Oxford's oldest student newspaper

Independent since 1920

Can #Fitspiration make us healthier?

As we’ve settled into January, it’s become clear why it’s dubbed ‘diet month’. Newspapers and magazines are full of the ‘New Year, New You, New Body’ clichés. The solution to an improved, ‘more healthy’ you is a lifestyle change that involves losing weight. Looking at the poster girls for ‘healthiness’, ‘health’ looks like a defined pair of biceps, a chiselled set of abs, and a keyhole thigh-gap flanked by solid quads. In other words: an absence of body fat. Is that really ‘healthy’? ‘Health’ should not just be about physical wellbeing.

Discussions of mental health, particularly with regards to body image, and eating disorders are extremely important. There’s an awful lot we don’t know about eating disorders. Evidence suggests that 1.6m people in the UK suffer from them and that 89 per cent of those people are female (National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence). Fashion magazines have long been criticised for an unhealthy emphasis on one’s appearance, and in 2012 a coroner even blamed the fashion industry for the suicide of a schoolgirl who had been suffering from bulimia. Conversely, health and lifestyle magazines have rarely been condemned for promoting negative mental wellbeing because this would be utterly paradoxical. But just because they champion that simple five-letter word in their titles, does that mean they are actually endorsing it? 

The virtual world of social media is also revealing. If you type #thinspo into Instagram’s search engine, it’ll yield no results. If, however, you type in #fitspo, you’ll find over 15 million. ‘Thinspiration’ is the online glorification of thinness and eating disorders. ‘Fitspiration’ is apparently the ‘healthy’ version. But the fact that the demise of the former and the rise of the latter was simultaneous suggests that we are dealing with a Lernaean Hydra which is not something that can be easily censored. Fitspo perpetuates the same trends as thinspo because of its excessively meritocratic mentality. Supposedly, if you can work hard enough, then you’re entitled to feel good. If you can’t, you deserve to feel like a failure. In comparison to thinspo, it’s argued that fitspo encourages a healthier body image because it doesn’t focus on low BMIs. But by placing excessive emphasis on having low body fat and eating ‘clean’ foods, fitspo can encourage similar unhealthy thoughts and behaviours as thinspo.

A disorder has recently been identified by the chair of the British Dietetics Association, Ursula Philpot known as ‘orthorexia’ – the unhealthy obsession with eating only ‘clean’ foods. Essentially, the disorder does not necessarily cause the sufferer to be physically malnourished because they don’t obsess about controlling food quantity but rather food quality.  Researchers have shown that social problems and mental rigidity are more obvious dilemmas. If orthorexia were a recognised disorder like anorexia, fitspo would probably be censored like thinspo. But it isn’t, because ‘healthiness’ is terminologically imbued with positivity. It seems though that ‘healthiness’ has taken on a far too narrow definition because it has been constructed against an equally narrow conception of ‘unhealthiness’. We cannot deny that obesity is a problem in the UK; 23.1 per cent of the population is obese. However, cultural anxiety over this issue has fostered  perception of health into dichotomous categories of ‘fat’/’thin’, ’guilty pleasures’/‘clean foods’ and ‘unhealthy’/’healthy’.

We now have a discourse of health which has lost one of its oldest adages, the ‘healthy balance’. Essentially, the ‘healthy’ ideal presented in the media is aesthetically attractive by today’s beauty standards, and wrongly conflates ‘healthy’ with ‘thin’. This aesthetic is created and primarily driven by the beauty and fashion industries so that ‘healthy’ is synonymous with ‘skinny’. If, however, health was perceived more broadly as a spectrum rather than black and white categories, which incorporated mental as well as physical wellbeing, we might be able to shift the construction of the healthy ideal into a more achievable place. There should not be a definitive depiction of health. Humans come in all different shapes and sizes and we need to celebrate diversity and broaden our perception of health.

Check out our other content

Most Popular Articles