Avoiding the Influence of Toxic GymTok

Fitness and diet are increasingly becoming intertwined with social media, and because of that, toxic gym and diet culture can be challenging to escape while scrolling. 

People overexerting and starving themselves to look a certain way isn’t anything new. Even before social media, there were magazines, TV shows, movies and commercials 

that displayed desirably unrealistic bodies. 

Social media’s prominence is here to stay, and these platforms have become a breeding ground for toxic gym culture, something that has begun weighing heavy on adolescents. Due to this, they idolize these unrealistic standards that just end up damaging their physical and mental well-being. 

There are multiple ways that toxic gym culture can develop – from promoting extreme and dangerous routines to just overly glorifying certain body types that are impossible to achieve. With many people who have grown up with all types of social media platforms, lots of fitness influencers on these apps are responsible for showcasing these unhealthy habits. 

Fitness influencer Liv Schmidt, a TikTok creator who had almost 700,000 followers, was recently banned from the app for prompting her unhealthy fitness and dieting tips. 

Her content included ways to stay skinny and what she eats in a day. These tips to keep thin can be extremely damaging to one’s body and can ruin someone’s relationship with food, which then ultimately leads to disordered eating. 

Her approach to maintaining being “skinny” or losing weight quickly can be harmful to adolescents, who could eventually damage their bodies. In one of her videos, she showed a 30-minute workout that helps slim your legs when it is quite literally impossible to target fat loss in a specific area of your body. 

Another video shows her telling her followers that tomatoes make you fat because it has lectin, and that can cause obesity. Not only did her videos impact her followers' health, but these tips of hers are literal misinformation. 

If you think that’s bad…it was even worse before. Online health and fitness culture was very popular in 2014 on Tumblr. At the time, the platform was used not only for sharing fitness advice but also to show very in-depth and specific logs of how much food people consumed and calorie amounts. 

In this era, diets were extremely strict, and calories were carefully documented, with people using hashtags like #thinspo or #fitspo. These trends populated a community that made restrictive and disordered eating a normal part of their routine. This led to developing eating disorders and body dysmorphia due to being influenced by these unrealistic trends. 

Despite the repercussions of toxic gym and diet culture, influencers and regular individuals advocate for body positivity with better and healthier ways to promote going to the gym and having a balanced diet. With that comes the encouragement of celebrating their progress despite not meeting their goals. 

Fitness and diet are not just about what it’s doing for your body but also what it’s doing for your spirit and your mental health. That should be what fitness influencers promote – body positivity, healthy living, and inclusivity. 

Strike Out, 

Jessica Harris 

Boca Raton

Jessica Harris is a Content Writer for Strike Magazine Boca. As a proud introvert, she is described to be quiet but always up for challenges to get her out of her shell.  When not overworking herself with school and work, she’s nose deep in a book on her balcony, sobbing over Kdramas or constantly writing in hopes of publishing a book. You can reach her at jessicaharris777@gmail.com.