Abstrakt
In 2000, the World Health Organization declared obesity a worldwide pandemic - and the status has not changed to date. Only in Czechia, 60% of the population is considered overweight or obese (Eurostat data from 2019, last updated 2022). It is then no surprise that both traditional and social media in the country dedicate a significant space to topics connected to body weight. However, there has been a shift in body image perception in Czechia. At the turn of the 21st century, traditional media saw dieting with minimum references to exercise as a solution to weight-gain, and an overweight person would traditionally not be pictured in a positive light on the cover of a lifestyle magazine. Twenty years later, exercise is the most commonly recommended activity for maintaining a healthy lifestyle (Ortová, 2023), and at the same time, - and with the expansion of social media - movements such as body positivity have become a topic even in the mainstream press.
Various researchers (esp. Cohen et al., 2019; Mulgrew et al., 2017; Mulgrew & Courtney, 2022) confirmed that body positivity movements contributed to the better mental health of overweight people and raised the level of social acceptance of different bodies. On the other hand, Jerónimo & Carraça, (2022) suggest that the so-called "fitspiration" content on social media be potentially harmful, especially to the younger population. Slater et al. (2017) then offer a solution to that in the form of combining self-compassion quotes and fitspiration images, which might be "attenuating the negative impact of social media on women's body satisfaction" (ibid). Moreover, in their work, Mulgrew & Courtney (2022) and Mulgrew et al. (2018) proposed that exposure to realistic videos of exercising women who were engaged in a local health campaign "produced higher intent to engage in exercise in the following week." In the more recent work, the authors also called upon other researchers to dive into the area of creating inspirational content for functional self-care encouragement. In my work, I intend to follow this invitation indirectly.
To this date and to my knowledge, no researcher has yet directly asked the question "How do people with BMI over 25 who use social media perceive body positivity in connection to fitness?" This idea also comes from Cohen's (2019) work, where she discusses that when "fat girls" say they can exercise, they usually picture yoga as the primary form of exercise. I conducted hour-long semi-structured interviews with 10 Czech women aged 18-34 during December, 2022. This age group was selected because of Instagram's leading user group (Statista, 2023). The women must fit in the BMI 25+ category and had to express to be active Instagram users and interested in body positivity content. In the interviews, they were asked about their perceptions of their own body and what body positivity means to them. Most importantly, they evaluated fitness content from in total four body-positive influencers with BMI over 25 and under 25. The picture instrument created by Pulvers et al. (2004) was used to estimate the BMI of the selected influencers. The participants of the study were acquainted with the sensitivity of the topic and signed an ethical approval.
The first thing the participants described was not a body-positive approach but a body-neutral approach of being thankful that their bodies' functionality. Also, most of these women said they regularly exercise and follow fitness content. However, they rather connect this content to thin or muscular influencers than those suffering from being overweight. When being shown these two types of influencers, they mostly sympathized with the overweight ones and chose them as more likely to follow. On the other hand, the preliminary results of my research showed that fitspiration does not necessarily mean that it would be demotivating for overweight women, as some of them still considered the fitspiration content more likely to follow. Also, for the participants, overweight people in fitness content are fine if the person shown is not morbidly obese.
The limitation of the study its qualitative form which cannot transfer the results to the whole population. Also, some participants might not have shared their genuine opinions due to the topic's sensitivity. Using the BMI scale might be perceived as a simplification of body image, however, in medical terms, this is still considered a primary scale used by the medical public in Czechia.
This study shows that further research in the field is needed to promote healthy behavior on social media and motivate overweight influencers to share their fitness journey. Also, it provokes further debate on re-evaluation of fitness communication towards overweight people.