Instagram is trying to make you more insecure
And it’s likely working
We know social media plays with out insecurities, but we scroll on anyway.
May 19, 2023
It feels a subconscious reflex to open Instagram, sometimes. When there are moments of silence or boredom, I find myself scrolling through the app, catching up on the activities of my friends, distant acquaintances, and celebrities. Until a few weeks ago, I considered it a calm, even relaxing, activity.
However, as you likely know, Instagram has an “algorithm” that pushes content that it thinks will appeal to you. If you like one video, five similar ones will be pushed into your feed, encouraging you to like, follow the creators, and share it with everyone you know.
A few weeks ago I was doing a death scroll and liked one video about low calorie Starbucks drinks. The next video to show up was a workout routine for “dancer arms.”
I liked this one, too. I didn’t think it would make much of a difference. Before I knew it, my phone was flooding with diet videos, weekly workout routines, and girls with perfect bodies instructing me on how to eat as little as humanly possible.
It’s tempting to dismiss this as just an inevitable part of social media, but when it keeps happening, it just gets painful. I feel like my brain always had these videos and posts in the background now. Of course, being healthy is a good thing. However, when people are feeding into teenager’s insecurities in the name of “health,” that’s when the problems can begin.
I know better. As a legal adult on the way to college, I know that these ideals are completely unrealistic. It is obvious to me that it isn’t healthy or normal to starve yourself or only try to eat fruit for a day.
I worry about the people younger than me or the people who are dealing with their own insecurities and don’t know how to handle them in a healthy way.
I know that if my Instagram looked like this when I was a freshman or sophomore, I would have been tempted to adapt to these dangerous fad diets. For fun, I’ve tried some of the recipes from the health influencers.From my experience the smoothie bowls melt too fast and the gluten free and vegan banana bread I made both looked and tasted like a pile of sand.
The internet in general has seen a spike in toxic diet videos over the past couple of years, be it on Instagram or TikTok.
I decided to visit some of these so-called influencers’ Instagram pages and two things shocked me: the number of people I knew who followed them (lots of underclassmen) and the unrealistic diets they were pushing.
Loading ...Scrolling through the videos, I just continued to feel worse about myself. It is completely unnecessary to show a row of perfect abs when you’re doing a recipe video.
In a sick way, it reminded me of some of the unrealistic body standards that I’ve faced in ballet.
I have been doing ballet since I was about eight years old and I enjoyed it, at least for a while. That started to change when I hit high school.
I no longer was skin and bones, nor should I have been. If I was, it would have been extremely concerning and unhealthy. But watching these videos of seemingly perfect girls brought me back to the ballet bar: it’s 7:30 p.m., so I’ve just had dinner and raced to class. My teacher would do her rounds, checking our form and making sure we were practicing proper turnout. Then, I can feel her tapping on my stomach, telling me to suck my belly button in towards my spine. But I’ve just eaten, I thought. This is completely ridiculous.
The shame would burn in my chest and I would try to shake it off, but her comment would haunt me until I got home and continue to whisper in my ear until I fell asleep. Then, the torture would start again in the morning, staring at the fridge trying to find the least caloric food possible.
I found myself sucking in my stomach constantly. I could always feel her tap on my stomach and I would force the air up to my chest. However, this soon caused a lot of problems. In choir, I couldn’t hit certain notes correctly because I wasn’t able to breathe correctly. My torso was always sore because I was trying to force something that simply wasn’t going to happen.
Eventually, I had the realization that I just needed to stop. Health is obviously very important, but so is being realistic. I needed to do dance because I loved it, not because I wanted to look a certain way. I also know that I’m not going pro by any stretch of the imagination, so I don’t necessarily feel the pressure to look and feel stick-thin.
Ballet is a very aesthetic art form, so it is understandable why people have an expectation for ballerinas to look a certain way, but one website I visited alarmed me. I Googled what the “ideal” ballet body would be and it said that you had to be between 5’2 and 5’8 and between 84 and 129 pounds. When I saw the 84 pound mark, it made me sick to my stomach. Absolutely no grown adult woman, no matter how short, should be aiming at that unrealistic ideal.
An important takeaway from all of this is that a majority of what you see on social media is fake. This is probably pretty obvious, but when your feed is overwhelmed with videos encouraging you to change how you look to fit a certain beauty standard, the blinders can really be put on over your own common sense.
In the future, when you are scrolling through your feed and see one of these unrealistic things, my biggest piece of advice is to just scroll past it. It is definitely easier said than done, but you will be able to avoid a lot of issues in the long run. Exercise and diet in the lens of health can be good as long as it’s not extreme, but health in the name of exploiting insecurities and vulnerability is when it can turn problematic.
