Is this humility? Self-protection? Or am I just bragging with plausible deniability, performing health while refusing to actually perform it? After all, isn't social media fundamentally a bragging platform, a highlight reel we all tacitly agree to maintain? But then why does hitting "post" feel like walking a tightrope between inspiration and judgment, between pride and shame? And why am I so acutely aware that in 2025, as thinness resurges as the aesthetic ideal and fatphobia floods our feeds with renewed vigor, any post about fitness exists in a minefield of interpretation? Social media may not be "the real world," but when it comes to our mental health and how we perceive our bodies, it's very much a real world—one with real consequences.
"Social media didn't create this—it just amplified what was already there in fitness culture," says Echo Wang, founder at Yoga Kawa. "It's become a place to gain clout and sell an image, so it's no surprise that wellness and gym culture thrive there. People have always wanted to look a certain way, which social media has just made public and constant."
This sense of being pulled in contradictory directions was a major theme in my inbox. "I feel like I'm non-consensually being pulled in a million different directions regarding what I should be doing to benefit the most from working out," says Polina Jewel. "I'm thinking about reps, calorie deficits, and creatine, when the only way for me to feel better about exercising (read: being in my body) is turning inward and listening to what feels good, and using that information to better myself."
The true cost of "public accountability"
Ryan Nilsen sums up what many seemed to feel, saying that “public accountability helped me start a routine right off the bat for going to the gym, but never helped performance. I feel like I need to trick myself sometimes when developing a new routine."
But he quickly identifies the pitfall: "On the flip side, it's easy to chase vanity metrics like pace or the amount of steps at the expense of recovery and/or sleep. Constant benchmarking can create fitness performance anxiety, where the fear of looking slow, running less, cycling lower distance, or lifting less pushes people to overtrain or to curate only 'good' workouts."
Sara Lebow also voiced this contradiction behind the “public accountability” defense. She says, “most of what people are doing online is pseudoscience wellness, or a form of optimization that can only be described as an obsession with control, one that's bleeding into every part of our lives from work to dating. I want to work out and not track everything in this world. And yet, I weigh myself and then feel insecure, because that is what we do."
Matthew Singer, a yoga teacher, says most “fitspo” (fitness inspiration) “is as helpful for fitness as previous winning lottery numbers are for winning millions. Fitspo cannot take into account genetics, job and family circumstances, health history, or any of the other countless factors that influence health outcomes."
But it's not just about angles and lighting. O'Connor describes the invisible infrastructure that makes aspirational bodies possible: "All these public figures have teams of people helping look effortless. They have nutritionists, private chefs, personal trainers, state of the art equipment at their homes and some even have a team of PR people helping them manage an eating disorder, scheduling out how to give them the bare minimum of nutrition to keep them relatively functional, not unlike a warden at a prison labor camp."
O'Connor reframes what fitness actually is: "Fitness is less about looking perfect and is more about taking small steps to achieve and maintain longevity to live a long and healthy life. Anyone trying to sell you a quick fix is lying. Fitness is a marathon. And it takes a ton of frustratingly small steps to see what you want to see in the mirror. Don't let the smoke and mirrors of social media dent the resolve of a slow and steady approach. Your body will thank you. (And so will your bank account because we live in a deeply stupid propaganda-riddled society where the healthcare system is run like a casino)."
Boudrye also describes the dark side to achieving the perfect thirst trap: "Body dysmorphia, disordered eating, and exercise bulimia,” that last one describing when “bulking” is actually binging and “cutting” is unhealthy restriction. “This is certainly true for me, and I know it's common, even if people don't admit that the obsessive tracking and strict adherence to diet qualifies as disordered eating."
It’s so much more than metrics
Take it from me: Fitness is boring, incremental, unsexy work that happens outside the frame of social media entirely. The performance of fitness—the ring-lit selfie, the carefully pumped muscle, the optimized angle—bears almost no relationship to the actual practice of maintaining a healthy body over time. But that doesn't get likes.
Echo Wang frames this disconnect in terms of what gets lost: "From a wellness point of view, that incessant chatter is what causes anxiety and burnout. The pressure to show that you are 'healthy' enough, 'fit' enough, or 'disciplined' enough is very tiring. When everything is about data, validation, and aesthetics, you lose the connection with your body." This goes for aesthetic-based apps like Instagram, but also ostensibly fitness-based ones too, like Strava with its leaderboards. Because when I post my runs on Strava, I keep all my data private—I'm too self-conscious to reveal what an utterly average runner I am, and I know plenty of runners who share my shame-based privacy. So, if you're anything less than perfect, why post at all?
Claire Lower, former Lifehacker writer and powerlifting enthusiast, offers a perspective rooted in genuine love for her sport: "I like lifting, I look forward to it. I go to the gym whether I post or not. It has nothing to do with accountability—that's why I pay my trainer. Posting is a good way for me to document for myself and track my progress. But if you look at any video of a woman powerlifting, a man has something to say about her form; I don't want to reach a wider audience." Here, posting serves a documentary function—a digital training log—but Lower deliberately limits her audience to avoid unsolicited feedback and mansplaining that plague women in fitness spaces online. Good on her.
For others, the audience becomes an unwelcome source of anxiety. Shenuque Tissera says, "I feel like there's some really great representations of fitness for the sake of health, but a lot of the content and performance of fitness online has made me feel bad. I definitely now feel a bit compelled to work out because of online health performance even though I started working out for my own needs and health concerns. And while I used to not judge myself over the regular fluctuations of my own body, I find myself doing way more negative talk about my body that gets heightened with social media."
The fatphobia factor
The resurgence of thinness as the beauty ideal emerged as a particularly concerning theme. Jo Wild articulates the cognitive dissonance many feel: "I've recently seen a rebirth of fatphobia being seen as 'cool' that really disgusts me, and honestly makes me embarrassed to intentionally change my body in any way. I worry that the reason I want to be strong is that secretly I want to be skinny, and I don't want people to know that secretly I want to be skinny. At the same time, I don't fit into my favorite pants anymore, so maybe I only exercise in the hope that one day the button will close again. But I keep most of my gym time and dance classes off of socials, because I don't like to think I'm contributing to a 'health craze' that's really just fatphobia in a poor disguise."
Alex Phipps, a fitness instructor, gave me an interesting counterpoint about online fitness classes: "People who normally didn't work out or like working out really got into it way more than they did in person, and a lot of them told me that they felt that they couldn't work out any other way, because they were terrified of being perceived by other 'conventional' fitness people. But online, they felt free to try and actually push themselves. The idea of strength as opposed to thinness being the goal is what has always motivated me, and it's what I'd try to cultivate in my students."
Finding balance
Faynboym offers practical advice for navigating this landscape: "The best fix is to occasionally hide or de-emphasize numbers that trigger you, share selectively, set goals you control, think of long-term progress, and post about rest days and form wins as often as you feel. Ultimately, use the crowd for support and let the metrics follow your body's needs, not the other way around."
The overwhelming message from these responses is that fitness culture on social media exists in a state of productive tension: It can inspire and support, but it can just as easily trigger comparison, anxiety, and a disconnection.
And maybe that starts with posting the sweaty face after all. Or not posting at all. Or posting only on days when it feels like record-keeping, rather than performance. The answer, frustrating or freeing as it may seem, is there is no answer to how you should post. Like with posting pictures of your kids, or your political opinions, or that perfectly curated gym selfie you snuck in the locker room: It’s your choice. There’s private physical experience, and there’s how we package that up for a wider audience. It’s an ongoing negotiation, and you need to be honest with yourself if you’re getting a raw deal.
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