The other day I was talking with a friend about social media and all the fitness content out there, and she asked me:
“How do you stay in the fitness world (lifting, learning and writing about body science and nutrition, interacting with other people doing the same thing) without falling into all of its bullshit?”
I’d be lying if I told you the answer came easily. My first thought was to say:
“If you want to stay in the fitness world without falling into its traps, don’t look on social media.”
But the truth is, I still go on social media from time to time, and I still consume fitness content (though I usually prefer to do it on YouTube, and no, YouTube is not social media in my personal opinion, but I digress).
My personal experience with social media when it comes to fitness is complicated, to say the least. I used to follow dozens of fitness influencers. I told myself it was for inspiration and motivation, and for a while, I think it actually was. I would see a training video, feel excited about my next session, maybe pick up a new exercise or a nutrition tip. It felt productive, like I was learning and staying motivated just by scrolling.
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment it flipped, but at some point, the inspiration turned into something else. I would watch a woman with visible abs post her training day and immediately think about how far I was from looking like that. I would see someone’s progress photo and feel like my own results weren’t enough. Not fast enough, not visible enough. The content that was supposed to motivate me started making me feel guilty for not doing more, not training harder, not being further along.
And the worst part was the cycle it created. I would feel bad about my progress, and instead of getting up and doing something about it, I would keep scrolling. Watching another stranger’s workout, then another one, then another one. Sitting still while their lives moved forward and mine did not. I was stuck in this loop, consuming other people’s effort while producing none of my own, and I could feel it eating at me mentally in a way I hadn’t expected.
It took me a while to see that what I called inspiration was actually making me miserable.
Last year, I started setting some boundaries around the way I consume content on social media. It helped me stay sane while pursuing my fitness goals (and now also working in this industry). So in this article, I’ll share how I approached that.
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the comparison trap
When you’re constantly scrolling on social media, it’s hard not to fall for the comparison trap. I would see someone’s physique and immediately measure myself against it.
— “She started training at the same time as me, why does she look like that and I don’t?”
— “She eats the same calories, why is her progress faster?”
— “She has visible abs, what am I doing wrong?”
What I wasn’t seeing was the lighting, the angles, the pump right after a workout, the years of training before she even started posting, and the simple fact that her genetics and mine are completely different. I was comparing my real life to someone’s highlight reel and treating the gap between them as evidence that I was failing.
And this is not just about fitness. This pattern showed up in every area of my life where I was trying to build something. When I started my newsletter, I spent more time reading other people's newsletters than writing my own. When I was growing my photography work, I spent hours looking at other photographers' portfolios and feeling like mine would never be that good.
The comparison always led to the same place. Inaction.
The mechanism is always the same: you see someone who seems further ahead, you feel behind, and instead of doing your own work, you spend the next twenty minutes consuming theirs.
too much information, not enough execution
The other thing social media does is flood you with options. Every day there is a new workout split, a new nutrition approach, a new opinion from someone with a large following who sounds very confident. When you are exposed to fifteen different strategies in a single scroll session, it becomes almost impossible to commit to one.
So you don’t.
You start a program on Monday, see a different one on Wednesday, wonder if yours is optimal, and by Friday you’re researching a third option instead of just finishing the week.
This isn’t a discipline problem. It’s an environment one.
Your brain was not designed to process this many competing inputs and still make a clear decision.
The irony is that the people posting these programs and tips online are successful precisely because they picked one approach and stuck with it for a long time. But the platform rewards novelty, so they keep producing new content that makes you think you need to keep changing too.
how i took my brain back (and you can too)
About a year ago I decided to treat this like what it was, a problem, and actually do something about it. Not in a dramatic I-deleted-all-my-apps kind of way, but with small, intentional shifts that added up to a very different relationship with my phone.
1. creating a feed that doesn't make me feel like I'm not enough
The first thing I did was a ruthless unfollow. I went through every fitness account I followed and asked myself one question. Does this person’s content make me want to train, or does it make me feel like I am not enough? If the answer was the second, gone. I kept two or three creators whose approach aligned with mine and who genuinely taught me something. Everyone else, no matter how popular, no matter how nice they seemed, I unfollowed. My feed is my environment, and I get to choose what lives in it.
2. setting specific times to consume fitness content
No scrolling before training. No scrolling during training. My session is my session, my program is my program, and my numbers are my numbers. If I need to look up a technique for a specific exercise, I search for it intentionally, watch the video, and close the app. That is very different from opening Instagram with no purpose and letting the algorithm decide what I think about for the next thirty minutes.
I also started using screen time limits. Not because I do not trust myself, but because the apps are literally designed to keep you scrolling. A simple 30-minute daily cap on Instagram was enough to make me more intentional about when and why I open it. When you know your time is limited, you stop wasting it on content that does not serve you. Also, it helps to use it on your desktop, where the experience isn't the same and the urge to doomscroll is less tempting.
3. replacing the scroll with something else
The urge to pick up my phone did not disappear overnight, so I needed an alternative. In the morning, instead of opening Instagram in bed, I started reading a few pages of a book or writing down three things I wanted to get done that day. After training, instead of checking what everyone else was doing, I looked at my own numbers from the past few weeks. The comparison shifted from me versus strangers to me versus last month. And that comparison actually felt good.
Finally, I stopped treating social media as a place for validation. I used to post and then check how many likes it got, as if the number meant something about my value or who I am. When I stopped doing that, I realized that my life had been outsourced to strangers.
The real validation was in my personal achievements, and none of that needed an audience.
I stopped comparing my week 6 to someone else’s year 4. I started paying attention to my own data, my own progress, my own trajectory. And when I looked at those instead of looking at someone else’s, I could actually see that things were working (not only at the gym, but in different areas of my life).
The moment I started treating social media as a tool I use on purpose instead of a place I go to by default, things got better across the board.
Not just my physique, but my output, my clarity, and honestly my mood. Because constantly measuring yourself against other people’s curated results is exhausting, and it takes energy away from the one thing that actually moves the needle. Doing your own work.
If your phone is the first thing you reach for in the morning and the last thing you look at before bed, and the content you consume makes you feel like you are not doing enough, that is not inspiration. That is noise. And the fastest way to make progress on anything, whether it is your deadlift or your career or your side project, is to turn down the noise and focus on what is actually in front of you.
Your progress is real. Stop asking Instagram to confirm it.
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This is such an important piece. The shift from consuming to creating, from comparing to tracking your own progress, changes everything. Treating your feed like an environment you get to curate is the move :)
It resonates so much! I am starting my own business/personal project and something I’ve realised is that I have spent more time looking at others. I would lie if I say that it’s just as “inspiration” but no, usually I fall in that trap of comparison.
This piece is a reminder of what social media can do to us if we don’t put boundaries. Is like with anyone, we set boundaries for healthy relationships. 💜