IG, the cable news of fitness and nutrition
When I look at my Instagram feed of fitness and nutrition, I get sad. I understand that IG is not an educational platform and that it is meant to entertain and market. Yet much of fitness is entertaining through education. And IG education plays to the lowest common denominator. It simplifies things to the point that they no longer have value.
The same process is a big part of the way 24 hour news transformed politics. Prior to CNN, there was really only news reported locally in the morning and nationally each night. We relied on the news cycle to last at least 24 hours. News days always had impact because there was at least one impactful thing that happened. And when something big happened, there was a lot of time for intellectuals to examine the issue and analyze it from all sides. However, when the shift to constant news began, we slowly started losing expert voices as the cacophony of ever growing talking heads dominated the conversation.
As the years, now decades, have worn on the very idea of celebrity has changed, as has our view of authority. We trust reality stars and influencers and that girl from high school who found you on Facebook and had an amazing opportunity to tell you about. We trust them with supplement recommendations and where to shop and even our health choices. And at the same time we’ve grown wary of Drs who mimic their behavior on magazine covers and daytime tv and on The NY Times Best Seller list. So who do we trust if there’s no gate keepers left?
In fitness there are still thought leaders but they rarely have the biggest audiences. No that’s reserved for the fitfluencers and bootie girls and the 43 Kardashian sisters. The researchers and applied scientists and great coaches still get comments about their lack of knowledge by someone who has none. Everyone is a newscaster.
Also like in cable news, the industry grabs on to a news idea rather predictably. A new flavor of the month or three that matriculates from a singular concept to an amorphous pile of nonsense, watered down to the point of being counterproductive to the original idea. We take concepts rooted in research and in the efforts to market them in simpler terms and in shareable bite sized content pieces we break them from any context or nuance. We take the finest, sharpest Japanese steel and blunt it to a dull hunk of lead.
So what does that mean for you? The consumer? It means that it’s harder than ever to parse good information for bad. It’s harder to delineate evidence based practice from bullshit; it all looks the same. The most egregious examples of malarkey in fitness and nutrition are bathed in science-y sounding terms and backed by research. How can we be expected to know the difference?
I’ll tell you how. If there’s certainty from the perpetrators of information, absolutes and calls to authority, you can be sure it’s bullshit. Science is messy. And science is about eliminating variables rather than answering questions definitively. Just know king down pins to get a little bit closer to some sort of objective truth. The people I trust most are the ones who portray skeptical optimism. After all, I’m not a researcher or scientist, I’m a student. I’m a conduit for the researchers and scientists. Not nearly as smart but not so bad at communicating ideas. I also see it as my responsibility to not oversimplify things. To not create obfuscation in the pursuit of likes and shares. Ok, so maybe I’m not that good at communicating.
The good news is that there are very trustworthy, ethical people in our industry who readily lend their voice to educating within it. If we must be caught up in the 24 hour news cycle of fitness, at least we can turn to the big guns and hear less biased, more informative news. Or you can turn on your talking head word soup cable show and hear what you want to hear. Of course, that’s what got us to the point we are now. Where people believe their own reality. Don’t let that be you.