Marketing of the Body: A Linguistic Analysis of Weight-Loss Influencers on Instagram
“Am I skinny fat, midsize, or chubby thick? And how can I become a skinny legend like her?”
Course Title: ANTH/LING 4800-001: Language and Culture, Spring 2025
Nominator: Prof Velda Khoo
As an app that emphasizes photos and videos to convey information, Instagram has allowed users to create and consume ideas through visual means. Over the years, it has solidified into a major network of communication and identity formation, influencing ideas across cultures and reaching people from all different walks of life. With Instagram’s continued development of its business arm, earning a profit as an “Instagram Influencer” has also become easier as users can now directly profit from their audiences. It thus comes as no surprise that “fitness” and “weight loss” gurus flock to the app to capitalize on these opportunities.
My online ethnography project seeks to study the Instagram fitness community in order to identify what makes up “health and fitness culture. I focus on interactional patterns between community leaders (high follower count influencers) and members (followers and commenters) and discuss main strategies of engagement: (1) the use of visual aids as means of “proving” expertise and group membership; (2) hashtag use to boost visibility and access for these influencers; (3) specific jargon to further prove community membership and to promote specific products or health ideologies; and (4) Instagram-specific marketing strategies that allow these influencers to directly profit.
Screenshot from posts on Instagram under hashtag #weightlossjourney
When it comes to proving one’s status as a “weight loss influencer,” the repeated template of the “before and after photo” is extremely significant especially within a visual medium like Instagram. Across thousands of posts, influencers use these photos strategically to gain credibility by demonstrating their apparent expertise on health and fitness as people who have “succeeded” in transforming their bodies. These images also serve another important function: marketing and profit gain. As you can see in the screenshot above, many influencers game the algorithm by using revealing, eye-catching before-and-after images to farm interaction and view counts and increase pay margins from Instagram and sponsors. Hashtags like #weightlosstransformation are paired with these weight loss posts to further grab attention.
To further solidify one’s position within the Instagram fitness sphere, influencers will frequently use jargon to perpetuate their original “brands” of fitness. These include “technical” terms like skinny fat, shredz, 30/30/30 method, etc that usually allude to pseudoscience information that are difficult to find elsewhere online. The jargon therefore work to reinforce follower loyalty in the influencer’s personal circle/community as users would have to consume more content or buy more merchandise to fully access these influencer fitness plans. Because of the interaction-based business model of Instagram, the more devoted attention and followers influencers can gather, the more money they can earn. Creating tight knit communities directly impacts the profitability of their online brand.
Through my analysis, I reveal the exploitative, repetitive strategies employed by community leaders in the Instagram health and fitness space, and also discuss these practices in the context of harmful media portrayal of overweight people online. What it means to be “healthy” cannot be quantified and generalized across populations, as bodies and fitness differ significantly from person to person. However, treating fitness as an individual journey shaped by multiple social and biological factors contradicts the influencer’s neoliberal logic of self-improvement. When the name of the game is attracting the precious seconds of attention, why not play upon the already established stereotypes of health and fitness? These influencers therefore continue to perpetuate and uphold the same low-body fat, high-muscle mass body images accompanied by excessive workout routines and diets popularized by mainstream media, despite their outdated and unrealistic nature. These practices are also significantly harmful to Instagram’s user base that includes impressionable children and teenagers. When personal opinionated beliefs and products are packaged as “true” fitness and health techniques and marketed alongside images of unrealistic bodies as a way to make money, these influencers instill within their audiences potentially dangerous ideas of what a healthy and beautiful body should look like.
When it comes to health and fitness, for-profit industries seem to always weasel their way in, shielding fact in favor of an easily profitable fiction. Even as Instagram allows users to easily connect, build, and interact with communities gathered around similar information and beliefs, what has ended up defining online “health and fitness culture” are fitness influencers using templatic language to sell “healthy” ideas and products to susceptible followers who fall into their niche echo chambers.
Screenshot of fitness influencers “tips” for weight loss; note all the information is in the caption in order to boost the amount of watches per video
Screenshot from fitness influencer that directly links her “fitness guide” stating all it takes is 3 months to lose a significant amount of weight, a potentially dangerous approach to weightloss
