In this instructional video, Victoria S. Dorsano, a health‑and‑fitness professional, explains why constantly seeing peak‑fitness and body‑composition content on Instagram can distort body image and mental wellbeing. She describes her personal frustration with the platform’s echo chamber of ripped bodies and explains how this skewed feed undermines realistic expectations of health. Dorsano then walks viewers through the concrete steps to modify Instagram’s content‑preference settings: accessing the Settings menu, selecting “Content Preferences,” and editing the algorithm’s tags to reduce fitness‑focused posts and increase topics such as nutrition science, leadership, joyful content, and behavior science. She emphasizes the positive mental shift she experienced after making these changes and encourages others to customize their feeds for a healthier, more balanced online experience.
Chapters
So because I am in the health and fitness space, my account on Instagram and TikTok and most social accounts is just constantly full of other health and fitness folks, which to a degree I appreciate, but there's also a point at which I am so tired of being in this echo chamber of health and fitness content, and in particular seeing, um, women's bodies in body composition, recomposition, fat loss tips, all this stuff. And I get it. I understand that I share some of this information too, but I don't want to be seeing super ripped people all of the time, um, because that is not real life. That is not what people look like normally all the time. And I don't want my reality to be skewed into this vision of what Instagram wants my brain to think that normal looks like, right? Like, that's not healthy for me, and I don't think that's healthy for anybody because what we're seeing is somebody's like peak fitness, not their peak health, but their peak fitness. And that's just not something I'm interested in seeing every single day and having that shape my reality. So it just doesn't make me happy. It doesn't make me feel good about my body and my own health and my own fitness journey. So I want to advocate for people who are maybe in that boat. If they are, you know, maybe felt inspired at some point by seeing that content, but now they're like, wow, I just— I'm constantly seeing them and seeing me and seeing this big difference, and it's just mis— it's skewing my, my reality. Um, you can actually change your settings on Instagram, at least. I— you could probably do it on other platforms, but I just went ahead and did this, and it has been so lovely. So you can actually go to your Instagram settings and change what you want Instagram to show you and what you want it to not show you. And that in itself has been such a refreshing, like, breath of fresh air and something I advocate for many people to do. So check it out. I will do a quick little screen recording of how to do that here in a sec. All right, so what you'll do is you will go to your settings in your Instagram account, and then I believe you go to— is Content preferences. And then what you can do is go to your algorithm here at the top and you can change what you want to see. So for me personally, I've again been seeing so much fitness and body composition and fat loss and different things like that, which at points in time I appreciate. It's great, but I just— Just too much on my channel right now. It's just consuming. So I'm seeing less of that. That's what I put in my tags. And I wanna see more about good nutrition science, leadership, joyful content, behavior science, um, things like that. So that's what I'm adding in here. And, uh, you can do that too. So hopefully that helps.
