The ‘We Need To’ Culture Is Breaking Our Relationship With Our Own Bodies
Somewhere between the protein checklist and the cold plunge evangelists, we lost track of what "healthy" actually means.
You open your phone for five minutes and walk away feeling like you’re failing at everything. You haven’t hit your protein. You missed your fiber window. You should be lifting, but not too heavy, because someone on TikTok just said heavy lifting gives women a boxy waist. You need to sleep eight hours, but not before you’ve meditated, journaled, done ten minutes of evening stretching, and read something nonfiction. You have to work, but not let work consume you. Stay social, but protect your energy. Track your steps, heart rate, zone 2, macros, and cortisol. And if you have a husband and kids? Consider the bar higher still.
This is the wellness culture social media has built. And it is exhausting.
The Social Media Fitness Checklist That Never Ends
The “we need to” content pipeline runs twenty-four hours a day. For every hour spent on TikTok or Instagram, the algorithm delivers a new protocol, a new deficiency, a new reason to feel behind. But the people behind the most widely shared fitness content are often not qualified to give it.
“Just because someone has a large following doesn’t mean they’re qualified to give fitness guidance,” said Dr. Amy Comander, director of the lifestyle medicine program at Massachusetts General Hospital, to The New York Times. Richard Beddie, chief executive of Exercise New Zealand, agreed. He warned the latest wave of social media fitness trends is “often driven by online influencers with little or no formal training in exercise, health or wellbeing.”
A 2024 study published in Digital Health, which surveyed 339 active fitness video viewers on Douyin, China’s TikTok-like platform, found that trustworthiness and expertise matter far more than physical attractiveness in response to fitness influencers. The problem is that on most platforms, the two are almost impossible to tell apart.
The Social Media Fitness Myths Experts Are Tired of Seeing
Let’s go through what is actually circulating. “Runner’s waist” is a trend claiming that regular running will give women a wider, boxier waist due to visible oblique muscles. Per Exercise New Zealand, citing research highlighted in Healthline, this claim is not supported by scientific evidence. Running develops endurance, cardiovascular health, and core stability. It does not significantly increase the size of the oblique muscles.
“Cortisol face” is the suggestion that everyday exercise causes facial puffiness through elevated stress hormones. Medical experts at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center stated it is not a recognized medical condition. The facial changes associated with abnormally high cortisol levels are linked to rare disorders, not a morning run.
And the long-standing claim that women will get “bulky” from lifting weights continues to discourage strength training. Per Exercise New Zealand, building substantial muscle mass requires years of progressive resistance training, carefully managed nutrition, and in many cases, favorable genetics. For most women, strength training builds strength, bone density, confidence, and functional fitness.
Then there are the challenges. “75 Hard,” the viral program that requires two daily 45-minute workouts, a strict diet, a gallon of water, and at least ten pages of nonfiction reading for 75 consecutive days, is “extremely unsustainable” and “quite possibly the worst way to set good habits,” said Victoria Sekely, a physical therapist and founder of Train Smart Run Strong, per The New York Times. Exercising twice a day, especially for beginners, “is a good way to injure yourself and to create completely unrealistic expectations around exercise,” Sekely added.
“What I eat in a day” videos carry their own damage. “All of us have different heights, different weights, different body compositions,” said Dr. Comander. Meghann Featherstun, a sports dietitian in Kent, Ohio, warned that comparing your own diet to what you see online can encourage disordered eating, per the same reporting. It’s also worth noting that what someone shares may not be what they actually eat day to day, particularly when they make a living promoting sponsored products.
The Algorithm Doesn’t Know Your Body
What makes the social media fitness problem uniquely hard to escape is that the platforms are built to keep feeding it to you. Per Glorious Sport, TikTok and Instagram’s algorithms learn behavior from signals as small as whether a user lingered on a video for more than five seconds. The longer someone engages with fitness content, the more fitness content arrives, regardless of whether it is accurate, applicable, or created by anyone with credentials.
According to a 2023 study published in the journal Body Image, exposure to fitness influencers on Instagram and TikTok can increase body dissatisfaction, especially among young women.
The one-size-fits-all nature of the content is part of the design. “Effective fitness doesn’t look the same for someone managing chronic illness as it does for a college athlete,” per the International Fitness Professionals Association. Hormonal shifts, injuries, neurodiversity, and socioeconomic barriers all shape what a person actually needs from movement. Per IFPA, these realities are largely invisible in the content being promoted. When a program fails to work for someone, the implicit message social media sends is that it must be her fault: she didn’t push hard enough, didn’t want it enough. When in reality, as IFPA notes, the program was simply never designed with her body or her life in mind.
The data obsession adds another layer. Per Kathryn Larson, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic Sports Cardiology Clinic, some patients become so fixated on their trackers that “at the end of the day, they’ve kind of lost focus on why the exercise is important in the first place.”
Our Mothers Never Had Time for Wellness Culture
Here is the part that doesn’t get talked about enough.
Our mothers survived. That was the assignment. They worked, they raised children, they kept households running, and they did not have the bandwidth to think about their fiber intake, their zone-two heart rate, or whether their cortisol was aging their face. The wellness culture social media sells was never designed for women who were too busy keeping everyone else alive to take care of themselves.
And now, decades later, many of them are living with the consequences. And it’s not because they failed at some protocol. Because, honestly, they didn’t even exist. And because survival mode does not leave much room for building bone density, muscle mass, or the cardiovascular foundation that carries a person into old age without pain. The autoimmune conditions, the knees that won’t cooperate, the back too stiff to pick up a grandchild. That is what actually happens when health gets pushed to the bottom of the list, not because of anything a fitness influencer said, but because there was no other option.
Social media has taken that reality and commodified its opposite: the relentless idea that if you are not optimizing everything, you are failing. And it is selling that idea to the daughters of the very women who had no choice but to do without.
“We’ve gone from celebrating what our bodies can do to worrying about whether our waistline or face fits the latest TikTok trend,” said Beddie, per Exercise New Zealand. “That’s a step backward.”
The irony, Beddie added, is that social media is making people fear the very activities that improve their health. Running, strength training, and regular physical activity reduce the risk of chronic disease, improve mental wellbeing, and build confidence. The content designed around those same activities is actively working against them.
What Works Has Never Gone Viral on Social Media
The honest version of fitness advice does not make for compelling content. Per The New York Times, experts recommend finding movement you enjoy, doing it consistently, and building a habit, rather than chasing the latest miracle workout. Full-body strength training twice a week. Paying attention to how a workout feels rather than what the smartwatch reports. Consulting a nutritionist if you want guidance on food, rather than modeling your meals on a creator who may not eat what they post.
“What matters most is actual feeling and intensity,” said James McKirdy, founder of McKirdy Training.
Similarly, one of the most meaningful shifts in the fitness industry over the past two decades has been moving the conversation from “exercise for looks” to “exercise for health.” Social media is actively working to undo that progress.