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Pin This, Not That: A Bizarre Nugget of Pinterest

Posted: February 9th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Social Media | 1 Comment »

Clearly Pinterest has gotten its due hype lately, and the data my company has discovered has added to such coverage. Pinterest is on a tear! While I’m happy for them, I do find it necessary to call out a strange little nugget of the site that causes me huge concern. There’s a trend of “Thinso” or “Thinspiration” boards that seem to glorify unrealistic body images and I think it’s a negative thing for the Pinterest users.

Back in the days of Xanga and Live Journal, “Pro-Ana” or Pro-Anorexia sites sprung up around the internet. On these kinds of sites, people with eating disorders wouldn’t gather for support or treatment, but rather, to encourage each other to pursue a lifestyle of starvation by posting pictures of skeletal models and odd motivational statements to discourage eating. It wasn’t good.

Being that fitness is one of the categories of boards and people I searched for to get started on Pinterest, I definitely found some weird stuff and it has me concerned. I love the visual posts showing instructions of exercise moves and pictures of healthy recipes. Those are actions you can take toward a heathy lifestyle or even a goal of losing a few pounds. But just staring at a skeletal, photoshopped picture of a model is anything but inspiring – it’s defeating and most of all is unhealthy and unrealistic.

Luckily I’ve seen the community policing itself. I’ve seen people posting on those hashtags asking people to stop with those kinds of images. I hope people continue to police it and continue to realize that this is a negative thing. Pinterest seems to be so popular among young women and that also is the demographic that can be more prone to eating disorders. We need to watch out for each other.

National Eating Disorders Awareness Week is February 26-March 3. There’s no time like the present to be self-aware of how the images we surround ourselves with online influence how we feel about ourselves. I love nutrition and health, and I think we need more of that and less of these bizarre, fake pictures. I encourage us all to surround ourselves and our fellow pinners with positivity – visuals of actions we can take towards healthy lifestyles (recipes, workouts) rather than self-defeating unrealistic photos of models.


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JennyAvventura 5 pts

Fantastic post. I agree with you wholeheartedly.