In the News

Two things in the news over the last week you may have read about.

The Fat Shaming PT and Instagram banning the advertising of content that “makes a miraculous claim about certain diet or weight loss products, and is linked to a commercial offer such as a discount code”.

Thankfully the general reaction from most people demonstrates the overriding belief withing the fitness industry that fat shaming isn’t ok.  Most fitness professionals are both welcoming and understanding to people from all walks of life, backgrounds and whatever their previous experience of fitness and nutrition may be.  You could argue this should be a given- let’s be real people who need help with exercise and food are the PTs ideal clients right?  Therefore it stands to reason that understanding the obstacles (be it medical, mindset or education based) involved when creating healthy habits and understanding their effect and how to overcome them should be a key skill for any fit pro.  Of course there are some people who fail to see this.  These people are known as dicks and the less airtime or exposure they are given the better in my opinion.

The banning of the advertising of diet ‘miracles’ is an undoubtedly positive thing.

As a fitness professional you can look at these paid ads by minor celebrities with no fitness qualifications and dismiss them as ridiculous.

But if you think you have wright to lose and see something that claims it will help you do this with minimal work or effort the chances are you’ll be tempted.  The fact they are advertised by people you may know add strength to the claim.

The cold truth is given the choice to listen to a semi famous person you’ve heard of tell you drinking this tea every morning will help you lose weight will often win out over that unknown PT on your instagram feed telling you that you’ll actually have to take some bog standard boring action and change your habits.  That costs less but will take longer and seems a bit like hard work and we are all pretty used to being able buy anything we want and get it the next day.

When these products are given less exposure people will have to go and look for them more actively – and if your willing to actively research a solution to your problem you’re more likely to be willing to  actually work to fix it, which means you’re more likely to actually find a healthy sustainable solution.

This week has shown there are many issues within the fitness industry but also that there are positive moves being made all the time to remove some of the bullshit.



Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s