Social Media And Its Influence On Body Image

Is Social Media a blessing or a curse? This is still an ongoing debate amongst people and is mostly polled 50-50. The reason behind this is the versatility of this huge platform that comes with many perks and perils of its own. The use of social media seems to be overgrown in contemporary times as it holds the most power in the world when it comes to influencing people. People of almost every age seem to be enjoying their time on social media in their own way, but the way it sways the younger generation is almost unthinkable. Social media sites have become a new platform for people to share their views, ideas or lifestyle attributes in general that can have both positive and negative impacts on people's mindsets.

One of the many changes that came along with this new age of social media is the newly defined body and beauty standards. Many Instagram models and lifestyle bloggers create unrealistic body standards for their followers, promoting a product that has literally nothing to do with how they look. All an Instagram model has to do, is look and pose perfectly holding merchandise, for example a detox tea, with a caption saying how she looks perfect and glowy with the help of that product. When in reality, it actually took a buttload of editing, retouching, makeup and maybe, just maybe the least of that product. This creates unrealistic body standards for the followers, especially young boys and girls and lets them believe that how they look is not good enough and the ticket to a perfect body is a dietary supplement. This leads to low self-esteem and negative thinking which is the prime reason why social media affects mental health. People face confidence issues because they want to achieve those "Body Goals" in order to look like their "idols" which also leads to a rise in eating disorders. Reasons like these are probably why social media is condemned so much by many people.

However, it is not social media per se that is at fault. The way it affects us depends on how we perceive it. It's like wanting to eat chicken and deciding whether to have it as deep fried and greasy chicken wings or stir-fried with veggies. You always have a better choice to make.There are so many social media influencers, fitness and health bloggers that manifest a healthy lifestyle and motivate their viewers to start a healthy routine. They post about diet recipes, workout routines and general information related to health and fitness. Most of all many of them post about their transformation journies that help the viewers to relate to them and get influenced by their content.

So the bottom line is that we can't really consider social media as either boon or bane. But we can surely control the way it impacts our mental and physical health. For a start let's stop spending hours scrolling through the content that makes us feel bad about ourselves and follow people who influence and motivate us to be comfortable with ourselves.