a time where going viral wasn’t really understood.
And it’s a timely thing to think about. More and more people are coming out with admissions of previous mistakes. It was also the foundation of a conversation between Alice Liveing and Grace Beverley - previously known as Clean Eating Alice and Grace Fit - on Beverley’s podcast this week. The two were at the forefront of the movement towards ‘clean’ and chiselled being the ultimate goal. It’s a message Liveing in particular hasn’t just distanced herself from but completely rejected, with honest conversations about how her behaviour and body has changed since letting go of diet culture. On the podcast, she shared her side of that story, looking at how it felt to have her disordered eating encouraged by not just followers, but brands, book agents and anyone who she fulfilled a narrative of perfection for.
I recommend you listen to the whole episode, but I want to finish on one part of their discussion that stands out: “I held - and continue to hold - an immense amount of guilt for the narrative that I played out online… but I do think there’s a part of me that thinks there’s a conversation that needs to be had about how it was a wider context of a movement rather than it being individual people really driving that narrative,” Liveing said.
I think it’s easy to blame a single person for sharing their specific life at a specific period of time for being the root cause of our problems. I also think it’s easy to absolve them and say they couldn’t have known better. I think the reality is somewhere more in the middle. 2015 was not the dark ages; even then it was feminism 101 to not encourage other women to hurt their bodies, like many of these influencers did. But they were also being congratulated for hurting their own: they gained followers and likes for being disordered - even if they didn’t admit they were. I could pretend that I’m better than them because, even at 20-years-old, I knew that objectifying my body online wouldn’t help the wider cause. But I played my part in objectifying their bodies - I was one of the hundreds of thousands who gave them a double tap in exchange for more photos of their skin and bone. I used them as proof that what I was doing was fine because they were doing it even better than I was.
As exercise culture has grown, we’ve been able to understand both scientifically and socially that normal people probably don’t need to do so much exercise that they can’t socialise and that food is actually necessary to function around your training. But there wasn’t a blueprint for that at the time. Before Instagram fitness inspiration, we’d never really seen people - especially women - moving or eating in this way before. And it did seem kind of healthy, at least compared to 00s-recommended habits of starvation and smoking. Yes, ‘health’ still meant ‘pursuit of thinness’, but the journey to getting there seemed… better?
So rather than thinking about how singular people have changed their mind and betrayed themselves and us, why don’t we zoom out and look at the fact that we only wanted to be like these influencers - we only trusted the 20-year-old women without PT qualifications who promised burpees could solve our problems - because we lived in a world where health information was so inaccessible and diet culture was so consuming that there was nothing else to believe in.
I’m grateful that people have changed their minds. I also don’t want anyone to laugh at the damage that they previously sold. And rather than appointing blame for awful past culture, maybe it’s more efficient to try and stamp out the miscommunication still happening. Look to TikTok, where hours and hours worth of content is dedicated to ‘leggings legs’ and Miley Cyrus’ arms, and it can feel like we’re still in 2015. And in that, I’m grateful we have the voices of people like Liveing with experience of learning how to better treat their body.
Thanks for subscribing to Gray’s Anatomy. That was a deep one this week so please feel free to share your take on it in the comments - I’d love to open the discussion.
And, as always, please do share with someone who might enjoy it and subscribe if you aren’t already.