May 5, 2026

7 min read

Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm

An Olympian scientist explains why online fitness content can be dangerous

The Internet loves fitness-motivation content. Olympian and researcher Valerie Gruest explains why it can be so harmful

By Allison Parshall edited by Tanya Lewis

FG Trade Latin/Getty Images

On TikTok and Instagram, fitness content is everywhere. Algorithms serve users glossy videos featuring toned bodies, gym routines and health food endorsements. This isn’t really new: “fitspiration”—an amalgam of “fitness” and “inspiration”—is one of the Internet’s oldest enduring types of content, with roots in the “thinspiration” world of online eating disorder communities.

Fitness content has evolved with new hashtags over the years, but it’s still dominated by the visual language of “fitspo” such as photographs and videos that emphasize strict diet and exercise routines. And researchers have accumulated evidence that this imagery is detrimental to users’ mental health and self-image and may encourage disordered eating.

“It’s incredible how people are responding to this [content],” says Valerie Gruest, who studies the Internet’s effect on body image at Northwestern University. Gruest is a former Olympic swimmer who competed for Guatemala at the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

“This topic [of fitspiration] is so dear to my heart, not only as a researcher but also as an athlete,” Gruest says. She grew up exposed to a lot of fitness content in an athletic environment that already had an “intense eating disorder culture,” she explains. After injuries ended her career, she decided to become a researcher studying how this social media content operates. In a meta-analysis published this week in Health Communication, she examined the mental health effects of a decade’s worth of research on fitspiration content.

Scientific American spoke with Gruest last week, just hours before she defended her Ph.D. dissertation, to ask about how fitness content has evolved, how it affects adults and kids and how we can curate our social media feeds to motivate us in a healthy way.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

Tell me more about fitspiration content and your own exposure to it over the years.

“Fitspiration” content has always emerged very organically on my social media feed and the feeds of people that have been around me throughout my athletic career. This is content that promotes a more active lifestyle but, in the background, motivates people to aspire to a very thin, very fit body ideal—which, in a lot of cases, is very unattainable. I can say for myself, even as an elite athlete, it was very hard to achieve that kind of body. It’s not correlated with athletic performance. There is often an either implicit or explicit invitation for users to engage with disordered eating and exercising practices in order to achieve those standards.

For my Ph.D. dissertation, I had the opportunity to talk with different types of social media users, from elite athletes to people who didn’t consider themselves active. And even in conversations with athletes, there was this feeling of “it’s just impossible for me to either find the time or really have that strict mentality around food and exercise in order to achieve ‘ideal’ body standards.”

How has fitspiration content evolved over time?

This content has origins dating way back to the rise of the web, with roots in pro-eating-disorder websites. People with eating disorders would share their experiences as a way of motivating others to achieve extreme body standards through imagery of emaciated bodies. They transitioned into spaces like Tumblr and Pinterest, and this is where “thinspiration” and “thinspo” originated through hashtags. A lot of these platforms took action, canceling accounts that were related to thinspiration. That’s where fitspiration started to emerge, like the typical picture of a selfie in a Nike sports bra and very small shorts—not as a way to promote fitness but still promoting a very thin body. Then, with the rise of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat, that’s where fitspiration was adopted more widely online. Now we are exposed to this content much of the time. Perhaps we don’t always see the hashtag “fitspiration,” but a lot of those core elements are present. Brands have now adopted the trend in their wellness and fitness-related marketing.

You recently analyzed the