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The Pioppi Diet is a superficial lifestyle guide based on distorted evidence – Spectator.co.uk
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Pioppi is a very small village in southern Italy. It is one of those places where people are reputed to live much longer than average (the authors claim life expectancy is 89 years but do not provide a citation for this claim). The gimmick behind this book is that the authors have travelled to the village, bottled its secrets and are prepared to sell them to you for a small fee.
Since the authors are both advocates of the low carb, high fat (LCHF) regime, everything is seen through the prism of the Atkins diet. They are Aseem Malhotra (a cardiologist, as he never tires of reminding you) and Donal ONeill (director of internet-only, anti-carbohydrate movies such as Cereal Killers and Run on Fat).
In some respects, Pioppi is a surprising place to find this low carb duo as it was the home of the scientist Ancel Keys who died in 2004 at the age of 100. It was Keys who drew the worlds attention to the villagers longevity when he was conducting research into nutrition in the mid-twentieth century. That research helped to create the evidence that linked saturated fat to heart disease, and low carb activists have spent years portraying him as a crackpot and a bully who was probably in the pay of Big Sugar and who definitely blackmailed the scientific community into unfairly demonising saturated fat. As a result of his junk science, they say, governments around the world changed their dietary guidelines to encourage the consumption of carbohydrates at the expense of life-saving lard. The general public, slavishly following government advice as always, took this as a green light to stuff their faces with sugar and soon became obese.
Its a bizarre and ahistorical conspiracy theory which, as Anthony Warner says in The Angry Chef would require paying off the medical establishment, the World Health Organisation, numerous charities, public health bodies and nutrition researchers around the world, and keep producing systematic reviews that show links between consumption of saturated fats and increased risk of heart disease. The idea that millions of people have been killed by guidelines which (a) were never followed, and (b) clearly discouraged sugar consumption, is one of the strangest memes in the world of nutritional woo.
Pioppi is at the very centre of the nutritional orthodoxy. Not only did Ancel Keys live there for many years, but it is recognised by UNESCO as the home of the Mediterranean Diet. In a sense, The Pioppi Diet is an attempt to erase the legacy of Keys and reclaim the village for the one true faith of LCHF. Keys attributed the Pioppi residents low rates of heart disease to the relative scarcity of saturated fat in the Mediterranean diet, but as far as Malhotra and ONeill are concerned, saturated fat has been exonerated and their job is to discover what is really going on there.
Reading between the lines of The Pioppi Diet, its reasonably obvious whats going on. Its a rural farming and fishing community of 200 people who are engaged in manual labour from a young age and remain physically active throughout their lives. The air is clean and the local diet is dominated by fruit, vegetables, fish, pasta, olive oil and wine. The villagers have traditionally been too poor to eat a lot of red meat. Indeed, they have been too poor to eat a lot of anything, hence the low rate of obesity and its associated diseases.
The longevity of the Pioppi people is therefore entirely consistent with mainstream science and yet it forms the backdrop to a book which tells the reader to be prepared for everything you know and believe to be true to be turned on its head. But it is only a backdrop, a blank screen onto which they project whatever thoughts come to mind. They visit the village but do not conduct any research there. Instead, they stroll around drinking coffee, admiring the noble peasants and making sagelike comments such as Theres not much sign of stress around here, Aseem.
The first half of the book sees them take it in turns to crowbar in all the LCHF articles of faith: physical activity wont help you lose weight, saturated fat is good for you, cholesterol is nothing to worry about, sugar is a poison, a calorie is not a calorie, etc. I have neither the time nor inclination to fact-check all of their claims so I will allow for the possibility that they might be right from time to time. I am quite prepared to believe that the dangers of saturated fat have been overstated; better qualified people than Malhotra and ONeill have been critical of the evidence for years. But whenever they touch on a topic with which I am familiar, I noticed that their discussion of evidence was partial and one-sided, and sometimes totally incorrect. On the occasions when I felt moved to follow up their (rather patchy) references, I nearly always found that there was less to them than meets the eye.
For example, Malhotra cites the PREDIMED study, a well-regarded piece of research which appeared to show significant benefits from the consumption of nuts and olive oil. But it did not, as Malhotra claims, show the superiority of a high-fat diet over a low-fat diet; such a hypothesis was never raised nor tested. He also cites the Lyon Diet Heart Study as evidence that the standard American Heart Association recommended low-fat diet causes more heart attacks than the Mediterranean Diet. The study does indeed show benefits from the Mediterranean Diet, but it is only by reading the study that you would see that the Mediterranean Diet was lower in both total fats and saturated fats than the standard diet.
Some of the errors in the book are risible, such as when they claim that in industrialised countries between 5 and 10 per cent of GDP is spent treating dental disease (the entire NHS budget takes up 9 per cent of GDP). Others are just sloppy, such as when they use a graphic from a newspaper to prove that poor diets cause 35 per cent of deaths (they dont). Nearly all of them are consistent with a systematic bias towards a desired conclusion.
The reader should not have to look up the references in a book to find out what is being concealed. The nutritional epidemiology literature is enormous. Thousands of studies have been conducted and they do not all agree with one another. If one ignores the totality of the evidence and cherry-picks a handful of studies, it is possible to argue almost anything. If the reader cannot trust the author to play with a straight bat, he might as well save his money and go on a Google binge.
Take the chapter on sugar, for instance. The scientific consensus says that obesity is a risk factor for diabetes. Insofar as there is a link between sugar and diabetes, it is the same as the link between cheese and diabetes, ie. if you eat to much of it, you will become obese and therefore be at greater risk of diabetes. It is indirect.
A handful of dissenters claim that there is a direct link and that sugar can cause diabetes even in the absence of obesity. The most famous of them is Robert Lustig, a Californian endocrinologist who has views on sugar that are extreme by any standard. He has made various wild claims about sugar being toxic and addictive. He calls it the alcohol of the child. Amongst other strange assertions, he has said that breast milk is not sweet and that pasta was invented in America. His published research on sugar is, in my view, third rate and I dont think anybody should take him too seriously. But he is on the low carb bandwagon and is one of Malhotras chums. Consequently, while the chapter on sugar only references five studies, four of them are by Lustig and his colleagues, although this is not obvious from the text.
Even if the scientific consensus is wrong and Lustig turns out to be a sort of Galileo, shouldnt Malhotra at least acknowledge the totality of the evidence, even if only to argue against it? And if there is an independent association between sugar and diabetes, why do organisations that want people to eat less sugar such as SACN and Diabetes UK continue to deny it? Is everybody in the pay of Big Sugar?
Malhotras credentials as a cardiologist are not sufficient to persuade me to ignore so many scientists. He says himself that the majority of doctors are not equipped with even basic training to give specific, evidence-based lifestyle advice and admits that he doesnt recall receiving a single lecture at medical school on the impact of nutrition and lifestyle on preventing and treating disease. All of his conclusions, he says, are based on my own research. But there are experts in this field who have received ample training and have been given many lectures on nutrition. They are called dieticians, and I have yet to meet one who endorses Malhotras message.
It soon becomes clear that The Pioppi Diet is not a serious review of the evidence. It provides a distorted and superficial account of a tiny fraction of the evidence. It does not really attempt to overturn the scientific consensus, it simply ignores it. Meanwhile, it devotes page after page to a handful of low carb activists who are portrayed as world-leading authorities, such as Zoe Harcombe, Tim Noakes, Nina Teicholz, Jason Fung and Robert Lustig. While all these people have books to sell, Malhotra and ONeill accuse many scientists and doctors, as well as the media, of being under the financial influence of the food and pharmaceutical industry. This, we are told, is why they disseminate selected, biased and outdated information. When your best evidence is a single study from 1956 which has never been replicated, this is a bit rich.
So what is this Pioppi Diet that promises a life-changing journey taking just 21 days? The first thing to understand is that it is not a diet, it is a lifestyle. From wandering around Pioppi, Malhotra and ONeill come to the profound conclusion that it is important to socialise with friends, take plenty of exercise, be relaxed and get some sleep. They cant help you with socialising or stress relief, but they suggest you get at least seven hours sleep (which is also what the National Sleep Foundation recommends). With regards to exercise, ONeill spends several pages waxing lyrical about high intensity interval training, but is forced to admit that they dont do that kind of thing in Pioppi and so recommends getting up from your desk every 45 minutes to stretch your legs.
So much for the lifestyle. What about the food? Malhotra and ONeill recommend that you avoid desserts, all sugars (including fruit juice and honey) and many of the most common sources of calories, including bread, rice, pasta, cereals, potatoes, noodles, couscous and anything flour based. You should also fast for 24 hours once a week and think about skipping breakfast every day (because the authors were told that Pioppi people used to be so poor that they sometimes went to work hungry). If you do all this, plus lots of walking and go to the gym five times a week (as Malhotra does) or engage in regular high intensity training (as ONeill does), they reckon you will lose weight. And do you know what? I think they might be right. Behold the miracle of the Pioppi Diet!
The trouble with this whole concept is that Malhotra and ONeills interpretation of the Pioppi Diet does not reflect what the people of Pioppi eat. It is basically an ultra-low carb version of the Mediterranean Diet with a few trendy ingredients, such as coconut oil, thrown in. Coconuts have never been part of the Italian diet and nor have full-fat fermented dairy products but the authors include the latter anyway because as they say the Greek cohort in Ancel Keyss original studies enjoyed [them] so there is no reason we shouldnt be doing likewise!
Do you know what the people of Pioppi actually eat? Processed carbohydrates. Farm workers in rural Italy do not could not survive on a diet of fish and seasonal vegetables. Pasta is as central to the Italian diet as potatoes are to Britains. So too is bread. This is the elephant in the room for anyone trying to pretend that Italians eat a low carb diet. As a 94 year old Pioppi resident said last year: Pasta is my favourite food. I dont understand why so many people try to cut that and bread out of their diets it is like medicine for the heart and it is silly not to eat it.
Once you accept that pasta and bread are important elements of Mediterranean cuisine, the actual Pioppi diet involves lots of fruit, vegetables, fish, starchy carbohydrates, mushrooms, nuts and eggs, but little or no cake, biscuits, processed meat, crisps and red meat. In other words, it is the UK governments Eatwell Guide with extra virgin olive oil. Maybe those official dietary guidelines are not so deadly after all?
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The Pioppi Diet is a superficial lifestyle guide based on distorted evidence - Spectator.co.uk
Green tea weight loss – do these drinks REALLY shrink your waist REVEALED – Express.co.uk
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Green tea, originally from China, is a type of tea that is made from Camellia sinensis leaves.
Unlike other leaves used for black tea - green tea leaves have not withered, which is why they still have their lush green colour.
Health effects of the drink are touted amongst nutritionists and health experts.
Looking at scientific studies it does seem that a number make a strong link between drinking the herbal tea and weight loss.
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A green tea weight loss trial found that green tea had a big effect on weight loss of the patients in the study.
Moderately overweight people where given two drinks each a day.
For one group all were placebos, the other had one serving of green tea while the other had two.
Scientists who carried out the research, in Shanghai, China, found: We observed a decrease in estimated intra-abdominal fat in the GT3 group, or the group with two servings of green tea.
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They added: In addition, we found decreases of 1.9 cm in waist circumference and 1.2 kg body weight.
This is fairly impressive considering the study did not include any other changes in diet or exercise.
A similar study that aimed to measure the effects of green tea on overweight Thai patients found the same thing.
We conclude that green tea can reduce body weight in obese Thai subjects by increasing energy expenditure and fat oxidation, the Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, at Khon Kaen University found.
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The University of Maryland Medical Centres Complementary and Alternative Medicine Guide strongly recommends green tea for those looking to boost weight loss.
The paper states: Clinical studies suggest that green tea extract may boost metabolism and help burn fat.
One study found that the combination of green tea and caffeine improved weight loss and maintenance in people who were overweight and moderately obese.
This facility specifically recommends 2 to 3 cups of green tea per day, depending on the brand - or 100 to 750 mg per day of standardised green tea extract.
However, not all studies are in agreement. Others have found no correlation between drinking green tea and weight loss.
Although drinking green tea or taking green tea supplements decreases cholesterol, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College found, and some studies have observed drinking the tea can reduce the risk of death from cardiovascular disease.
So while a certain link cannot be made between green tea and weight loss, it does seem that the relatively cheap drink is likely to have a positive effect on your overall health.
Have you heard of the latest diet that nutritionists claim to offer superior weight loss.
The diet involves limiting carbs to 50 grams or less, which puts the body into a state of ketosis.
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Green tea weight loss - do these drinks REALLY shrink your waist REVEALED - Express.co.uk
This Smart Scale Will Help You Lose WeightAnd It’s $30 Off – Prevention.com
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Prevention.com | This Smart Scale Will Help You Lose WeightAnd It's $30 Off Prevention.com Enter smart scales: These high-tech devices reveal much more than how many pounds you're carrying. They show other helpful metrics such as body mass index, body fat percentage, muscle mass, and bone mass. A 2016 University of Manchester study ... |
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6 Reddit Users Share What REALLY Helped Them Lose Weight – Women’s Health
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Women's Health | 6 Reddit Users Share What REALLY Helped Them Lose Weight Women's Health One of the most important elements of successful weight loss is establishing a support system. For some this means leaning on friends, family, and coworkers. But that's not always enough. Sometimes, you need a community of people who truly understand ... |
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6 Reddit Users Share What REALLY Helped Them Lose Weight - Women's Health
6 Things You Should Know Before Trying To Lose Weight On The Whole30 – Women’s Health
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Women's Health | 6 Things You Should Know Before Trying To Lose Weight On The Whole30 Women's Health While the program can help you lose weight, the Whole30 is meant to reshape your overall relationship with food so that you feel your best. And should you happen to shed pounds along the way, it's just a bonus. But what if you want to try the Whole30 ... |
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This Is Why You Lose Weight on Vacation – The Daily Meal
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The great mystery: You went on a vacation, ate ice cream on the beach, drank sugar-loaded cocktails every night, and you came back five pounds lighter.
How did that happen?
No, it doesnt mean you should come back and throw all your health habits out the window. And no, it doesnt mean you should take a cruise every weekend to get thin. So what does it mean?
Based on our culture of slashing calories and shedding pounds, this phenomenon is a complete anomaly. I mean, youre pounding calories and dramatically reducing exercise. That should make you pile on extra fat, right? But based on what researchers and nutritionists know about health and weight, the weight loss actually makes a lot of sense.
There are three reasons your lazy lifestyle on vacation actually makes you lose weight.
Lower stress levels When you go on vacation, youre taking a break not only from your health habits, but also from your stress. Your adrenal glands get a breather (finally) and shut off their panic mode. They allow your body to fall more in sync with your natural rhythm and your health.
Cortisol, the main stress hormone in your body, gets taken down a level in your bloodstream, which can have a pivotal effect on your behavior, metabolism, and overall health. Often, weight gain occurs due to increased cortisol levels in the body. So it makes sense that reducing the stress hormones racing through your system allows those extra pounds to fall off.
Youre not exercising If youre a frequent exerciser, taking time off from the gym can actually result in more weight loss than overdoing it. When you rest your muscles, they recover and have time to build back up. This is why rest days are so essential but if youre living a fast-paced, busy lifestyle, even your rest days could be strenuous.
When youre lying on the beach or chilling in a cabana all day, your muscles finally get the time theyve been craving to recover. Having larger muscles burns more fat hence, you have a higher probability of weight loss.
You allow yourself to eat the foods you crave Dieting doesnt work. At this point, if you dont know that, then youve been living in serious denial. So what should you do to be healthier, if not diet?
Through extensive research, intuitive eating and letting go of all food rules and restrictions has shown the greatest health benefits in the long run no matter your current weight. When you go on vacation, thats exactly what you do. You eat when youre hungry and you stop when youre full. You let go of all the dieting rules and just let yourself eat and drink freely. No points, no calories, no macros. Just food.
It may seem counterintuitive, but it works. Its a safe bet that you feel those benefits, too, as well as see them on the scale.
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Mom Claims She Dropped 112 Pounds By Drinking Green Tea – GoodHousekeeping.com
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Siobhan Thornton spent most of her life as a size 12 or 14, but after giving birth to her now three-year-old-daughter Tia, the 23-year-old could barely fit into a size 18. By 2015, Thornton was at her heaviest after she had split up with her boyfriend. The single mom soon developed an unhealthy relationship with food and rarely left her house because of her sadness, and soon she became depressed with how she looked.
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Determined to lose weight to become healthier and feel better, Thornton found research online that indicated that green tea can boost metabolism and slow down weight gain. So, she began drinking two cups of tea every day.
The 23-year-old mom, who once weighed 245 pounds, claims she was able to lose 112 pounds through regular exercise, a Vibroplate and drinking gallons of green tea, she told the Daily Mail.
Before her weight loss.
Siobhan Thompson/Triangle News
"I am certain that I lost the first [42 pounds] through drinking green tea alone," Thornton told Daily Mail. "My metabolism just went through the roof and I hadn't done much else."
The Scotland native now weighs 126 pounds. "I was measuring my waist and it was getting smaller and smaller and I wasn't doing any exercise," Thornton says. "Green tea is so underrated and it's cheap as chips."
After her weight loss.
Siobhan Thompson/Triangle News
Inspired by her weight loss, she was willing to alter her diet and exercise plan to keep up her new healthy lifestyle. She has continued to drink her brew while adding three trips to the gym each week and only eating junk food in moderation.
Now that the single mother is at her healthiest, her confidence has grown.
"I used to avoid looking at myself, now my confidence is through the roof and I've halved my BMI," Thornton says.
Drinking tea has numerous benefits to your health as Thornton initially researched. Studies have found that the catechins in green tea can help elevate metabolic rate and increase fat oxidation which helped participants lose weight.
"If you're a regular soda, juice, energy-drink or sweetened-coffee-and-tea drinker and you switch to unsweetened green tea, it can absolutely be a contributor to weight-loss!" says Jaclyn London, MS, RD, CDN, Nutrition Director at the Good Housekeeping Institute. "That's because the number one source of added sugar (and therefore, added calories) in the American diet is from sugar-sweetened beverages, so opting for a calorie-free alternative is always best, and green tea can be a delicious replacement."
But London warns, drinking green tea alone may not work wonders for everyone. "If you're already sipping on water flavored with fresh fruit, sparkling water, unsweetened coffee and tea, or the occasional diet beverage, then chances are you'll have to do more than simply switch up your hydration habits to lose weight for the long-term."
According to a small study, green tea is effective in reducing participants' body fat due to the tea's high amount of the antioxidant EGCG. Other studies have found similar results, where drinking green tea may aide your weight loss efforts when in combination with a healthy diet and exercise.
"While a few small-scale studies have linked an increased metabolic rate to drinking green tea (when sipping about four caffeinated cups per day!), the only truly variable factor in your basal metabolic rate is increasing your lean body mass, a.k.a. building muscle. That's why strength training is key to keeping your metabolism up for the long-term, and crucial to bone, muscle and immune function, which ultimately helps to support metabolism over time," London says. "The more direct link between green tea and potential metabolic effects? If it wakes you up enough to get your tush to the gym!"
[h/t Daily Mail]
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Mom Claims She Dropped 112 Pounds By Drinking Green Tea - GoodHousekeeping.com
How Catch-Up Sleep Can Help You Lose Weight | Reader’s Digest – Reader’s Digest
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shutterstockIf you cant seem to catch enough zs during the week, youre not alone. But bad things happen to your body when youre sleep-deprived, not least of which is weight gain. Well, heres some good news: Sleeping in on the weekend to make up for sleep lost during the week is associated with lower body mass index (BMI), according to a study published in the Oxford University Press journal Sleep.
The researchers, a collaboration of scientists based in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Republic of Korea, sought to determine if what they refer to as catch-up sleep impacts body mass index (BMI) in the general population. To do so, they conducted face-to-face interviews of a random sampling of 2,156 adults, comparing their sleep habits with their BMI scores. The 932 participants who slept incatch-up sleepers (people who sleep longer on the weekend than on weekdays by approximately two hours) had a significantly lower BMI than the other subjects. Whats more, every additional hour of catch-up sleep was associated with a decrease in BMI.
As to why sleeping in on weekends can lead to weight loss, one of the study co-authors, Robert Thomas, MD, MMSc, of the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine, Department of Medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, reminded Readers Digest of the substantial experimental and epidemiological data that short sleep contributes to weight gain. He notes, our best estimate [as researchers] is that there is a balance to be kept, and the body can adjust and adapt within reason. Catch-up sleep allows the basic balance to be maintained.
Accordingly, Dr. Thomas suspects that intermittent catch-ups during the week would have the same effect. However, as he points out, the reality is that most of us dont have time for cat-naps mid-week and are left to catch up on sleep over the weekend.
Although the study showed significant differences in BMI with the addition of two or more hours of catch-up sleep, Dr. Thomas points out that there are substantial individual differences, such that the benefit we get from those extra hours will vary depending on how much sleep each of us generally needs. To determine your optimal sleep, you can track the time spent sleeping on nights when there is no need to wake up to an alarm, suggests Liza Baker, a health coach at Simply Health Coaching. That tells you about how many hours of sleep your body likes to get, since it varies greatly across the population, from just 4 to 5 hours to 9 to 10 hours. (Most adults fall in the 6- to 8-hour range.)
So can you actually lose weight by sleeping in on the weekend? Only if youre paying off a sleep debt from the week, according to the results of this study. It helps if youre also eating less, Dr. Thomas adds.
If youre looking to get more sleep, you might want to try some of these sleep tricks on for size, and be aware that there are jobs that are bad for sleep.
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The Best Wines To Drink If You’re Trying To Lose Weight – Delish.com
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When you're trying to lose weight, the biggest bummer of all isn't giving up chocolate cake or hitting the gym five days per week it's having to quit drinking. Seriously, grabbing drinks is one of the most social activities of all time. And abstaining from a poolside beer or ice cold ros can make for a torturous summer when all your friends are busy boozing. Luckily, we've got a little hack that helps you sneak in a glass every now and then. You've just got to know which bottles to pop.
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If you love red wine, stick to merlot, pinot noir, or ros. According to Tanya Zuckerbrot, R.D., creator of the F-Factor Diet, they each contain about 88 calories, 3 grams of carbs, and 1 gram of sugar per glass.
Steer clear of marsala and sherry, though. Those glasses are loaded with 164 calories, 14 grams of carbs, and 8 grams of sugar.
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When it comes to lighter white wines, opt for chardonnay, white zinfandel, or sauvignon blanc. Zuckerbrot notes that these picks are all under 85 calories, with 2.6 grams carbs and 1 gram of sugar per glass.
What you definitely need to avoid are sweet dessert wines like riesling or moscato, which can clock in at upwards of 160 calories per glass, 12 grams of carbs, and 8 grams of sugar per glass.
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No matter which varietal you choose to pour, you've got to stick to a 5-ounce serving. So, as tempting as it is to fill that giant balloon glass with a little somethin' extra, you should try to stay strict.
What's more, the old adage that "moderation is key" remains true here as well. Zuckerbrot made a perfect point in a recent interview with Women's Health: "Just treat it like any other indulgence by adding up your calories for the day or week to determine how much wiggle room you have and where wine can fit in."
So, my fellow winos, that means only one glass per night.
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Finding a More Inclusive Vision of Fitness in Our Feeds – New York Times
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Arias belongs to a growing coterie of personal trainers who are building empires on Instagram. The fitness universe on Instagram is almost incomprehensibly vast there are hundreds of millions of photographs with hashtags like #fitness, #workout, #fitfam, #fitnessjourney or #fitlife, featuring people in various states of undress, lifting weights, making and drinking shakes, demonstrating techniques and documenting inches and pounds lost, all alongside messages about staying motivated to hit the gym and eat right. Its as inspiring and vapid as anything else on social media and somehow manages to invoke awe and envy at the same time. In a way, fitness Instagram is just the next iteration of a business model that began in the 1980s and 1990s, when workout gurus like Richard Simmons and Jane Fonda created their own empires by selling VHS workout tapes (and eventually workout DVDs) to people who wanted to learn to exercise from the comfort of their living rooms. Those products were marketed in health magazines, on daytime and nighttime talk shows and in infomercials. But as streaming-media sites like YouTube and Netflix matured, businesses built on the backs of older media dwindled. And as social-media sites like Instagram grew, people like Arias realized they could sidestep the traditional machinery that ruled the fitness world to tap into new audiences, especially those the fitness industry has often ignored.
Arias told me that she started working out as a holistic way to treat chronic depression. She documented her fitness journey online, which held her accountable and allowed others to participate remotely, if they wanted. After weeks of working out, she posted a photograph of her sculpted abdomen, which went viral. She gained several tens of thousands of followers overnight. People started asking me how I did it, and how can they do it, she said. She became certified as a personal trainer, so she could start teaching and dispensing advice, and began doing workout classes in Central Park. Eventually, she started posting short videos on Instagram, teaching people quick routines they could do at home. She began creating 30-day workout and meal programs that people could sign up for on her website; for a fee, they could get access to Arias and a digital community that was also working out that month. Her Instagram functions as a marketing tool, driving people to her website and paid services. And it works: Arias told me that between 1,000 and 2,000 people sign up each month to receive personalized workout advice. She also works with brands that want to reach her 2.2 million followers on Instagram to advertise, say, a supplement or active-wear company, and that advertising makes up about 20 percent of her income.
Arias has benefited from the fact that social media has become a place for people ill served by most traditional industries, and fitness is no different it allowed people to more easily find trainers, lifestyles and information that were previously more difficult to access. As Jessamyn Stanley, a yoga teacher with a large following on Instagram, put it to me: Its about making something accessible by making it visible to lots of people. Stanley said she was able to find an audience online that would have been hard to build offline: There was a niche community of people waiting for a yoga book written by a queer, fat, black person. It was just about finding the means to reach them. But as much as Stanley credits her successes to social media, she noted that the performativity and stylization popular on the internet can quickly get out of hand. It can create molds and archetypes that become bigger than the activity itself, she told me. She gave the example of an Instagram clich: a handstand at sunset on a beach. Its so idealized, like, your life must be perfect if you can hold a balance posture on the beach, she said. But the actual practice of yoga isnt about that at all. The image isnt important. The practice is.
In a 2014 article for BuzzFeed, Katie J.M. Baker wrote about the complications of documenting a lifestyle online. She examined healthful-food blogging on Instagram and wondered about its relationship to disordered eating habits. Its impossible to tell whether these exquisite bowls are a product of calming ritual or unhealthy obsession (or both), or whether their creators are actually eating the artwork they profess is so delicious, she writes. But onlookers will always judge young women for what they choose or dont choose. Bakers article reminds us that performance can pervert; Stanley told me that social media, for all of its benefits, is a place that can still replicate a lot of the same body-image pressures that the world at large has long put on people. Aspirational lifestyles are still that aspirational. She also pointed out that what tends to get the most attention on social media still largely adheres to a cis-het white male gaze, meaning that the images that tend to trend are still ones that fit into traditional beauty standards.
But Stanley also told me that ultimately, she feels that social medias ability to forcibly expand perspectives on lifestyles trumps the pressure it may induce among viewers who now feel they have new standards to live up to. Stanley and Arias have attracted followings in part because they play into certain eye-catching aesthetics: a full-figured woman and another whose physique is so toned and muscular it is irresistible click-bait. And theyve managed to turn that into profit, becoming an entirely new class of fitness entrepreneur one that perhaps never would have existed without the advent of social media. Both women have changed my relationship to fitness and my body: Although I am frequently the only woman of color in my real-world yoga and fitness classes, I can always turn to a screen and look at Stanleys and Ariass accounts to remind myself that bodies like ours have a place in this realm.
Jenna Wortham is a staff writer for the magazine.
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A version of this article appears in print on July 9, 2017, on Page MM14 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Fitness feeds on Instagram can perpetuate harmful ideas about the perfect body but they can also inspire us with bodies that are more like ours.
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Finding a More Inclusive Vision of Fitness in Our Feeds - New York Times