They’re a set of duel tipped markers presented in a neat little case with a handle. In the car on the way home she said,

‘I cannot believe I have these markers. I am so happy’

At home, she coloured and drew all day.

I just wanted to remind you to never not be impressed with new stationary. If you’re having a bad day, maybe a new set of markers is what’s holding you back.

Now, imagine if someone came along and said to my 5 year old, using markers isn’t real art.

Aside from wanting to punch them in the face, you’d probably say don’t be ridiculous.

So let’s scale this up into a popular wellness troupe thats doing the rounds at the minute. It’s a classic, where we tell people their favourite way to exercise isn’t good enough.

This comes in many formats.

‘walking isn’t exercise.’

‘only heavy lifting counts’ etc etc

Pilates Isn’t Strength Training

Now, I’ve covered the ‘that’s not strength training’ statement before, so read below if you need to catch up. But today, lets zoom in on Pilates and why these tit for tat gatekeepers piss me off so much.

Debates about what qualifies as strength training often overlook a few things…

• Who wants to get strong? Is it Gary the 25 year old powerlifter? Or Susan the 66 year old grandmother? Or is it Tim the 35 year old with chronic fatigue and hypermobility syndrome?

• What do they need to be strong for? Powerlifting comp? Gardening? Keeping up with the grand kids? Get out of bed in the morning? Support their own body weight on mobility aids?

• What skills do they need? Straight line maximal force? Multiplanar? More awareness of their body in space?

It makes you wonder how anyone with a fitness qualification and an online platform got that way without ever having to consider that not every single person has the same goals or body.

Motor Skill Development

what shapes this conversation even further is research on motor skill development.

Gary the powerlifter will be interested in traditional resistance training with heavy loads, he wants maximal force production and muscle gains. Bro lifts for the win.

However, Susan or Tim might be looking for something that emphasises motor control, balance, proprioception, movement quality and coordination. All of which are forms of neuromuscular skill development and these are real strength adaptations. Pilates might be their perfect pairing.

Exercise Adherence

The arguement between pilates as strength training versus pilates as not strength training is genuinely unproductive. Research on exercise adherence consistently shows that divisive messaging can be a barrier to taking part. When people feel their chosen exercise is dismissed, adherence declines significantly which is totally not cool.

This is also really important for our chronic pain girly pops as research on exercise adherence in chronic pain populations shows that exercise identity (the extent to which individuals view themselves as exercisers) and confidence in managing their own fitness are key when it comes to consistency. In case it wasn’t clear, we need people to be consistent.

Given that most adults fail to meet exercise recommendations, gatekeeping fitness categories serves no population health purpose so get in the bin.

WHAT MATTERS

An individual doing Pilates is developing neuromuscular strength through motor control and coordinated muscle activation.

An individual lifting heavy is developing maximal force production and muscle hypertrophy.

For the vast majority of sedentary adults not meeting guidelines, this distinction is tomato, tomatoe.

What matters is whether someone engages in consistent, challenging exercise.

The research on exercise snacking, home based workouts and low dose training programs shows that short bouts of physical activity produce consistent health improvements.

Most of the above pieces of research don’t even use heavy weights. they depend on consistency and progressive challenge relative to individual starting fitness.

If you’d like to start exercising at home and you don’t know where to start, how about doing some ‘that’s not strength training’ with me in my fitness community? Consistency is what we do best.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too.

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Member’s of the public are then invited to try the expensive sacred water, their reactions recorded. (Watch the skit here.)

At first, you might watch the video and be inclined to label these people completely unhinged as they declare they can taste ‘hints of hibiscus and honey’. You might even think you’d NEVER fall for such a thing. That you cannot be duped by price tag and labels.

But this is human psychology at work, something we are all capable of falling for and a near perfect anatomy of how the wellness industry gets you to hand over your hard earned cash. It’s worth delving into this brain mechanism fully because these people are not stupid for thinking the water tastes incredible, its simple neurology and it is how we are exploited by misinformation every day.

Plus we get to talk about fallacies and you know I love that. FALLACY. Not phallus. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Fallacy Number One: Price Quality Heuristic or ‘Expensive Means Better’.

We tend to treat price as a stand in for quality whenever we can’t actually assess quality for ourselves. With most wellness products that we see online, we can’t always assess the quality straight up so a signal our brain relies on is, ‘what does it cost?’.

The most cited (and interesting) study that demonstrates this is Plassmann et al 2008. The study gave people the same wine at different labelled prices while scanning their brains. When the label said the wine was more expensive, people rated it as tastier, AND, their medial orbitofrontal cortex (sounds made up lol), the brain region which tracks experienced pleasured, showed higher activity.

Yes, pleasure generated in real time by the price tag. welp.

This frames the hose pipe water entierely. That guy wasn’t lying about tasting hibiscus or honey. Potentially these are flavours that he associates with higher price tags. His brain built those flavours with the context, $12 and ‘sacred’, being filmed etc.

Fallacy Number Two: Anecdotal Fallacy or Appeal to Personal Experience

This is a hard pill to swallow. I made a post about how collagen supplements can’t do what is sometimes advertised, and someone shared my post slagging me off. Their main argument was that they felt better instantly, as soon as they started taking it. I also get this alot when I talk about lymphatic drainage massage or fascia release.

There’s a reason why witness testimonials are considered the lowest form of evidence in court, it is because humans are incredibly unreliable.

We can’t treat first hand sensory experience as a gold standard of proof. Taste like other experiences, is partly about perception. It's reconstructed in real time from expectation, framing, social context, and price.

In a much cited demonstration from Bordeaux, wine experts tasting an ordinary white wine that had secretly been dyed red described it using red wine language: dark fruit, full, tannin etc. Their expertise didn't protect them, if anything they were just able to bullshit more confidentally.

Fallacy Number 3: Appeal to Nature or Natural Means Safer, Healthier and Better

Once you’re paying premium prices, the next fallacy using waiting for you is the appeal to nature. If it’s natural, plant based ancient or just like your ancestors ate, we assume its automatically better than synthetic or modern alternatives.

It's an old bias (arsenic, hemlock and nightshade would like a word) but it has enormous commercial pull.

Behavioural scientists writing on this note that we tend to treat ‘natural’ as an automatic cue for ‘safe’, a sense of security that isn't actually earned when we're buying foods, cosmetics or supplements with long lists of unfamiliar ingredients.

It's also why supplements marketed as natural or ancient can charge more and face less regulatory scrutiny than a pharmaceutical doing the same job with far better evidence behind it.

Fallacy Number 4: The Health Halo

Related to above and just as sneaky. Once a product has earned a positive sounding attribute like organic, plant based, natural, traditional, low fat, artisan etc, we just assume the rest of it is virtuous without checking. The term health halo was coined by Chandon and Wansink and it was first documented in fast food labelling. They found that people consistently under estimated the calorie content on a main dish when the food outlet was labelled as healthy (subway) as opposed to when it was not (Mcdonalds).

Apply this same logic to wellness marketing and you will soon realise how easy it is to misjudge products or supplements based on a few buzz words.

Fallacy Number 5: Appeal to Authority and now, Social Proof

The final layer to unpick is, who is telling you this?

Appeal to authority has morphed a little bit in the wellness industry. On the one hand we have ‘drs’ who are not in the correct lane but trusted because or their credentials and on the other, it is becoming increasingly trendy to reject credentials and be someone who ‘did their own research’ or ‘cured their illness naturally’. The latter feeling more genuine and authentic because they sit outside ‘the system’ and ‘big pharma’, incorruptible and trustworthy. Social proof. This means it’s not just a celeb endorsement we need to watch out for. Literally anyone can grow a social platform and delude you.

Researchers studying this space describe a distinct class of wellness influencers who dispense health advice as part of their personal brand, for whom a lack of professional training often functions as a source of authority rather than a gap, letting them position themselves as relatable and uncorrupted by institutions people no longer fully trust.

Social proof can also work on the basis of feeling similarity with the person selling. Even hair colour. So imagine how powerful it becomes when you’re a busy mum, and that person is a busy mum, and they have the same condition as you, and maybe they also have brown hair like you….nuts right?

Beyond The Comedy Skit

While it’s difficult not to mock the people who tasted hibiscus or said it was the best water they’d ever tasted, we need to remember that it could be any of us. Maybe it already has been us.

These are not failures of intelligence or critical thinking, it’s how perception and trust work. Humans love storytelling, it is how we connect with others. The wellness industry has become scaringly good at taking advantage of our psychology in the current social and political landscapes we exist in, tying it up into a neat little story.

So, as always stay safe out there. Big wellness is wanking, I mean, watching. A cheat sheet of these fallacies is available in my fitness community for a quick reference guide.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too. As always, these posts are for informational purposes only and do not constitute individual medical advice.

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Plassmann H, O'Doherty J, Shiv B, Rangel A. Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Jan 22;105(3):1050-4. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0706929105. Epub 2008 Jan 14. PMID: 18195362; PMCID: PMC2242704.

Morrot, Gil & Brochet, Frédéric & Dubourdieu, Denis. (2001). The Color of Odors. Brain and language. 79. 309-20. 10.1006/brln.2001.2493.

Pierre Chandon, Brian Wansink, The Biasing Health Halos of Fast-Food Restaurant Health Claims: Lower Calorie Estimates and Higher Side-Dish Consumption Intentions, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 34, Issue 3, October 2007, Pages 301–314

O'Brien G, Ganjigunta R, Dhillon PS. Wellness Influencer Responses to COVID-19 Vaccines on Social Media: A Longitudinal Observational Study. J Med Internet Res. 2024 Nov 27;26:e56651. doi: 10.2196/56651. PMID: 39602782; PMCID: PMC11635329.

Deleniv, S., Ariely, D., & Peters, K. "Natural Is Better: How the Appeal to Nature Fallacy Derails Public Health." Behavioral Scientist.

This 2026 paper wants us to stop assuming that.

Instead, we need to think of the wellness industry in the same way we do tobacco, alcohol or even oil industries.

Commercial incentives, political lobbying and real capacity to cause harm.

The Big Wellness Playbook

The athors of this paper lay out the specific tactics that the wellness industry uses and then they mapped this disturbingly neatly on top of the same strategies that tobacoo/alcohol/oil companies use.

• Empowerment rhetoric: selling products as taking control of your health, which conveniently reframes any call for regulation as an attack on your personal freedom and experience.

• Fear based (FUD) marketing: capitalising on anxiety and distrust and painting scientists and other professionals as untrustworthy or ideologically motivated. (COVID conspiracy content that wearing a mask causes ‘reactivation’ of the COVID-19 virus, as well as providing vehicles to promote the marketing of unproven supplements is the paper’s go to example).

• Fake credibility: influencers stacking credentials or lived experience to sound authoritative without actual evidence. The paper’s example is Tim Spector’s Instagram account which has ‘MSC FRCP MD FRSB OBE’ plastered after his name.

• Manufactured evidence: publishing in predatory journals to create a paper trail of proof. Predatory journals mimic established brands while lacking sufficient peer review and publication standards and they are very much real.

• Scienceploitation: borrowing real scientific vocabulary. The paper links to a substack post in which wellness entrepreneurs suggest their alternative (and untested) product harnesses ‘bioenergetic harmony,’ as a solution to ‘non native electromagnetic frequency distortion’ it might sound legitimate while meaning nothing.

• Lobbying against regulation: trade bodies positioning themselves as public health defenders while fighting labelling and safety rules.

• Suppressed cure narratives: ‘Big Pharma is hiding the real cure,’ a classic distrust generating move.

How are we here?

The paper is careful not to blame individuals. People turn to wellness because of real, legitimate failures: underdiagnosed conditions (perimenopause, endometriosis get named specifically), poor access to care, dismissive medical experiences, chronic pain nobody can help with.

The wellness industry didn’t contribute to our failing systems but it did identify it, exploit it and monetise it, offering the feeling of control rather than the substance of better care.

In the US, UK, and EU, wellness products are barely regulated because they're not classified as medical products. In the US specifically a 1994 law (DSHEA) that loosened supplement regulation was pushed through partly by industry money because one of its own Senate sponsors was financially backed by a supplement company. So bad.

Companies can legally slap ‘not evaluated by the FDA’ on a bottle and still imply the product does something or has scientific backing.

The MAHA connection

This is where it gets political. The paper argues wellness logic has now been absorbed directly into US health policy via the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ movement (wellness for fascists) led by RFK Jr. (himself flagged in 2021 as a top anti vaccine influencer).

MAHA blames food dyes and toxins and pushes individual lifestyle fixes, while sidestepping structural issues like poverty, food access, and healthcare infrastructure and it's become entangled with right wing politics, including figures actively steering tax free health savings dollars toward unproven products like cold plunges and collagen. fuck.

What they're calling for

The researchers' asks are unglamorous but correct: proper regulatory oversight of health claims, so brands can't say whatever they like about your hormones or supplements.

Demonetising harmful health misinformation online, so the algorithm stops rewarding whoever shouts ‘toxins; the loudest.

And real structural investment in healthcare, so people stop being funnelled toward wellness because the systems that are supposed to be in place let them down.

I have to believe we can do better

There are some real forces for good on social media, but with algorithms continuously rewarding and pushing misinformation faster and further than evidence based content, we really are fighting an up hill battle.

With that said, I have to believe that it can change because I don’t want to give up. So I’ll continue to highlight the misinformation and I’ll continue to make evidence based resources for my fitness community.

Until then, stay safe out there. Big wellness is wanking, I mean, watching.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too. As always, these posts are for informational purposes only and do not constitute individual medical advice.

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KARREMAN, N., ZENONE, M., MAANI, N. and HAWKINS, B. (2026), The Political Economy of Wellness: Commercial Determinants of a Burgeoning Industry. Milbank Quarterly., 104: 361-385. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0009.70088

On one hand, the representation and awareness of women & AFAB’s midlife health is great to see. The airtime is most definitely needed.

Unfortunately, the majority of the content is widely inaccurate, causing more harm than good.

The scale of menopause content online has exploded, but as we all know by now, popularity and accuracy are not the same thing. The majority of what has gone viral isn’t evidence based.

When researchers looked at the most visible HRT related content across Facebook, Google, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube in the UK, they found that 67.2% of all claims fell outside established clinical guidelines from the British National Formulary and NICE. Disturbing.

That’s roughly 2 out of every 3 pieces of content you see online about HRT directly contradicting clinical guidance.

Someone’s financial gain, is your red flag

Of the 180 HRT related recommendations examined across major social media platforms, 139 (77.2%) were associated with a conflict of interest, with 117 of these conflicts being directly or indirectly related to menopause through provision of private practice, pharmaceutical industry funding or retail products marketed at menopause.

This would suggest (to no one’s surprise) that the information your are seeing is designed to sell you something rather than help you make informed decisions.

Tiktoks version of ‘awareness’

Tiktok has become the go to classroom for alot of people, with many people searching on Tiktok before even going to google.

A review of 155 menopause videos, with a combined 9.42 million plays, found:

• Only 8.4% discussed HRT which is the treatment with the strongest clinical backing for most symptoms.

• 29.7% promoted ‘natural’ remedies like castor oil and Moringa, which don’t have robust evidence behind them for menopause symptoms.

• 92.9% included no citation to a scientific source whatsoever.

• 9% were suspected to be AI-generated, some apparently using real physicians’ likenesses without consent.

• 24.5% contained explicit promotional content designed to sell a product.

When these videos were scored on DISCERN, a standard tool for rating the reliability of health information, the average came out at 11.50 out of 25.

Professional sounding platforms are not much better

If your instinct is now saying ‘I should google this instead’, the research isn’t much kinder to websites.

Public health information is supposed to be written at roughly an 8th grade (year 9 to us UK folks) reading level so that most people can actually use it. When the top HRT websites were assessed, the average reading level came out at grade 12 which is considered college/university level. Only 58% scored good to excellent for information quality and 17% scored poor or very poor.

So you’re either faced with information that’s totally problematic or hard to understand. Joy.

Let’s not spiral

Before we totally spiral ourselves into a panic, let’s get better at reading the room. Here’s a few things that are worth remembering before you let an unhinged 30 second video from a random influencer shape your health decisions:

Follow the money. Who benefits from you taking this advice? Sure it’s nice if people get paid for their content but is there a supplement link in bio? A private clinic being plugged? A ‘code AMY10’ situation?

What are the sources? Nearly 93% of Tiktok menopause content had no citations. If there is a citation, go check it out. I have seen people cite studies that have nothing to do with the thing they are saying just to have some credibility. Even if you’re not a research reader, look at the abstract, does it match what they’re saying?

Is this a healthcare professional? Just because someone is dressed like a doctor does not mean they know what they’re talking about. It’s probably ai - these videos using medical professionals likeness are already out there. Who is this person? What do they do?

Is ‘natural’ being promoted without evidence? While natural products may feel safer intuitively, the research does not support the superiority of 'natural menopause treatments. Content heavily promoting unproven remedies like castor oil or specific herbal supplements usually minimise HRT or dismiss it altogether. Appealing to natural solutions is a fallacy, just because something is natural doesn’t mean it is good, right or healthy. Or that ‘unnatural’ things are bad.

What does the content refuse to say? Good information on HRT explains what it can treat (hot flushes, night sweats, vaginal dryness, low mood, low libido with testosterone) and what it can't or shouldn't be sold as. It’s not a cure all, an anti ageing treatment or a disease prevention miracle. If a piece of content is only telling you the upside or the horror story, it’s not helpful.

Is there room for difference? Menopause experiences vary hugely, just like menstrual cycles! Anything that says ‘everyone should’ or ‘no one should’ take HRT can be disregarded as prioritising engagement over information.

Here’s What To Do…

Under served areas of women’s health are vulnerable to misinformation online. use what you find online to generate questions, not out right conclusions, and take those questions to someone who can actually look at your history and your symptoms and discuss your options. Don’t buy anything!!

We will be continuing this discussion on menopause & HRT with proper evidence based information in my fitness community - The Snack Pass. Here you can already find useful cheat sheets on all kinds of topics.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too. As always, these posts are for informational purposes only and do not constitute individual medical advice.

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J Gunter, “Addressing the Challenges of Online Misinformation and Unregulated Products in the Clinical Management of Menopause.,” Obstetrics and Gynecology, 2025, doi: 10.1097/AOG.0000000000005989.

M. McCartney, R. Morgan-Young, F. Sullivan, D. J. Murphy, J. Albulushi, and J. Larkin, “Does online information about hormone replacement therapy (or menopause hormone therapy) reflect indications from the British National Formulary and guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence: a cross-sectional study of UK media,” BMJ Open, 2025, doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2024-094773.

S. Hanfling, J. L. Ragos, V. Chauhan, S. Reed, K. S. MacRae, and R. Rubin, “(123) Menopause Goes Viral: The Quality and Credibility of TikTok’s Health Content,” The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 2026, doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/jsxmed/qdag063.114.

They are also all fruits.

Therefore all fruits must be red.

Don’t worry, I haven’t lost the plot. This is an example of a false or weak analogy and is an example of how many people argue their points online, particularly when it comes to weight loss/weight gain.

This week, I shared a post about ‘stubborn’ body fat. Here’s my little head below.

Someone shared that their personal decision was to not fight her bodies natural increase in body fat during menopause. Because as long as she’s eating well and moving frequently, she’s happy with her body. Right on.

Of course another social media users (a man lol) replied to her comment.

Comparing changes in body weight in menopause, and any other time, to choosing to get sun burnt is an example of a false analogy and logical fallacy.

A false analogy compares two things that are not actually similar at all in the area being discussed. The argument relies on superficial similarities to draw an invalid conclusion.

As mentioned above, we see this in weight loss/weight gain discussions all the time.

Simple formulas for weight are appealing and people like to use them to prove how lazy everyone is.

Here are a few popular weight loss analogies and why they are totally shit.

Before I continue - dropping in the Snack Pass Research Cheat Sheet Library this week is menopause body changes, your quick guide to why/when those changes happen and your weight inclusive guide to exercise during this time - all based on research papers.

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The Savings Account Analogy

‘Body fat is like a savings account in the bank', if you earn more than you spend, you’ll gain reserves. It’s that simple’.

This is a direct quote from one of the biggest fitness influencers of our time.

This assumes that the body is a static, non living entity.

In reality, spending energy in the form of exercise results in compensatory responses that inhibit significant weight loss.

According to the Laws of Thermodynamics and the CICO (Calories in, Calories out) model, increased exercise induced energy expenditure, in the absence of any compensatory increase in eating, should result in an energy deficit leading to reductions of body mass.

However, since your body is not a bank account and contains complex processes, the negative energy balance is met with metabolic and behavioural compensatory responses.

So if we continue with the analogy that you are a savings account, what actually happens is you resist withdrawal from that account. And these compensatory changes are stronger when you’re in a negative energy balance rather than a positive one.

The deeper you cut into those savings, the harder your body fights back through multiply pathways at the same time.

The Car Fuel Tank Analogy

A car fuel tank is a stock and flow system. Fuel goes in and gets burned at a relatively constant rate depending on how fast or how far you’re driving.

The body is not this simple.

The body is not this simple. Adaptive thermogenesis refers to changes in resting and non resting energy expenditure which are independent from changes in fat free mass. When you restrict calories, or drain your fuel tank, your body doesn't just maintain a steady burn rate. Instead with a negative energy balance, adaptive thermogenesis is directed towards energy sparing.

This is demonstrated in fatigue models during sporting events. A marathon runner, regardless of how far they’ve ran, can usually complete a sprint finish. Your body always saves some energy for emergencies. If their energy levels were simply a stock and flow tank slowly draining as they ran, there would be no energy left for a sprint finish.

Your Body Doesn’t Have Free Will

Weight loss attempts do not always follow a linear fashion or always go as expected even in research settings where the intervention is calculated with precise tools and has input from professionals. Our bodies have a huge biological drive to regain any weight lost to survive. Bank accounts and cars don’t have this drive.

You have free will to avoid getting sunburnt.

Also, the greater the metabolic adaptation during weight loss, the greater the drive to eat. This might help explain the individuall differences in weight loss outcomes to dietary interventions.

No fuel tank or bank account system includes a hormonal feedback loop that simultaneously reduces output and increases demands for input. Your body does both. Without your knowledge or consent.

R. Stubbs and J. Turicchi, “From famine to therapeutic weight loss: Hunger, psychological responses, and energy balance‐related behaviors,” Obesity Reviews, 2021, doi: 10.1111/obr.13191.

K. D. Flack et al., “Altered motivation states for physical activity and ‘appetite’ for movement as compensatory mechanisms limiting the efficacy of exercise training for weight loss,” Frontiers in Psychology, 2023, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1098394.

M. MartínezGómez and B. M. Roberts, “Metabolic Adaptations to Weight Loss: A Brief Review.,” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2021, doi: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000003991.

M. Müller, J. Enderle, and A. Bosy-Westphal, “Changes in Energy Expenditure with Weight Gain and Weight Loss in Humans,” Current Obesity Reports, 2016, doi: 10.1007/s13679-016-0237-4.

C. Martins, J. Roekenes, J. F. Rehfeld, G. Hunter, and B. A. Gower, “Metabolic adaptation is associated with a greater increase in appetite following weight loss: a longitudinal study.,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.ajcnut.2023.10.010.

C. Martins, J. Roekenes, B. Gower, and G. Hunter, “Metabolic adaptation is associated with less weight and fat mass loss in response to low-energy diets,” Nutrition and Metabolism, 2021, doi: 10.1186/s12986-021-00587-8.

T. Knaan et al., “Multilevel metabolic adaptation to exercise training,” Communications Medicine, 2026, doi: 10.1038/s43856-026-01502-z.

E. Çetin, B. Pedersen, and M. Burak, “Paradigm shift in obesity treatment: an extensive review of current pipeline agents,” Turkish Journal of Medical Sciences, 2025, doi: 10.55730/1300-0144.5938.

C. L. Melby, H. L. Paris, R. Sayer, C. Bell, and J. O. Hill, “Increasing Energy Flux to Maintain Diet-Induced Weight Loss,” Nutrients, 2019, doi: 10.3390/nu11102533.

Which is a massive red flag, especially since one her books is called ‘hack your hormones’ and she is regularly featured in news articles talking about how she has ‘biohacked’ her way to a biological age of 20 (she is 47) with tips on how to ‘make your own Ozempic’. YIKES.

But what does this have to do with Collagen?

Taylor has her own supplements company (of course she does) called Willpowders which sells all kinds of expensive, biohacking, clean powders and capsules…including Collagen.

In a recent social media post, Taylor ranted about ‘gobshite doctors and gobshite fitness people’ and ‘dickheads who sit on the ITV sofa and say collagen don’t work’.

Using the fact that she is nearly 50, has 4 kids, is divorced etc etc as proof that collagen supplementation DOES work because she looks how she looks.

What is important to understand is, a sweary rant, 1 million+ followers on social media and being nearly 50 does not qualify as evidence for what you are selling. And calling people who like evidence ‘gobshites’ (I mean, I am a gobshite so she is right there) instead of providing evidence for her claims is absolutely wild.

Way before Taylor called everyone Gobshites, I’d been delving into research papers on Collagen for lots of the clients that have asked me about whether they should buy it or not. And as someone who does not have an affiliation with a supplement company, my answer was quite basic. Don’t overpay. Make sure it’s hydrolysed. It might have some benefit for skin elasticity.

But since Willpowders has a load of other claims on their website about CollyG, so for shits and gigs, shall we dig into those?

CLAIM 1: ‘Loaded with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory amino acids’

This claim is overstated and unsupported by direct clinical evidence for collagen specifically. While collagen does contain amino acids (particularly glycine, proline, and hydroxyproline), the clinical evidence does not demonstrate that collagen supplementation delivers meaningful antioxidant or anti-inflammatory effects through these amino acids.

At the moment, there are no studies that directly measure antioxidant activity after collagen supplementation - probably because it is just an established fact that collagen doesn’t contain the right compounds.

BUT, collagen supplementation combined with vitamin C might explain some anti inflammatory benefit as Vit C is an established antioxidant.

Cost/Benefit Verdict: Not justified for this claim. If you want antioxidant benefits, polyphenol rich foods (berries, tea, dark chocolate) or supplements are more evidence based.

CLAIM 2: ‘Hello glowy skin and strong hair and nails’

This is the most evidence supported claim for collyG, but the effect size is modest and requires 8 to 12 weeks minimum use, plus there are plenty of issues within studies which means we have to take this with a pinch of salt.

Many studies use unique combined formulas, for example, in one study the collagen contained hyaluronic acid, biotin and vitamins C and E. Making it difficult to determine how much of the heavy lifting the collagen was doing.

In a study for hair and nails, the collagen contained taurine, cysteine, methionine, iron and selenium, again making it difficult to judge how much the colly was doing itself.

In the most recent literature review, once studies were held to the highest methodological quality, the effect sizes were alot smaller. Meaning the studies are considered low quality with a high risk of bias, since many studies are funded by the brands themselves, this is not surprising.

Cost/Benefit Verdict: Partially justified, but overstated. Effects are real but modest (13–22% improvement in skin metrics). Results require strict adherence (daily dosing for 8–12+ weeks). You're likely paying a premium for branding and marketing rather than for superior efficacy. Cheaper collagen products likely work similarly if dosed correctly and combined with vitamin C.

CLAIM 3: ‘Decreases signs of ageing, which start to creep in after 30 when natural collagen reduces at 1% a year’

Interestingly, collagen synthesis peaks in the mid 20s and gradually declines from there. It doesn’t suddenly just happen at 30.

Collagen loss is also not linear. it accelerates with UV exposure, oxidative stress, and lifestyle factors like smoking, not simply ageing.

We have some data that wrinkles and skin elasticity can be improved but as mentioned above, this is usually when using combined formulas and the effect sizes are quite small.

We also have no RCT data on whether collagen supplementation prevents future decline vs. temporarily improving existing skin quality, much like a moisturiser works while you’re using it.

Cost/Benefit Verdict: Not justified for this specific claim. Collagen does help with existing aging signs, but the preventive claim and the specific age threshold are not evidence based.

CLAIM 4: ‘Studies show collagen is gut barrier fortifying’

No, studies don’t show this. This claim is NOT supported by clinical evidence in humans. It is based on mechanistic plausibility and animal data, not human RCTs.

Not only did the animal studies not even work that well, they also didn’t use collagen. lol. While we are here, ‘leaky gut’ is also not a validated clinical diagnosis.

Cost/Benefit Verdict: Not justified. This is speculative marketing. There is no clinical evidence that collagen strengthens the gut barrier in humans. If gut health is a concern, probiotics and dietary fibre have stronger evidence.

CLAIM 5: ‘Research highlights collagen aids muscle, tendon and ligament repair’

This claim is partially supported for specific contexts (resistance training + collagen), but the evidence is modest and limited to certain populations.

We have some evidence that taking collagen supps with resistance training might be worthwhile for muscles but we need way better, bigger trials before we can confirm this.

When it comes to tendon and ligament repair, the evidence here is slightly weaker because again, they are mostly animal studies not humans.

Cost/Benefit Verdict: Partially justified, but only in a specific context. If you are doing resistance training 3+ times per week and want to optimise connective tissue adaptation, 15g/day of collagen is supported by some evidence. However, you could achieve similar results with adequate total protein intake + vitamin C + training.

CLAIM 6: ‘May shut down aches and pains’

The evidence here is mixed and has issues mentioned previously. One meta analysis found good results and the other found that collyg didn’t perform better than placebo for osteoarthritis pain. This could potentially be down to earlier studies being industry funded, low quality and very bias.

We also don’t have enough studies in this area to suggest a dose either.

Cost/Benefit Verdict: Weakly justified for OA pain and increasingly uncertain. Early evidence suggested modest pain reduction in knee OA, but a recent rigorous RCT found no difference from placebo. The evidence is contradictory, and long-term benefits are unestablished. For acute or chronic pain outside OA (muscle soreness, general aches), there is no evidence. You're likely paying for hope rather than proven efficacy.

CollyG - Is She Worth It?

Collagen can marginally improve skin appearance if you take it for at least 8–12 weeks with vitamin C. Cheaper products work as well as premium brands - provided the collagen is hydrolysed.

Most other claims (gut health, pain relief, anti aging prevention) lack solid evidence.

Before forking out £££ you should ask yourself: Is a 13–22% (not guaranteed) skin improvement worth it, or would sunscreen, moisturiser and adequate dietary protein achieve the same result for less?

I think my issue with collagen is the influencers influence. Brands market ‘collagen’ as the active ingredient, but the actual clinical benefit often depends on the combination. When you buy a premium collagen supplement with vitamin C, zinc and other ingredients, you're paying for a formulation. Most brands don't clearly isolate which ingredient drives which benefit, making it hard to assess whether you're overpaying for the collagen component specifically versus the synergistic formula. And it might be more cost effective and beneficial to buy something else.

I’m not against people taking collagen whatsoever, but I do not like over inflated claims and ignoring evidence. If that makes me a gobshite then fine.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too.

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REFERENCES

X. Zhang et al., “Structural and functional analysis of a homotrimeric collagen peptide,” Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, 2025, doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2025.1575341.

C. D. Nulty et al., “Hydrolyzed collagen supplementation prior to resistance exercise augments collagen synthesis in a dose-response manner in resistance-trained, middle-aged men.,” American Journal of Physiology. Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2024, doi: 10.1152/ajpendo.00252.2024.

A. Dakhovnik et al., “A collagen amino acid composition supplementation reduces biological age in humans and increases health and lifespan in vivo,” npj Aging, 2025, doi: 10.1038/s41514-025-00280-7.

D. Reilly, L. Kynaston, S. Naseem, E. Proudman, and D. Laceby, “A Clinical Trial Shows Improvement in Skin Collagen, Hydration, Elasticity, Wrinkles, Scalp, and Hair Condition following 12-Week Oral Intake of a Supplement Containing Hydrolysed Collagen,” Dermatology research and practice, 2024, doi: 10.1155/2024/8752787.

A. Trehan, R. Anand, G. Chaudhary, H. Garg, and M. Verma, “Efficacy and Safety of Skin Radiance Collagen on Skin and Hair Matrix: A Placebo-Controlled Clinical Trial in Healthy Human Subjects,” Clinical, Cosmetic and Investigational Dermatology, 2024, doi: 10.2147/CCID.S438642.

P. Markowicz et al., “EFFECTIVENESS OF ORAL COLLAGEN SUPPLEMENTATION IN IMPROVING SKIN ELASTICITY AND HYDRATION: A LITERATURE REVIEW,” International Journal of Innovative Technologies in Social Science, 2026, doi: 10.31435/ijitss.1(49).2026.4852.

A. Perez-Sanchez, E. Burns, V. M. Pérez, E. K. Tantry, S. Prabhu, and R. Katta, “Safety Concerns of Skin, Hair and Nail Supplements in Retail Stores,” Cureus, 2020, doi: 10.7759/cureus.9477.

X. Liu, G. C. Machado, J. Eyles, V. Ravi, and D. J. Hunter, “Dietary supplements for treating osteoarthritis: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2017, doi: 10.1136/bjsports-2016-097333.

R. B. D. Miranda, P. Weimer, and R. Rossi, “Effects of hydrolyzed collagen supplementation on skin aging: a systematic review and meta‐analysis,” International Journal of Dermatology, 2021, doi: 10.1111/ijd.15518.

K. Bischof, A. Moitzi, and D. König, “Impact of collagen peptide supplementation together with long-term resistance training on maximal strength and muscle size in healthy adults – A systematic review and meta-analysis,” Current Issues in Sport Science (CISS), 2024, doi: 10.36950/2024.4ciss002.

F. Rezazadeh, S. Aali, F. Imani, P. Fahimi, and G. Badicu, “Nutritional Support in ACL Rehabilitation: Current Evidence, Sex-Based Gaps, and Future Directions,” Journal of athletic training, 2026, doi: 10.4085/1062-6050-0625.25.

A. D. V. Meza et al., “Injectable Peptides in Sports Medicine: A Structured Narrative Review of Evidence, Safety, and Antidoping Implications.,” JBJS Reviews, 2026, doi: 10.2106/jbjs.rvw.26.00027.

M. Simental-Mendía, D. Ortega-Mata, C. Acosta-Olivo, L. Simental‐Mendía, V. Peña-Martínez, and F. Vilchez-Cavazos, “Effect of collagen supplementation on knee osteoarthritis: an updated systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials.,” Clinical and Experimental Rheumatology, 2024, doi: 10.55563/clinexprheumatol/kflfr5.

V. Yuenyongviwat, C. Anusitviwat, P. Tuntarattanapong, T. Hongnaparak, and K. Iamthanaporn, “Efficacy of combined undenatured type II collagen and hydrolysed collagen supplementation in knee osteoarthritis: a randomised controlled trial,” Scientific Reports, 2025, doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-17505-0.

His post states boldly that ‘Thicker Thighs Save Lives’ so of course, my interest was peaked. Here is his post so you can take a look for yourself.

The study he referenced examined 1,436 men and 1,380 women from Denmark and found that a small thigh circumference was associated with an increased risk of heart disease and premature death in both men and women. There was also a threshold effect, greatly increased risk of premature death occurred below around 60 cm of thigh circumference.

These findings were independent of belly fat, lifestyle, and other cardiovascular risk factors like blood pressure and cholesterol. The researchers concluded that a low thigh circumference seems to be associated with an increased risk of developing heart disease or premature death, possibly because it reflects too little muscle mass in that region.

The study was observational (not a controlled experiment), so it shows association but not causation. It also measured participants only once in 1987-88 and followed them for about 10 years, which means thigh size could have changed over time without being recaptured.

It’s a really cool finding but I was disappointed to see that the study was from 2009, which is practically ancient. I think it’s always really important to have a group of similar studies or a systematic review that all roughly conclude the same thing before we start jumping up and down about something.

Also, I hate the way it always feels like women especially are looking for justification for their body parts or size. Like having juicy thighs is fine even if it isn’t going to save your life.

More Recent Studies

I began the hunt for some more recent studies, to not find a great deal. It seems that we have expanded beyond simple measurements for things, which is a good thing. And having a level of fitness and some muscle mass is a great thing for your health.

But one study did stick out with an unexpected finding.

Juicy Thighs, Not Just Muscly Ones, Are Good

In 2021, some researchers aimed to investigate what type of tissue, adipose (fat) tissue or muscle tissue, actually drives the relationship between thigh circumference and cardiovascular (CV) risk.

The study took all sorts of things into account from age, gender, smoking, blood pressure and total cholesterol.

Thigh circumference was measured directly below the butt cheeks (using the average of both thighs). Body composition, specifically legs fat mass and legs lean mass, was measured using Dual Energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DEXA), a gold standard imaging technique. Faaaancy.

Lower thigh circumference was associated with higher cardiovascular risk classes in multiple statistical models. The association held true whether adjusting for age and sex alone, or further adjusting for BMI and waist to hip ratio (WHR).

Critically, when the researchers examined what composed the thigh circumference, they found that both fat tissue and muscle tissue contributed to thigh circumference independently, but fat tissue had a much stronger effect. Most people had more fatty thighs than muscly ones.

Interesting Finding - Fat Was Good

The study's key insight is that smaller thigh circumference is indeed associated with higher cardiovascular risk, but this association is driven more by inadequate fat tissue than by insufficient muscle mass.

This finding contrasts somewhat with the earlier interpretation that low thigh circumference reflected too little muscle mass. Instead, it suggests that thigh circumference itself, particularly its fat component, may be a marker of overall metabolic health or lean body composition elsewhere in the body.

It’s Really Nice For Instagram Drs To Tell Us Stuff

Doctor Amir Khan is definitely one of the good guys, and he carries significant authority bias (something I do not have), so it’s really great that his overall message was about how the focus of fitness should be strength and how much muscle we carry.

And I agree! But we also don’t have to ignore fat or demonise it. Or justify the fat we have on our body because we also have muscle, or because we are also fit.

And the study that Dr Khan shared doesn’t tell us the full story.

Both of the studies are cross sectional in design meaning it prevents any causal conclusions. And while I love how these studies can make wanky personal trainers shouting ‘calorie deficit’ in your face seem even more obsolete, the findings of both studies should be treated as hypothesis generating to prompt future studies with better designs.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too.

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Then comes the fuck it, what is the point? stage.

If I can’t get to the gym and lift heavy and do it OpTiMaLlY then why even bother??

Do I even know how to exercise without obsessing over something?

The Impossible Balancing Act

I guarantee that anyone you perceive as having a good relationship with exercise is either a man, lol, or a woman or non binary person who has been through all of the above and had a serious stage of doing absolutely nothing.

When I have coaching calls with members of my fitness community, you probably won’t be surprised to learn how many people are stuck in this phase currently.

You know exercise is good for you. You know your life will probably get a tinsy bit better if you could do some more of it. Yet you just…don’t.

There are a few little research snippets I like to tell people in this boat to see if we can nudge the needle towards moving just a little.

Start Small

Ridiculously small. I mean it. Not even a 30 minute workout. Make it 15-20. Once per week.

Even a little bit helps alot.

One study on people who did little to no activity found that even a small increase in physical activity (18-24 minutes) was associated with improvements in physical capabilities, quality of life, well being, depression and fatigue.

We also know that vigorous cardio is great in small amounts but I like to save this conversation for another day, if you’re currently doing nothing, lets not even talk about getting overstimulated by cardio.

Walking IS exercise

Moderate intensity aerobic exercise (like a fucking brisk walk) is really effective. It can improve sleep quality and daytime function and can consistently improve VO2 max and resting heartrate. Despite wellness wankers telling you walking isn’t exercise, it can be a great way to stay consistent.

Seeing walking as the exercise box ticked for a day is a great way to reframe your brain that all movement counts.

Try an Exercise Snack

Exercise has an accumulative effect. Meaning you can do shorter bursts throughout the day and the benefits will all add up.

Breaking up a workout into smaller chunks can be easier to stick with, more time efficient and more flexible than doing one long workout. I am constantly doing one set of push ups at random times during the day. Or I’ll work on some deep squat mobility for a couple of minutes while I’m between tasks.

Social Support Is Key

You think you can do this lone wolf style but it just works better if you have support.

In studies, effect sizes were larger when interventions used centre based exercise, were delivered in groups and used intense contact between interventionists and participants.

Research consistently shows people may be more motivated when influenced by clinicians, family or friends, keeping costs low and enjoyment high.

This builds self efficacy, leading to more exercise and other health behaviours. A happy spiral.

When I set up my fitness community, I knew the super power would be the members and how they support eachother. That’s why the group chats were set up and after 3 years, I am still blown away by how members respond to others.

Stop Being a Dick Head (to Yourself)

Cognitive restructuring of negative and self defeating attitudes and misconceptions increase self efficacy and self management skills. In other words, understanding how our brains work, the fact we are not lazy and that health is more than what we can see are all proven ways to increase exercise. Also makes us less of a dick to ourselves and others.

It’s ok not to feel motivated constantly. Motivation is abit of a myth. No one is lazy and people have real barriers in the way of getting started. I spoke in detail about this in the procrastination webinar, the replay of which you can find in the Snack Pass members hub.

Getting Started

If you want a place to start for FREE, you can find my playlist of 5 minute, progressive, no bullshit, fun exercise snacks over on YouTube. Don’t forget to subscribe over there so you always know when a new workout becomes available.

There’s absolutely no diet culture, no equipment needed and plenty of ways to modify so you can find something that works!

5 Minute Body Snacks

Ready for the full shabang? My fitness community combines everything mentioned above in way more detail. Full support from a community of like minded wierdos, shorter exercise snacks, coaching materials to get your head around it all etc.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too.

join The Snack Pass

It’s nearly two years ago that I lost a friend from cancer. She was young, hilarious, driven, bright and I found a space in her that I hadn’t had in a very long time.

She basically changed who I am as a person and my career. I would not have had the confidence to do things differently if it hadn’t been for her, and it retrospect, I was still pretty stuck in my fitness wanky ways until I met her.

This might all sound very dramatic, but it’s true. And what I also know to be true is that I have always had moments where I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. Moments where I think I should just quit everything and live a life away from social media. Shut down my business etc.

But you have certain people around you who spin you around. Who don’t just restore you back to where you were but somehow inject more. You feel more determined. More motivated. You can’t believe you ever felt like quitting.

Well I lost the person that was the best at that. It was her skillset. It’s why she was an incredible personal trainer and coach. It’s why her clients, her friends, her family adored her.

And although I have others and parts of myself that can help spin me around, it’s now just a simple turn. I’m pointing the right way but it feels flat.

I didn’t really mean for this to turn into a long piece about grief, but the context is important and when I started writing it just started to flow. Writing is good like that. Revealing.

Sometimes when you feel stuck, it’s good to look back at how far you’ve come and remember where you’re heading. So with that said,

Hi, I’m Amy, an Ex Fitness Wanker.

If you’re new here, hi. You’ve found the corner of the internet where we are tired of

• Health & fitness messaging which only focuses on weight loss

• Wellness wankers selling you shit using fear, uncertainty & doubt

• Influencers doing literally anything to get your attention to promote overconsumption & ‘trends’

I’m here to help you avoid wellness misinformation and make health & fitness feel SIMPLE. So you can spend less time online trawling through content and more time doing the things that actually matter.

I became a personal trainer back in 2019 after a career as a primary school teacher for one big reason - to help others avoid the wellness burn out that I fell victim to. I mean real burn out too, I had to have 6 weeks off sick from my teaching job.

The ‘I just want to be healthy’ to disordered eating pipeline

I was in my late 20s and all I cared about was losing weight. I used exercise for punishment. I was obsessed with taking photos of my body and comparing them to other photos of my body. Micro scrutinising everything, including food! I was a right knob head.

I was injured all the time, felt uncontrollable around food, depressed, fatigued & always ill so naturally, I crashed and burned.

After a small period of healing, in 2018 I decided to retrain as a personal trainer

2018 - 2020: The strong not skinny era

I loved being a personal trainer who didn’t focus on weight loss. But I was still being abit of a wanker. I was obsessed with new things like how much weight I could lift or how much protein I was eating. Everything had to be ‘optimal’ including how I moved.

I used to pose like a fitness influencer and post the picture with a cringey message like ‘fitness is a mindset’ lol.

Of course non of this could end well.

I was making the classic error, again.

It took the COVID-19 pandemic for me to realise that my new found ‘good relationship’ with exercise was all based around me being able to micro manage it still. It was not sustainable.

I finally ditched my fitness tracker. I spent my time at home during COVID learning more broadly about health, weight stigma & diet culture.

When gyms reopened, I was pregnant with my second child. Everything just felt off. I didn’t know who I was without making fitness my entire personality.

Then I met Lauren

I came across Lauren on Instagram. One of her posts made me feel deeply uncomfortable. Why? Because it went against everything I thought I knew about moving.

She used research to dispel big fitness claims that everyone believes to be true, about popular topics like back pain, lifting form, posture etc. Instead of doubling down on my believes, I wanted to know where she had learnt to find and read this research.

Reading research wasn’t a new concept to me. As an ex teacher, reading pedagogical studies was part and parcel of my qualification. It had just never occurred to me that what most people say about exercise might not have much evidence to back it up. Why would I think otherwise?

Personal training certificates are known to be really basic, so you then rely on finding popular names in the industry to do further learning from. You don’t ask questions about whether they have evidence to back up their claims, why would you? They have authority bias. You assume people with that many followers must be trustworthy and correct at all times.

Unfortunately that’s not the case - even for people who claim to be ‘evidence based’.

Transitioning from in person to online personal training

Lauren had been training people online throughout COVID and with gyms reopening, she had the skill set to continue to do so.

With a new baby, I really wanted more flexibility with my work. Lauren helped me take my business online and hooked me up with Faster, a personal trainer education company. Faster is where I learned to find and read research properly.

Me and Lauren started making content together, and honestly I have never had someone embrace my inner wierdo as much as she did. I would said a voice note with a ridiculous brief and half a day later she would have sent me the most unhinged footage with exactly what I asked for. Many of our reels can still be found easily through her instagram, they’re more buried on mine as I’ve continued to post.

More Babies & Online Classes

I started online training with so much confidence because of Lauren and Faster. For a year or so, I was full of 1:1s.

Then we had baby number 3 on the way and my dad was diagnosed with cancer. I knew that I was going to need even more flexibility with my work moving forward.

So I started doing online classes. With children, my availability was limited. I couldn’t offer anymore 1:1 slots so I felt like my income was being limited. I thought online workout classes offered a great opportunity to work with more than one person - but there was one problem…no one showed up!

Which was incredibly embarrassing because i thought my classes were really good. I was finally starting to enjoy movement again and find confidence and had no one to share it with! SAD

The Unf*ck It Course Was Born

I used some polls on my Instagram stories and found out that people didn’t feel like they were even ready to start exercising. The classes were 30-40 minutes, which felt too long for most people.

The interest was there, people just didn’t feel like they could. Everyone was so burned out from diet culture, they didn’t even feel ready to start. I changed tact and created a beginners coaching program designed to help people repair their relationship with exercise - it sold out within a few days!

People found the group so helpful that I put the materials into a course called ‘The Unf*ck It’ course so that people could access it at anytime (it’s now included with The Snack Pass btw).

A Can of Pregnant Worms

Whilst pregnant with no 3, I started reading more research about pre & postnatal fitness.

This opened up a massive can of worms. The amount of misinformation, fear & doubt spread to pregnant and postpartum folk about their bodies made me so angry.

John Hardy of Faster said I should write a course with what actual evidence says, so I did just that. I wrote a course for personal trainers and I wrote a course for any pregnant person navigating exercise (this is also included in the Snack Pass btw).

Guess who was the first person to buy my Faster course. Yes, Lauren.

Exercise Snacks & The Snack Pass

6 months postpartum with Olivia, I went back to doing classes. She would bob around in her bouncy chair in the corner while I delivered a 15-20 minute class.

When I decided to shorten the length of classes, I wanted to make sure people knew it was still beneficial to work out even for 15-20 minutes. So I started finding research on minimal dose exercise strategies, known affectively in research as an exercise snack.

Because many people couldn’t make the live classes but still wanted to do the workouts, I created an online library of replays and The Snack Pass was born.

Heartbreak in 2024

Lauren’s health declined quite quickly, she had known about her brain tumour for some time and it had been stable. She had gotten her driving license back and started horse riding again, she got married. But suddenly she was experiencing seizures again, lost movement in one side of her body and eventually had surgery to remove her tumour.

I went to visit Lauren post surgery, she felt like she was getting better, determined to horse ride again, cracking jokes about difficulty wiping her arse and all the other iconic shit she was known for. She made an Instagram reel rocking her radiotherapy mask. It just all seemed to happen so fast. She’d put on her stories how things didn’t feel good and I messaged her asking if I could come visit again. I noticed my message had been left unread for a few days. I’d been distracted as the week before, we’d had our pug, Pablo, PTS due to poor health.

Sometimes you just get that gut feeling that something isn’t right. It was a Monday morning, I was on the toilet of all places, and Lauren’s husband Simon came up as calling on my phone. I was in the right place for my stomach to drop. And I shared with Simon that I was on the toilet, because Lauren would have loved that. If you ever got a voice message from Lauren, you knew full well that she was taking a shit whilst doing it.

Adding Spice to the Mix

It was also around this time we realised the severity of my third child’s autism. She has no danger awareness, does not talk and is constantly sensory seeking. Some days I am EXHAUSTED. Some days I don’t know how my brain was supposed to process this all.

I’m Still Here, Just

Despite all the ups & downs, successes & failures, I’m still on a mission to help people avoid misinformation and empower more people to start a fitness journey away from diet culture and wanky wellness crap.

My values are pretty simple.

honesty evidence empowerment humour community connection

If these values align with you, you’re in your 30s, 40s & beyond & you want health & fitness to feel simpler (with nuance), then you’re in the right place.

I know that keeping my fitness community going, showing up as myself online and leading with these values is how I continue to honour my friend, even though showing up sometimes feels hard.

Thanks for reading, Amy x

www.thesnackpass.com

It stings because usually the content I am debunking has thousands of likes with hundreds of comments begging the influencer for their natural hormone guide or whatever bullshit is on offer.

I think the single biggest thing you can do if you’re an advocate against misinformation, is not just support, but absolutely HYPE up any content that’s pushing back against it.

Because although you might be the choir being preached to, think of how many other people have no idea what’s being sold to them.

So with that said, heres 5 completely terrifying facts, from research, about wellness wankers online

1. Fear Based Content Dominates & Outperforms Truth

A critical finding from this study was that fear based health narratives are systematically amplified by social media algorithms. Fear based wellness messages account for 62% of health misinformation posts and generate 2.3 times as many shares and 1.8 times as many comments compared to factual content. This makes me feel less bad about my content, at least it isn’t personal.

But unfortunately this does mean that fearful, sensationalised claims reach far larger audiences than accurate information does. This is because they generate the engagement needed to feed the algo. Misinformation is REWARDED by social media platforms.

2. Non Experts Dominate the Wellness Space

I hate to be this bitch but anyone with ‘certified holistic health coach’ in their bio usually has a page full of absolute bullshit.

Approximately 70% of health misinformation on social media originates from non expert influencers and lay individuals, while medically credentialed sources contribute fewer than 15% of total posts (same study as above). I am technically a lay person on alot of the topics I speak on, but I do have some awesome qualifications and know how to read research properly. Plus, I’m not selling you anything.

This credibility gap is particularly pronounced on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where short form video content thrives. People seeking health information are far more likely to encounter unqualified voices making emotionally charged claims than evidence based guidance from qualified professionals.

3. Emotional Responses Are Deliberate and Consequential

The oldest and best performing marketing tactic is called FUD. This stands for Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.

For wellness wankers, they can use FUD to prey on your anxieties about toxins, aging or declining health. Fuelled further by the fact many people don’t have access to quick and efficient health care systems, or even free healthcare at all.

Exposure to FUD laden wellness messaging triggers measurable mental health consequences. Research found that 36% of students reported experiencing psychological distress specifically due to misinformation dissemination on platforms like Telegram and Instagram during the Covid 19 Pandemic.

More broadly, people exposed to health misinformation on social media report anxiety, feelings of vulnerability and emotional distress. This isn’t just a happy accident that people don’t realise is happening, its an intentional mechanism behind FUD tactics.

4. Specific Health Topics Are Particularly Vulnerable

This study found that mental health and neurodivergence content on TikTok shows misinformation rates as high as 56.9%. Vaccine related content demonstrates how FUD tactics weaponise parental anxiety, with parents' vaccine hesitancy driven by abundant misinformation that deliberately increases fear and uncertainty. Under researched and poorly understood conditions (basically anything you can suffer from if you have ovaries and a womb) are also vulnerable to mass misinformation online.

So What Actually Works Against FUD Wielding Wellness Wankers?

You might be thinking that we could just use FUD for good. Make people fear misinformation instead. Well it doesn’t seem to work that way. One study looking at message testing to counter antivax rhetoric found that providing scientific evidence from government health agencies or medical professionals was more effective that using fear based alternatives. Even when the fear based alternative was trying to encourage a positive behaviour intention.

So the antidote isn’t more fear and emotional appeals, its just clear, transparent, expert backed information which addresses peoples concerns instead of exploiting them.

Protect Yourself (& Others)

One of the biggest shifts for all of our brains is that we need to see our health and wellbeing as collective. We don’t just need to protect ourselves but vulnerable others to. That’s why reposting and sharing content that debunks misinformation is vital, you may already know the information but how many people in your circle do?

It doesn’t matter if you only have 100 followers to share a post to.

You can model that healthy level of scepticism when it comes to claims that trigger strong fear or uncertainty, like when people make relatively normal symptoms sound like a hormone disorder, and recognise that social media algorithms are always going to show you the most engaging content, even when it’s wrong.

I appreciate it is hard to find trusted sources, I am sometimes tagged in posts alongside names of well regarded women in my industry who are actually full of shit. However, they’re seen as being evidence based and leaders of disseminating misinformation. So i do appreciate how hard it is when people are citing research, they seem legit but so many people do not know how to critically appraise a piece of research.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too.

join The Snack Pass - my fitness community is a place where you can send content or ask questions about what you’ve seen online and I will fact check it for you.

A. R. Butt, B. Hussain, F. Ullah, S. Aslam, and R. B. Sohail, “TRUTH, FEAR, AND VIRALITY: A CROSS-PLATFORM CONTENT ANALYSIS OF HEALTH MISINFORMATION NARRATIVES ON SOCIAL MEDIA,” Qualitative Research Journal for Social Studies, Feb. 2025, doi: 10.63878/qrjs969.

M. George, V. Modgil, I. Pearce, and T. Stasinou, “(379) Social Media and Men’s Health: Separating Science From Speculation in Andrology,” Journal of Sexual Medicine, Nov. 2025, doi: 10.1093/jsxmed/qdaf320.374.

F. Amini, A. B. Yazdipour, A. Rashki, R. Sheibani, and M. R. Habibi, “Evaluating the Impact of Social Media News on the Level of Students’ Fear and Anxiety during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Journal of Modern Educational Research, Mar. 2024, doi: 10.53964/jmer.2024002.

S. Kim, J. E. Schiffelbein, I. Imset, and A. Olson, “Countering Antivax Misinformation via Social Media: Message-Testing Randomized Experiment for Human Papillomavirus Vaccination Uptake,” Journal of Medical Internet Research, Feb. 2022, doi: 10.2196/37559.

A. Carter, F. Gracey, J. Moody, A. Ovens, and E. Chatburn, “Quality, reliability and misinformation in mental health and neurodivergence content on social media: a systematic review,” Journal of Social Media Research, Mar. 2026, doi: 10.29329/jsomer.84.

S. Sathianathan, A. M. Ali, and W. W. Chong, “How the General Public Navigates Health Misinformation on Social Media: Qualitative Study of Identification and Response Approaches,” JMIR infodemiology, Jun. 2025, doi: 10.2196/67464.

M. Arif, Z. Qadar, H. Khan, and N. Ansari, “Analyzing the Role of Crisis Communication in Mitigating Polio Vaccine Hesitancy: A Media Perspective on Misinformation and Effective Messaging in Pakistan,” Qlantic Journal of Social Sciences, Jun. 2025, doi: 10.55737/qjss.vi-ii.25347.

Where to even fucking start.

I wrote a few pieces on stress and cortisol a while back and the information still holds up so if you’re interested in the deep dive, start there and come back.

Cortisol Isn’t Bad

Before we have this conversation, It’s really important to understand what normal cortisol levels look like.

The above diagram shows a normal HEALTHY cortisol slope. A healthy cortisol slope follows a distinct daily rhythm: it surges by 50–60% within 30 to 40 minutes of waking, drops rapidly over the next few hours, and steadily declines to a low resting point by bedtime.

The 4 dots on this diagram represent salvia samples taken at 4 points during the day. Now the only way to know if you truly had an unhealthy cortisol curve would be to have salvia samples taken at least 4 times per day, and in most cases you’d want to do this for several days to make sure the slope was consistent.

An unhealthy, ‘flat’ slope fails to drop, signalling chronic stress or exhaustion like in the example below.

There’s also Hyperactive Slope: Cortisol stays elevated above normal ranges throughout the entire 24-hour cycle. And: Hypoactive Slope: Cortisol is abnormally low across the entire day, failing to trigger the necessary morning surge. It’s worth repeating that most people do not have unhealthy cortisol slopes, these are clinical and you’d probably have a diagnosis.

Back To Cardio

The social media claim that high intensity cardio elevates cortisol has a grain of truth but oversimplifies the science.

Yes, high intensity exercise does raise cortisol more than low intensity exercise, that's confirmed in research. However, this is an important distinction:

acute cortisol elevation during and immediately after exercise is a normal, healthy physiological response that is completely different from chronic elevated cortisol, which is what causes stress-related problems.

This study showed that acute cortisol exposure from a single 40 minute bout of high intensity exercise had no negative effects on immune function, while only chronic cortisol exposure dampened immune cell activity.

The Bigger Picture

The bigger picture, which is what actually matters for your health, is that high intensity and low intensity exercise can reduce stress hormone levels over time.

This study found that both moderate intensity interval and continuous aerobic exercise significantly reduced cortisol secretion and HPA axis activity in a group of women. And this one demonstrated that after 8 weeks of moderate intensity aerobic training, cortisol levels decreased substantially in participants with opioid use disorder.

Your Body Might Need Some Stress

An interesting finding from this 2021 study is that vigorous exercise appears to blunt subsequent stress responses, as in, it makes later stress easier to deal with. This dampened HPA reactivity was inversely related to cortisol release, vigorous exercise had the biggest impact compared to moderate and light, moderate had a better impact than light but light still had an impact.

So it seems that any type of exercise gives your body a better chance at handling stress.

Wellness Wankers Have It Wrong

The benefits of vigorous cardio are well established, so swapping high intensity for low intensity based solely on cortisol concerns is really fucking stupid. And the conversation is almost annoyingly pointless because most people do not have chronically elevated cortisol levels.

Remember, the best exercise is the one you’ll do consistently. Temporary cortisol spikes from intense exercise are a normal adaptation which helps you buffer other stress more easily.

Chronic stress induced cortisol elevation is problematic. If you're concerned about cortisol, prioritise sleep, stress management and consistent exercise of any intensity. Also, stop listening to self proclaimed hormone experts.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too.

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If just 10% of my readers on Substack joined my fitness community, it would change my life, so if you do have a few minutes spare, please click that link and check out what is on offer.

T. Luu, L. F. Hach, T. Seremet, K. Leuchte, P. T. Straten, and G. H. Olofsson, “Exercise Duration Modulates Cortisol Release and Chronic Cortisol Exposure Jeopardises T Cell Effector Functions,” Immunology, Aug. 2025, doi: 10.1111/imm.70028.

J. Park, Z. Murlasits, and S. Kim, “The Effect of Aerobic Exercise on Variation of Oxidative Stress, hs-CRP and Cortisol Induced by Sleep Deficiency,” Healthcare, Apr. 2023, doi: 10.3390/healthcare11081201.

D. Merawati, A. Pranoto, and H. Susanto, “Decreased Activity of the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis after Acute Aerobic Exercise in Obese Women,” Natural and Life Sciences Communications, Jul. 2023, doi: 10.12982/nlsc.2023.037.

A. Psarianos et al., “Cortisol and β-Endorphin Responses During a Two-Month Exercise Training Program in Patients with an Opioid Use Disorder and on a Substitution Treatment,” International Journal of Molecular Sciences, May 2025, doi: 10.3390/ijms26115178.

A. Caplin, F. Chen, M. R. Beauchamp, and E. Puterman, “The effects of exercise intensity on the cortisol response to a subsequent acute psychosocial stressor.,” Psychoneuroendocrinology, Jun. 2021, doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2021.105336.

D. Wilczyńska, T. Walczak-Kozłowska, R. Santos-Rocha, R. Laskowski, and A. Szumilewicz, “Stress is not so bad—cortisol level and psychological functioning after 8-week HIIT program during pregnancy: a randomized controlled trial,” Frontiers in Public Health, Jan. 2024, doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1307998.

My rebuttal was short, ignoring hunger isn’t discipline. It is social conditioning. And if you’re someone who is happy to ignore bodily cues, go for it babe. But encouraging others to do the same? Stfu.

I was then reminded of a research paper I glanced upon at the end of last year all about eating breakfast vs skipping breakfast and it’s impact on health, so that’s what we’re going over today.

The Nauseous Morning Club

Now I’m the kind of basic bitch that wakes up starving. I have low blood pressure, I am a terrible morning person and my face feels like a screwed up piece of paper for about 30 minutes after waking. Everyone knows to stay away from me until I’ve had time to unfurl like the crispy little leaf that I am.

My hunger in the morning borders on nauseous. It’s a fine line between being hungry and being sick. I know I’m not alone in this, with many people in the same boat struggling to eat first thing.

On a particularly bad day, I’ve found that fruit juice or smoothie can provide just enough carb to help settle that nauseous feeling, pathing the way for something more substantial.

Team Breakfast

This juicy research paper from 2025 looked at the impact of skipping breakfast on various health outcomes. They reviewed research from the last 15 years and found over all, skipping breakfast disrupts metabolism, impairs glucose control, gut microbiota, altered circadian signalling and systematic inflammation.

Athletic performance and bone health also suffer with reduced morning energy intake.

Whereas regular breakfast eating helps everything to regulate, It’s almost like food is good for maintaining homeostasis. WHO KNEW?

Influencer Math

The idea that holding off from eating for as long as possible will make you lose weight doesn’t even hold up either.

Overall, breakfast consumption highly influences hunger and satiety hormones throughout the day. With studies consistently finding that people who skipped breakfast tended to eat more overall throughout the rest of the day.

In one short term study, skipping breakfast led to initial weight loss but also resulted in increased cholesterol concentrations. So in a short space of time, skipping breakfast was making health outcomes worse despite weight initially going down. Another example of how losing weight is not the same as being healthy.

Chrononutrition

It won’t be long before wellness grifters start throwing the phrase chrononutrition around like it’s so futuristic wellness hack. Chrononutrition is just the study of how meal timing affects health.

The timing of food intake relative to your sleep wake cycle appears to be important. The evidence suggests that early consumption of larger meals (including breakfast) may provide metabolic advantages that are independent of total calorie intake.

Important Caveats

All research papers acknowledge important limitations. The first paper mentioned that, while some individuals experience neutral or even beneficial effects from breakfast skipping, causality remains complex due to confounding factors like diet quality, physical activity, and socioeconomic status.

It’s like humans are impacted by more than just their diets??

Eating Is Good

Overall, evidence suggests that regular breakfast consumption is associated with multiple health benefits including improved metabolic function, better glucose control, enhanced satiety, improved cognitive performance in children and adolescents, better diet quality, and reduced cardiovascular and mortality risk.

Decision Fatigue

Mornings are busy, I get it. Decision fatigue is real. I eat all kinds of things for breakfast in order to lessen that fatigue and one the best things I’ve done for my brain is see all foods as breakfast foods.

Dinner leftovers with added cheese or put in a wrap that I then air fry have become easy, nutrient dense breakfasts with little thought required. But I’m not the most organised of people and some days I do get caught out, opting for a quick hit of energy instead of a more substantial and filling meal.

What Works For You

At the end of the day, you have got to find a pattern of eating that works for you. And breakfast just means, first meal of the day. So whether you need a slight delay, have irregular work and sleep patterns, just try to make that first go at food in your day, slightly more substantial.

I hope this helped, even if it’s to block out the loud noise of influencers determined to make us starve ourselves.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too.

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If just 10% of my readers on Substack joined my fitness community, it would change my life, so if you do have a few minutes spare, please click that link and check out what is on offer.

T. P. Minari and L. Pisani, “Skipping breakfast and its wide-ranging health consequences: A systematic review from multiple metabolic disruptions to socioeconomic factors.,” Nutrition Research, Jul. 2025, doi: 10.1016/j.nutres.2025.07.006.

H. Chen et al., “Association between skipping breakfast and risk of cardiovascular disease and all cause mortality: A meta-analysis.,” Clinical Nutrition, Feb. 2020, doi: 10.1016/j.clnu.2020.02.004.

A. Geliebter, N. Astbury, R. Aviram-Friedman, E. Yahav, and S. Hashim, “Skipping breakfast leads to weight loss but also elevated cholesterol compared with consuming daily breakfasts of oat porridge or frosted cornflakes in overweight individuals: a randomised controlled trial,” Journal of Nutritional Science, Nov. 2014, doi: 10.1017/jns.2014.51.

Vaishnavi, R. Garg, and N. Singh, “Effect of Breakfast Skipping on Metabolism Among Adolescents,” International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology, Nov. 2025, doi: 10.38124/ijisrt/25nov881.

E. Zeballos and J. E. Todd, “The effects of skipping a meal on daily energy intake and diet quality,” Public Health Nutrition, May 2020, doi: 10.1017/S1368980020000683.

K. Roy and H. Kn, “Chrononutrition: How Meal Timing Impacts Metabolism and Disease Risk,” International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research, Jun. 2025, doi: 10.36948/ijfmr.2025.v07i03.49315.

Context: In postmenopausal women, the absolute shit show that is hormones leads to rapid bone loss and a decrease in bone mineral density which is genuinely difficult to reverse. This increases the risk of developing osteoporosis and with that, fracture risk increases. zero fun.

Since the fitness industry latched on to exercise ‘for old lady bones’, I have seen an absolute wealth of piss poor takes on how people can look after their bones as they age.

The LIFTMOR Study

This is was partly because of a recent research trial called the LIFTMOR study.

Don’t get my wrong, the LIFTMOR study is great because the researchers bridged a significant knowledge gap.

Is high intensity (heavy) resistance training and impact training (HiRIT) effective and most importantly, safe for postmenopausel women with very low bone mass?

The trial was notable for being one of the first to investigate the safety and efficacy of high intensity resistance and impact training in postmenopausal women with osteopenia and osteoporosis under highly supervised conditions, as previously this had been discouraged and deemed highly unsafe by professionals.

But this study has lead to the JUST LIFT HEAVY crowd being louder than ever and it doesn’t really demonstrate that lifting heavy alone is the best and only way to improve bone density.

Firstly the nature of the intervention was mixed, the participants didn’t just lift. They also did impact training which involved a plyometric style movement that generated high ground reaction forces. This is different to say, a squat, which produces joint reaction forces.

The more problematic aspect of claiming this study supports ‘heavy lifting is the only way’ relates to the control group design. The LIFTMOR study randomised women to either the HiRIT intervention or ‘a home-based, lowintensity exercise program’.

The home based, low intensity program was explicitly designed NOT to provide substantial bone stimulus. It essentially functioned as a do nothing control rather than a true comparison to other bone stimulating exercise modalities. The control group mostly did walking and stretching, and only used some 3kg dumbbells right towards the end.

The control group experienced a decrease in lumbar spine BMD of -1.2 ± 2.8% while the HiRIT group increased by 2.9 ± 2.8%. However, this comparison only tells us that HiRIT is better than minimal exercise, it does not tell us whether HiRIT is superior to other bone stimulating interventions, whether they involve heavy lifting or not.

This is a fundamental limitation that gets completely ignored when people cite LIFTMOR as evidence that heavy lifting is uniquely effective. The study design cannot answer questions about the relative effectiveness of heavy lifting versus other modalities like moderate intensity resistance training, impact training alone, or combined programs at different intensity levels. To make such claims would require direct comparisons between different exercise types at similar total volumes or intensities. Comparisons that LIFTMOR does not provide.

What the study did do is challenge the prevailing narrative that people in this population should do high intensity training. Which is GREAT!

What bigger pieces of research can tell us

A more recent study which has tried to directly pit all exercise modalities against eachother is this one.

Zhining Zhou, Xiaoyu Wei, Xinwen Zhang, Barbara E. Ainsworth, Jiaojiao Lü, Yu Liu,

Effects of different types of exercise over 24 weeks on bone mineral density in postmenopausal women: A systematic review with pairwise and network meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.

oooo fancy.

What the researchers did

The team searched four major databases (PubMed, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, and Embase) for randomised controlled trials going back to July 1989, right through to June 2025. That's 36 years of data.

The exercise types they compared included: aerobic, aquatic, balance training, impact exercise, mind-body exercise (Tai Chi, yoga, Pilates), resistance training, multimodal programmes (three or more types combined), and various combinations of the above.

The outcomes they measured: bone mineral density at the lumbar spine, total hip, femoral neck, Ward’s triangle, and total body.

What they found

• Multimodal exercise (three or more types combined) also showed strong results, particularly with longer intervention durations.

• Resistance training alone produced significant BMD gains across sites.

• Mind-body exercise alone (without the resistance component) improved lumbar spine and femoral neck BMD, though evidence at the total hip was limited.

• Aerobic exercise showed some lumbar spine benefits in certain analyses.

• Impact exercise had mixed, site-specific results.

• Aquatic and balance training alone showed limited evidence for significant BMD gains.

Duration matters more than most people realise

One of the most practically useful findings in the paper is about time. Interventions lasting 52 weeks or longer produced more stable and sustained BMD improvements than shorter programmes.

This doesn’t mean shorter exercise has no value. But it does mean that the goal isn’t a six week challenge. It’s you’re in this for the long game type thing.

It works at any bone density level

This is the part I found most reassuring. The researchers found that exercise induced BMD benefits were evident in both healthy women AND those with existing low bone density.

That dual finding is pretty cool. It means exercise functions both as a prevention strategy (if you’re healthy now) and as a treatment strategy (if you’ve already been told your bone density is low). It’s not too late to start, regardless of where you’re starting from.

The story so far

Previous research on exercise and bone health shows remarkable consistency in core findings across different systematic reviews and meta-analyses published between 2020 and 2026. Lots of different independent studies confirm that bone can be looked after using a variety of different exercises.

Two years ago I wrote this piece which pretty much said the same thing:

The results from todays study are consistent with a 2025 analysis which found combining cardio and resistance training to be most effective for lumbar spine bone mineral density. And others which suggested exercising 3x per week continuously for 48 weeks got the best results.

Some things to be aware of though. Many studies exclude women taking hormone replacement therapy or bone affecting medications. Since the majority of women in this demographic are likely to be taking these, it limits the real world applicability of the findings.

Practical takeaways from a personal trainer who doesn’t care how you exercise.

The bottom line: For everyday exercisers, combining different types of exercise and committing to at least a year of consistent activity gives you the best chance of improving bone health. Stick with what you enjoy (or dont hate) as this means you’re more likely to stick to it.

Remember, you are not just bone. Exercise improves many health markers, physical function, psychological well being and quality of life. Combined exercise modalities is good for all of these so try not to get too caught up on bone stuff and think about the bigger picture too.

There’s still too many gaps in the literature to make precise exercise prescriptions so be wary of anyone pushing that narrative.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too.

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A new study just dropped in the European Heart Journal has confirmed, with the energy of someone who has never once dreaded a Tuesday evening cardio class, that vigorous physical activity is very, very good for you.

I recently covered a similar paper about how data revealed that vigorous cardio is worth more than we thought in comparison to light and moderate cardio.

The Study

Researchers followed 96,408 UK Biobank participants who wore wrist accelerometers (fancy fitness tracker) for a week, and then tracked their health outcomes for almost nine years. They also had a second group of 375,730 people who self reported their activity levels, which is less rigorous as a study method because humans are notoriously bad at remembering what they did, but it's there for comparison.

They then looked at whether that proportion predicted eight specific chronic diseases: heart attacks and strokes, atrial fibrillation, type 2 diabetes, immune-mediated inflammatory diseases yadda yadda, fatty liver disease, chronic respiratory disease, chronic kidney disease, and dementia. All the bad stuff. Plus all cause mortality, which is the science way of saying ‘‘did they just simply... die.’ Very goth.

What did they find?

The threshold for benefit was incredibly achievable. Having more than 4% of your total activity classified as vigorous was associated with dramatically lower risk across all eight conditions.

4% looks like: if you move for a total of about two hours a day (walking around, light activity, existing in existential dread), 4% vigorous is less than five minutes - on this maths that I just made up, this wasn’t quoted in the study.

But we are talking mere minutes of hard effort in order to move the needle on your health outcomes.

Okay but what does this mean in terms of the old advice?

Previously, exercise guidelines operated on the principle that vigorous and moderate activity were basically equivalent if you just doubled the time. Two minutes of a brisk walk equals one minute of a run, that kind of thing. This study is gently but firmly telling that framework to pipe down.

What they found is that intensity and volume contribute differently depending on which disease you’re talking about. For something like immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (your autoimmune conditions, your chronic inflammations) the benefit was almost entirely driven by intensity, not by how much total activity you did.

Volume barely mattered.

For metabolic conditions like type 2 diabetes and kidney disease, both intensity and volume contributed meaningfully. But across the board, intensity was consistently the stronger predictor.

This is a big deal because it means you can’t simply stroll your way out of certain disease risks no matter how many steps you log. The body, it turns out, responds to being challenged in a way it simply doesn’t respond to being gently nudged.

The bit that actually matters for your life

The researchers were very clear that vigorous is relative. If you’re currently sedentary, a brisk walk might genuinely count. If you’re already fairly active, you probably need to be doing something that makes you want to lie down and temporarily die afterwards to hit that threshold. The talk test is your friend here, if you can narrate your entire commute, it’s not vigorous.

Also. and this is important. this doesn’t mean light activity is useless. It means light activity is good, but insufficient on its own for the disease prevention effects they were measuring. You still want to be moving throughout the day. You just also want to be occasionally making things a bit terrible for yourself.

My completely unbiased professional take

Every week I run a cardio class for my fitness community and I moan about it the entire time. Every single week. Because I find cardio deeply unpleasant and I think the correct amount of enjoyment to have while your heart rate is at 85% of its maximum is zero.

The good news is that based on this research, you don't have to do it for that long. A few minutes of genuine effort, a few times a week, is apparently enough to dramatically reduce your risk of eight different ways your body might betray you later.

Which is way more balanced and simple than most of the wellness advice out there.

If you fancy dropping by a cardio class to suffer with me, details are below.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too.

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Jiehua Wei, Minxue Shen, Shenxin Li, Yi Xiao, Dan Luo, Gerson Ferrari, Dong Hoon Lee, Leandro F M Rezende, Jason M R Gill, Matthew N Ahmadi, Emmanuel Stamatakis, Xiang Chen, Volume vs intensity of physical activity and risk of cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular chronic diseases, European Heart Journal, 2026;, ehag168, https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehag168

*Based on the TikTok creator insights demographic stats for this content.

The videos themselves range from being short, just a few punchy quotes, to longer more conversational pieces that go into detail of how people effectively shame themselves into hitting the gym. In one video, a female influencer says ‘you can skip the gym today, if you think that guy you like is into fat chicks’, and in another, a different influencer says her top tip is keeping a photo album on her phone full of body envy pictures. Photos of other women, with her ‘ideal’ body, which she regularly compares herself to every time she feels like skipping her workout.

The videos rack up millions of views and the comment sections overflow with people saying it works…but at what cost?

Before we get into that, I’d like to say this is a new concept. But unfortunately, we’ve had this absolute dystopian nightmare before.

Re Re Wind Back to the 90s

If you were a certain kind of teenage girl in the late 1990s and early 2000s, or if you've ever read about what those girls were doing online, you will recognise this script immediately. The rhetoric is nearly identical. The aesthetic has been updated, the platform has changed, the target demographic has widened to include men and adult women, and now there's an algorithmic content machine producing it on demand.

But the core mechanism remains the same…using self loathing as a motivator for controlling your body.

It nearly killed a generation of teenagers and researchers have been dismantling it ever since.

Before we had algorithms and endless feeds, we had dial up modems, msn messenger and primitive message boards and blogs like tumblr. This combined with skeletal super models and Tyra Banks calling a size 12 model ‘too big’, created a perfect storm for one of the internets most distrubing subcultures.

Pro anorexia - or ‘pro ana’ for short, referred not to the eating disorder itself but the communities that treated eating disorders as choices, even aspirational lifestyles to copy, as opposed to mental illnesses that can kill.

These communities had a visual vocabulary that was easy to recognise, including jutting out collar and hip bones, whilst using the terms ‘Ana’ and ‘Mia’ as shorthand for Anorexia and Bulimia like they were referencing a cool big sister. They had quotes and images that used the exact same psychological mechanisms as ‘toxic gym motivation’.

A Shift to ‘Fitspo’

After the banning of the ‘thinspo’ hashtag across many platforms, ‘fitspo’ emerged as a supposed positive counterculture. ‘Strong not skinny’ soon becomes the calling card of a more balanced fitness account, but researchers find it employs the near identical psychological mechanics, just substituting muscularity for thinness as the new aesthetic.

Pro Ana Hits the Gym

At it’s peak, ‘fitspo’ generated tens of millions of posts but researchers were immediately sceptical.

A 2015 study by Tiggemann and Zaccardo found that fitspo content produced increased body dissatisfaction, negative mood, and body shame in viewers. This was comparable to those produced by traditional thin ideal media. The mechanisms were the same, only the ideal had changed.

Shame is the Supplement

The reason pro ana content and its descendants are dangerous isn't that they're offensive or distressing, though they often are both. The danger is more specific than that and more measurable.

Ryan and Deci's foundational work on motivation (2000) distinguishes between autonomous motivation (doing something because you find it meaningful or enjoyable) and controlled motivation (doing something to avoid punishment or gain external approval).

Studies find that autonomous motivation predicts persistence, wellbeing, and long-term behaviour change. Controlled motivation, which is what shame and external pressure produce, predicts short term compliance followed by dropout. The streams of comments on these posts saying it works are not lying. Initially, that disgust with yourself might be productive. But it’s only temporary.

Because whatever shame based content moves you today will require more intense shame next week to produce the same response. All the while the association between the gym and negative emotion grows stronger.

Why it’s Such a Head Fuck

What makes fitspo and the new ‘toxic gym motivation’ trend particularly bad, in my opinion, is the veneer of legitimacy that fitness culture provides.

Wanting to be healthy is a good thing right? Going to the gym? also good.

And framing the advice as 'toxic’ before anyone else has had a chance to call you out for it attempts to neutralise any criticism. It positions itself as edgy and brutally honest with ‘we’re all thinking it and I said it’ vibes. It feels harsh but that’s the point and they named it.

‘I Use Shame Based Motivation And I’m Fine’

Are you though? And since this content doesn’t exist in a vaccuum, their are groups of people who are most at risk. Just because not everyone who comes into contact with this messaging with develop an eating disorder or exercise compulsion doesn’t mean it’s justified.

Body image research consistently finds that the late teens and early twenties are the period of greatest vulnerability to internalising appearance based ideals. This is also when eating disorders most commonly begin.

Individuals already prone to self criticism and perfectionism are not made more productive by shame based messaging, they are made more anxious ([puts hand up). The research on perfectionism in exercise contexts finds that it is associated with compulsive exercise, exercise dependence and a pattern of frantic over exercise followed by injury or complete dropout (puts hand up again).

Eating disorder clinicians have also documented this content as being a direct relapse trigger.

It’s Time for a Different Approach

The evidence against shame based motivation is substantial and spills into many areas of psychology.

A 2021 meta-analysis examined 73 studies of Self-Determination Theory based health interventions. It found that increases in autonomous motivation (moving because you want to, not to avoid shame) consistently predicted sustained behaviour change, improved physical health outcomes, and better psychological wellbeing. Increases in controlled motivation the kind produced by external pressure and shame did not.

Below is another stack I did all on a 2019 systematic review which covers a few of the same themes.

Self compassion is more powerful than self criticism too. Experiments found that self compassion after failure produces more motivation for improvement than self criticism does. This is counterintuitive to the "brutal honesty" framing and it holds across many studies.

Social connection is one of the most robust predictors of sustained physical activity, I go on about this one all the time, not social competition, not social comparison, but genuine belonging. The gym or working out as a community of shared endeavour rather than a tribunal of physical judgement.

This is the simplest and the most frequently forgotten: movement that you enjoy, that you find interesting, that connects you to something you love, is movement you will return to. Exercise motivation research consistently finds that enjoyment is a stronger predictor of long term adherence than almost any external motivator.

AI Slop as your New Personal Trainer

Someone on my Tiktok post said they were seeing these videos non stop, and it’s because some of them are ADs for a platform called Poke75.

Poke75 will send you ai generated messages to help you complete a 75 hard challenge. 75 hard is about working out 4000 times a day and eating dust (I exaggerate but you get the idea) for 75 days as this is how long it’s supposed to take to create a habit.

When researching the platform, many users said the messages can be very intense and mean.

What’s scary about this is thatthe pro ana reboot can now by pass social media and go straight to your DMs. The 1990s version was eventually understood as a mental health crisis, researchers studied it and platforms were pressured to moderate it.

The 2026 version is a trend framed as ironic and self aware which makes it much harder to recognise and avoid.

But the outcomes, reduced intrinsic motivation, increased disordered eating risk, short term compliance followed by steep decline, are what they are regardless of if they are delivered with feigned shock and some dramatic music.

If you can recognise the pattern, the underlying shame that’s supposed to fuel your motivation, you’ve at least got some media literacy under your belt. And honestly, we deserve so much better than to shame ourselves into behaviour change.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too.

join The Snack Pass

Vartanian LR, Shaprow JG. Effects of weight stigma on exercise motivation and behavior: a preliminary investigation among college-aged females. J Health Psychol. 2008 Jan;13(1):131-8. doi: 10.1177/1359105307084318. PMID: 18086724.

Tiggemann M, Zaccardo M. "Exercise to be fit, not skinny": The effect of fitspiration imagery on women's body image. Body Image. 2015 Sep;15:61-7. doi: 10.1016/j.bodyim.2015.06.003. Epub 2015 Jul 10. PMID: 26176993.

Ntoumanis N, Ng JYY, Prestwich A, Quested E, Hancox JE, Thøgersen-Ntoumani C, Deci EL, Ryan RM, Lonsdale C, Williams GC. A meta-analysis of self-determination theory-informed intervention studies in the health domain: effects on motivation, health behavior, physical, and psychological health. Health Psychol Rev. 2021 Jun;15(2):214-244. doi: 10.1080/17437199.2020.1718529. Epub 2020 Feb 3. PMID: 31983293.

Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133–1143. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212445599

Stice E, Shaw HE. Role of body dissatisfaction in the onset and maintenance of eating pathology: a synthesis of research findings. J Psychosom Res. 2002 Nov;53(5):985-93. doi: 10.1016/s0022-3999(02)00488-9. PMID: 12445588.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.6

There’s something quite iconic about watching a video of someone clean while you sit in decision paralysis surrounded by the doom piles you’ve slowly created throughout the weeks.

In my experience as a personal trainer and coach, there’s something to be said about our environments when it comes to engaging in health promoting behaviours. I’ve coached many people who have been committed to spending 15 minutes working out at home but struggled to put it into action even after we problem solved our way through many different barriers.

Usually, an environmental barrier was getting in the way. A rug area full of toys. Equipment out of sight and out of mind. A sink full of plates and cups that have been there for days. All of which seemed to create a very ‘whats the point’ or ‘I can’t concentrate on a workout my head feels like it’s spinning at home’ mindset.

Non of these are trivial by the way. Your home environment can make you feel overwhelmed and meh. And there’s research on it. Research we are looking at today.

I’ve spoken many times about wider environments, like our neighbourhoods, and how this can impact our health and health behaviours. Most of that isn’t in our immediate control but something we can focus on, or at least be aware of to name our feelings, is our immediate home environments.

No Place Like Home

This 2010 study explores how individuals perceptions of their home environments, analysed through linguistic patterns relate to their daily mood and cortisol stress profiles.

Linguistic patterns are predictable, recurring structures, words, or grammatical forms within spoken or written language that signify deeper thematic, semantic, or functional meaning. They help researchers spot patterns and understand things like sentiment and mental health markers.

They did all of this whilst family members gave home tours, think cribs but instead a research nerd follows you around with a clip board asking you how you feel about your windows.

The focus was on feeling either stressed by your home environment or restored.

The sample was 30 families in the US, dual earner middle class including two cohabiting adults, both working full time and two to three children. All families were mortgage holders.

60 family members (not in the same family or house obviously) descriptions of their homes were plugged into a computer who focused on words related to clutter, unfinished spaces, relaxation, and nature. ​

Tours ranged from 89 to 9,164 words, which one would you be? I’d probably be up in the 9000s but the software might not know about sarcasm and dark humour so they’d probably alert the authorities.

A Quickie on Cortisol

Cortisol is one of the buzzwords of the wellness industry. So much so, I wrote a few pieces on it two years ago.

If you need a quickie about all things cortisol, see the substack below.

If you’re not wishing to go full side quest, very quickly the diagram below is from a study looking into the cortisol slope with the incident of diabetes. The blue dotted line shows a flatter slope and these people went on to develop diabetes. The solid black line shows a healthy diurnal cortisol rhythm and these people didn’t go on to develop diabetes.

Studies generally show that these flatter slopes are associated with worse health. So ideally what we are looking for in a healthy individual is a nice sharp rise of cortisol on waking with a steep slope throughout the day. This is shown on the black solid line of the above diagram.

The Predictions

The researchers predicted that:

1. Stressful Home Words and Cortisol: Higher rates of stressful home words (e.g., words describing clutter and unfinished projects) would be associated with a flatter diurnal slope of cortisol (the bad one), which is linked to chronic stress and adverse health outcomes. ​

2. Restorative Home Words and Cortisol: Higher rates of restorative home words (e.g., words describing relaxation and natural features) would be associated with a steeper diurnal slope of cortisol (the good one), which is indicative of better psychological and physical well being. ​

3. Stressful Home Words and Mood: Stressful home words would be linked with higher levels of depressed mood over the course of the day. ​

4. Restorative Home Words and Mood: Restorative home words would be linked with lower levels of depressed mood over the course of the day. ​

5. Gender Differences: Women’s well being would be more closely linked to their perceptions of the home environment compared to men, as women often assume more responsibility for maintaining the household. ​ Women who report their home environment as stressful may show stronger associations with adverse patterns of mood and cortisol. ​

The study also controlled for potential confounding factors such as marital satisfaction and neuroticism. ​lol.

TL;DR: Women Feel It Harder

The study results show how women’s descriptions of their homes relate to their daily cortisol patterns and depressed mood, highlighting the significance of perceived home stressfulness and restorativeness. ​

Women describing homes as more stressful (cluttered, unfinished projects) had flatter diurnal cortisol slopes (the bad one)

Higher stressful home words linked to increased depressed mood across the day.

Women perceiving their homes as more restorative (yards, outdoor features, relaxation words) showed steeper cortisol declines (the good one) and decreased depressed mood over the day. ​

These associations remained significant regardless of marital satisfaction or neuroticism.

No significant effects were found for husbands’ cortisol or mood related to home descriptions. ​Basically, men didn’t seem to care about clutter on a deeper level.

Women may be more sensitive to home environment cues, possibly due to traditional roles or social presentation factors. I think there’s definitely something to this, even if you work full time, I think sometimes women still feel like the home environment is their responsibility. Even if that’s never been explicitly stated by their partner or by anyone, society and other factors tend to just have a way of creeping into your brain and taking over.

The study emphasises the importance of subjective home perceptions for well being and health outcomes. ​

Limits & Wider Contexts

This was such a small study focusing on middle class, dual income parents so that limits us on generalising, to determine causality we would need much more data over a longer period of time as it’s not clear whether stress influences home perceptions or vice versa, or if they just both compound on eachother in a never ending doom spiral.

The researchers also noted the social component of home tours and how this might influence women’s responses due to concerns about judgment, potentially down playing how they feel about their home environment.

Overall, the research highlights the importance of subjective home environment perceptions for daily stress, mood, and health, especially for women. ​

We also have a few other studies that are making this connection, like this one, all about how the physical and social environment at home can influence children’s sedentary behaviours.

You’re Not Lazy, You’re Overwhelmed

I know I say this all the time, but I mean it. So you haven’t managed to get in a home workout despite having bought some dumbbells and other equipment?

It is worth looking at your immediate environment and making a plan, and sometimes the workout is going to be last on the priority list, because that can’t come into you feel good in that environment.

The declutter expert I mentioned at the start has what’s called a basket method for quick tidying. Basically she just throws everything that’s pissing off her line of sight into a big basket and hides it until later. I’m paraphrasing.

The idea is your put it all away later while you have the brain space. The important thing is that you’ve immediately created a sense of clarity in your home environment and it doesn’t matter that all of that stuff is in a basket. This might allow you to initiate the workout you really wanted to do and this in turn, has a cascading effect where your self efficacy and mood gets a boost, leading to more motivation to do other tasks.

This isn’t a fail safe solution for everyone, but if you’re up for trying anything and throwing shit until you see what sticks, it can’t hurt to try it.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too.

join The Snack Pass

Small Business Dedication

I’m going to try more and more to dedicate my substack pieces to small businesses, ideally where the product fits the theme of the writing.

I was recently contacted by a lovely business called The Velvet Wick, who sent me some of their gorgeous hand poured candles. Once you’ve decluttered some space, maybe a nice smelling candle from a small business will really add to those restorative vibes.

Remember, small businesses help the world go round so add The Velvet Wick to your small business shopping list. I’ll be documenting a big declutter of my bedroom over on Instagram so make sure you’re over there to see when its posted.

Saxbe DE, Repetti R. No place like home: home tours correlate with daily patterns of mood and cortisol. Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2010 Jan;36(1):71-81. doi: 10.1177/0146167209352864. Epub 2009 Nov 23. PMID: 19934011.

Maitland C, Stratton G, Foster S, Braham R, Rosenberg M. A place for play? The influence of the home physical environment on children's physical activity and sedentary behaviour. Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act. 2013 Aug 17;10:99. doi: 10.1186/1479-5868-10-99. PMID: 23958282; PMCID: PMC3765081.

Maitland C, Stratton G, Foster S, Braham R, Rosenberg M. The Dynamic Family Home: a qualitative exploration of physical environmental influences on children's sedentary behaviour and physical activity within the home space. Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act. 2014 Dec 24;11:157. doi: 10.1186/s12966-014-0157-1. PMID: 25540114; PMCID: PMC4304138.

Like you’re not taught at age 4 that an apple is health or at age 7 you’re asked to count sugar cubes in fizzy drinks and work out how much exercise you’d need to burn it off. Lessons about ‘good vs bad’ food, calories and the bleep test are regimentally drilled into our young brains throughout the entirety of school, so much so that dieting behaviours have been documented in children as young as 5.

Plus, if you’re existing in a body that’s outside of society’s narrow version of health, you’ve probably been reminded of what’s ‘healthy’ and what isn’t so much that you want to scoop your own eye balls out. By adulthood, you’ve probably tried every version of being healthy that’s ever been shown to you and have the scars to prove it.

I think it’s safe to say that we know movement is good for us. And that eating some fruit and vegetables is generally considered a good way to eat.

Yet the past 20 years of public health campaigns (recap below) has focused on exactly that. Education. Awareness campaigns. Information.

Memory Lane - Diet & Activity Campaigns

• Better Health (2020–present): Launched during the COVID-19 pandemic to encourage weight loss and increase physical activity. It incorporates previous initiatives like Change4Life.

• Change4Life (2009–2021): A flagship campaign aimed at reducing BMI by targeting families with children under 11, promoting “60 active minutes” a day, healthier snacking, and smaller portion sizes.

• 5 A Day (2003–present): A nationwide campaign designed to increase consumption of fruit and vegetables to at least five portions a day.

• Sugar Smart / Sugar Swaps (2015–2019): Campaigns focusing specifically on reducing sugar consumption, often featuring the “Food Scanner” app to highlight sugar, saturated fat, and salt in packaged foods.

• Traffic Light Food Labelling (2013): Introduced to show amounts of calories, fat, salt, and sugar to encourage healthier choices.

• Sid the Slug (2002): A high-impact campaign by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) focused on reducing excessive salt intake.

Yet these campaigns show mixed success, with the Better Health one in particular being seen as inappropriate, shaming, dismissive of mental health, hypocritical and potentially damaging. Not great.

How Do We Make People Change Their Behaviour?

A paper published in September 2025 on behaviour change interventions, researchers pulled together a huge amount of existing studies to help answer one practical question.

When you want to change people’s behaviour, what should you focus on changing?

They started by making a tidy list of the things that drive human behaviour, things like knowledge, social norms, attitudes, and practical barriers. Then they looked at the evidence for which of those things actually predict behaviour, and which ones, when deliberately targeted by an intervention (a programme designed to change behaviour), actually work.

When designing a public health campaign, you need to decide what to target. Should you try to change what people know? Or do something else. If you want people to recycle more do you tell them about recycling? How to do it? Tell people that all their neighbours are recycling queens and hope they get FOMO? Build trust that recycling actually produces the benefits suggested? It’s a tough call.

Knowing what lever to pull when trying to change behaviour is really important and this paper pulls together a really wide sweep of existing evidence.

Ways You Can Be a Target

The researchers give a list of what are considered important components in determining our behaviour, things that can be targeted to change said behaviours.

Knowledge - a collection of facts about an object of behaviour, typically held with certainty even though they might be factually incorrect

Beliefs - probability judgements about an object in connection with an attribute or an outcome

General and behavioural attitudes - evaluations of objects or behaviours, respectively, along a positive–negative dimension

Emotions - visceral feelings associated with an object or behaviour

General and specific skills - cognitive skills involved in self-control or domain-specific cognitive or motor skills, think self-efficacy, your belief that you can do things

And habits - repeated, automated behaviours that continue even in the absence of rewards

We have alot of data on these areas as they make up the majority of behaviour change research and current public health campaigns.

Zero Surprise

Despite a large and growing body of evidence, worldwide rates of physical inactivity are not improving, and associated chronic diseases continue to rise globally. Interventions that target individuals tend to work in research settings, translating that into real world population change has proven much harder.

The researchers ranked individual level targets from least to most effective. The headline finding is that the interventions most people assume work best, giving people information and correcting their beliefs, are actually among the weakest. I was zero percent surprised.

Maybe I should stop writing my research reviews since giving people information doesnt seem to do anything *face palm

Amongst the individual factors that have a bit more sway are the ones that support building habits and practical skills. We do this in the Snack Pass so I do feel redeemed, maybe I will continue.

You Don’t Live Under A Rock

So why doesn’t it work? You know, targeting us as individuals? Surely we have the power alone to change what we’re doing? One existing issue with models of behaviour and predicting what people will and wont do, is that you don’t live under a rock - as nice as that would be.

The above list of what makes us tick are all about you as the individual. Yet you as the individual lives in a complex social and structural environment - and most of the time this is a dumpster fire.

Politician’s Can Continue To Waste Money Blaming Us

The single most effective intervention type of all? Simply making a behaviour easier to access so, building a gym nearby, making healthy food cheaper, removing practical barriers. That outperforms almost everything you can do at the individual level.

The paper’s own conclusion is pretty pointed, policy makers should focus on interventions that enable individuals to remove obstacles to desired behaviour change, rather than wasting time and effort on trying to increase people’s knowledge and belief.

Because like I said at the start, I think people know that exercise is good for them.

This is a classic example of our government giving us literal crumbs when it comes to our existence. Instead of spending money on infra structure to improve our environments and focusing on bringing the cost of living down, they instead hoard wealth and simply scatter the crumbs of what’s left by telling us to look for a traffic light system on our food or ‘just take a walk’ through our dangerous, inaccessible neighbourhoods.

Sweet.

Disproportionately harmed by these public health campaigns are women, trans and non binary folk who don’t feel safe exercising in public spaces. People in fat bodies who these campaigns claim to be ‘at war against’ who can’t even exist in public, never mind exercise, without being heckled and shamed. Disabled folk who cannot access these spaces or the support to navigate them who also need to know that doing less and doing it differently is still valid.

Stop Blaming Yourself

Looking at what does and doesn’t help us look after ourselves and seeing that what we’ve been subjected to for the past 20 years doesn’t actually work is not defeatist.

The point is, taking the blame away from yourself is actually really productive. You don’t deserve to be berating yourself for your choices or how you’re currently living.

Humans are incredibly complex, Let’s say you’re a non binary, chronically ill and disabled person who lives alone without much of a support network. You’ve got so many intersecting barriers to navigate at anyone time and the governments lack of support and accountability hits you ten fold.

One of the most powerful things for people in a complex situation is naming what is and isn’t in their control, and taking that blame and guilt away. And this is a reframe I’ve used with some of my 1:1 clients who are in that exact situation.

I can’t fix society with one coaching session or even one Substack, I absolutely wish I could, but I won’t have people blaming themselves for problems that aren’t theirs to fix.

Practical Takeaways

What we can learn from this paper in particular is that focusing on your own habits is strongest individual factor. That’s demonstrated nicely in the cool little circle diagrams. All individual factors are in the light blue shade on the left of the circles.

And this doesn’t have to be a personality transplant. It could just be one thing.

Descriptive norms was an interesting one in this research paper. Having role models that fit you demographically doing behaviours you’d like to implement did have a medium effect size in health behaviours. In other words, find someone like you that’s doing the thing you want to do, and take inspiration from them.

We have a great example of this in The Snack Pass, we have a group called ‘find a replay buddy’ and its where people go, pick a workout and see if anyone else wants to do it at the same time. It’s cute and cool.

From other research I’d read when setting up The Snack Pass, it was always set up as a community. A place for connection. Other research has always pointed to community as a strong predictor of behaviour change and todays piece of research compounds on that nicely. Social support had a medium effect size for exercise. So joining a group or community (it doesn’t have to be mine) is a great place to start.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too.

join The Snack Pass

Albarracín D, Fayaz-Farkhad B, Samayoa JAG. Determinants of behaviour and their efficacy as targets of behavioural change interventions. Nat Rev Psychol. 2024 Jun;3(6):377-392. doi: 10.1038/s44159-024-00305-0. Epub 2024 May 3. PMID: 40909436; PMCID: PMC12407158.

This is not to say that if you’re losing weight you’re doing it wrong. And it’s not to say that if you’re not losing weight, you’re doing it right. It’s just the plain, boring, well documented fact that body weight fluctuates, some people are naturally thin and some people are naturally fat, and the number on the scale has a genuinely weak relationship with what’s actually going on inside your body.

What unfucks it for everyone — and I mean everyone — is learning to look at another person and make absolutely no assumption about their health status based on their body size. It’s also none of your business.

A note before we start: I am not a fan of any of the words in the BMI categories. It is difficult to discuss or reference these studies without them, so they do appear below. Please take a deep breath. I’m sorry if these words have been used to devalue you. They are clinical categories being used here to describe research populations, not descriptors of human worth.

The Study That Started It All (And Still Holds Up)

There’s a 2012 paper that circulates heavily in intuitive eating spaces, and honestly, for good reason. It looked at how key health behaviours interact with BMI when it comes to all cause mortality, that is, death from any cause.

The behaviours they measured were: eating fruit and vegetables daily, engaging in regular physical activity, not smoking, and not drinking heavily or at all.

What they found was that BMI category was pretty much rendered null and void once a person was consistently engaging in those four behaviours. Across the board. In every weight category.

All cause mortality - The word mortality means death. In this context, all-cause mortality is death due to any disease, complication, or hazardous exposure.

Healthy Lifestyle Habits and Mortality in Overweight and Obese Individuals

Eric M. Matheson, Dana E. King, Charles J. Everett

The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine Jan 2012, 25 (1) 9-15; DOI: 10.3122/jabfm.2012.01.110164

This single chart has been doing the rounds for over a decade with many people discrediting it now due to its age. As far as research goes, yes its an elder.

So let’s see where research is up to now, including some more greats that have been screaming this message for ages.

Enter Professor Blair, Screaming Into The Void Since 2009

Professor Steven Blair is an absolute legend who has been trying to tell the medical establishment to stop obsessing over weight and start measuring fitness, for literally decades, and mostly being ignored.

In his 2009 paper, he argued that physical inactivity is one of the most important, possibly THE most important, public health problems of the 21st century. Not weight. Not BMI. Inactivity.

He also said something that has lived in my head rent-free ever since:

“I wager that the typical physician is 10–50 times more likely to measure cholesterol, blood pressure, and BMI than to measure fitness.”

Blair SN

Physical inactivity: the biggest public health problem of the 21st century

British Journal of Sports Medicine 2009;43:1-2.

He followed 2,316 men with type 2 diabetes for nearly 16 years. The ‘obese’ men who were moderately or highly fit had less than half the risk of dying compared to the ‘normal’ weight men who were unfit.

Less. Than. Half. For men who were both ‘obese’ AND active, compared to men of a ‘healthy’ weight who weren’t moving. That is not a small finding.

His conclusion? When a patient comes in, we ask about weight. We do not ask about fitness. And if we mention physical activity, we frame it as a weight loss tool, not a health tool in its own right. His words:

“The activity will be very important to the patient’s health, whether or not they lose weight.”

What The Last Decade Of Research Says (Spoiler, Same Thing, Bigger Numbers)

I wanted to see if the research had continued in this pattern since Blair’s work and that 2012 study. It has. Spectacularly.

The 2025 Meta-Analysis That I’ve Not Seen Anyone Mention?

This is the big one. Published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in early 2025, this meta-analysis pooled 20 studies and nearly 400,000 people. It looked at the relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness, BMI, and mortality.

What did it find?

• ‘Overweight’ fit and ‘obese’ fit individuals had no statistically significant difference in all cause mortality risk compared to ‘normal’ weight fit people.

• ‘Normal’ weight unfit, ‘overweight’ unfit, and ‘obese’ unfit individuals had 2–3 times greater mortality risk.

Read that again. Being unfit roughly doubled or tripled your mortality risk. Being in a larger body but fit? Statistically equivalent to being in a smaller body and fit. The fitness was doing the work. The weight was not the variable.

The 2024 Study On Physical Activity In People With ‘Obesity’

A 2024 systematic review covering nearly 200,000 people looked specifically at physical activity and mortality risk in adults with ‘obesity’. The finding: physical activity is associated with significantly lower all cause, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality in this group.

Moving your body protects your health regardless of what your body weighs. This is not a controversial fringe position. It is what the evidence consistently shows.

The 2022 UK Biobank Study

This one followed a huge cohort of UK adults and found:

• Healthy lifestyle behaviours substantially offset mortality risk even for people with a BMI over 30.

• People with a ‘healthy’ BMI who met none of the healthy lifestyle recommendations were among the MOST at risk of death in the cohort.

• Adopting a healthy lifestyle is of significant benefit to all, regardless of weight.

The 2023 JAMA Network Open Study

This one looked at lifestyle factors and ‘obesity’ related disease risk in UK adults and found that the lifestyle profiles associated with the lowest disease risk included a healthy diet plus at least one of: adequate physical activity, or never smoking. Which feels very doable, actually.

Also: The BMI-Mortality Picture Is Messier Than Anyone Admits

While we’re here, I want to flag something that rarely makes it into mainstream wellness content. A 2024 meta-analysis of 2.7 million patients found a U-shaped relationship between BMI and all-cause mortality with the lowest mortality in the ‘overweight’ BMI range of 25–30.

The researchers concluded that weight reduction should not be a universal clinical recommendation, and that any intervention should be individualised. That is the current evidence base. That is not a wellness influencer talking.

Separately, a 2023 analysis of over 554,000 US adults found that BMI may not independently increase mortality risk once other factors are accounted for particularly in older adults.

None of this means weight is completely irrelevant to every health outcome in every person. It means the relationship is complicated, contested, and absolutely not as clean as ‘higher BMI = worse health’ which is what most of us have been told our entire lives.

How Much Movement Are We Actually Talking About?

One thing I wanted to update in this piece is some practical numbers, because I think ‘exercise more’ as a message is useless without context.

• The WHO says insufficiently active people have a 20–30% increased risk of death compared to active people.

• A study following over 100,000 people for 30 years found that 150–300 minutes of moderate physical activity per week (that’s 20–40 minutes most days) was associated with a 20–21% lower risk of all cause mortality.

• A 2025 Lancet Public Health review found 7,000 steps per day is associated with clinically meaningful health improvements and may be a more realistic target than the mythical 10,000.

• A 2024 study found that people who sit mostly at work have a 16% higher risk of all-cause mortality but that adding just 15–30 minutes of leisure-time movement per day significantly reduced that risk.

The bar is lower than the wellness industry wants you to think. Because if the bar is low, they can’t sell you as much.

So What Does This Actually Mean For You?

Here’s what the research consistently points to as the health behaviours that matter most, independent of what your body weighs:

• Eating fruit and vegetables regularly. A healthy diet consistently comes out as the most important individual behaviour across studies.

• Moving your body. Not training for a marathon. Walking, dancing, swimming, chasing your kids around a soft play. 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, spread out however you like.

• Not smoking. Still one of the most powerful individual levers you have.

• Drinking in moderation or not at all.

That’s it. That’s the list. Not your dress size. Not whether you’ve lost 10 pounds. Not whether your thighs touch.

If your doctor is measuring your BMI and not asking about your fitness, your diet, your stress, your sleep, your smoking status that’s a gap in your care. Not a character flaw on your part.

The wrong message is: ‘you should exercise to lose weight.’

The right message is: ‘movement will matter to your health whether or not you lose weight. It’s one of the most powerful tools we have. Use it regardless of the number on the scale.’

We’ve been receiving the wrong message for decades. This is me trying to fix that, one Substack at a time.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too.

join The Snack Pass

Full References

1. Matheson EM, King DE, Everett CJ. Healthy Lifestyle Habits and Mortality in Overweight and Obese Individuals. J Am Board Fam Med. 2012;25(1):9-15.

2. Blair SN. Physical inactivity: the biggest public health problem of the 21st century. Br J Sports Med. 2009;43:1-2.

3. Heath L, Jebb SA, Aveyard P et al. Obesity, metabolic risk and adherence to healthy lifestyle behaviours: prospective cohort study in the UK Biobank. BMC Med. 2022;20:65.

4. Rassy N et al. Association of Healthy Lifestyle Factors and Obesity-Related Diseases in Adults in the UK. JAMA Netw Open. 2023;6(5):e2314741.

5. Weeldreyer NR et al. Cardiorespiratory fitness, body mass index and mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Br J Sports Med. 2025;59(5):339-346.

6. Martínez-Vizcaíno V et al. Physical activity is associated with lower mortality in adults with obesity: a systematic review with meta-analysis. BMC Public Health. 2024;24:1867.

7. WHO Global Action Plan on Physical Activity 2018–2030.

8. Arem H et al. Leisure time physical activity and mortality: a detailed pooled analysis. JAMA Intern Med. 2015;175(6):959-67.

When you call this stuff out online, you get called a bully. Despite the fact that non of it is based on any evidence. Despite the fact that encouraging people to waste their time and money on things they don’t need is slowly ruining the planet.

Published in 2025 in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, researchers Aishwarya Soni and Ramulu Bhukya sat down and actually studied, with interviews, surveys, structural equation modelling, the whole shabang, what self-care influencers are doing to us. To our purchasing behaviour. To our sense of self. To our bins, overflowing with half used serums that expire in three months.

First, a bit of history, because context is everything

Self care is not a new concept. Socrates talked about it. Audre Lorde radical Black feminist, poet, warrior reclaimed it as a political act of survival.

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence,” she wrote. “It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

She was writing about staying alive in a world that wanted her dead.

The same language is now used to sell you a £48 toner.

The researchers make this point directly. self care has undergone a transformation from a practice rooted in genuine wellbeing to one centred on conspicuous display of stuff. The ancient philosophical framework of self-care as soul-tending, as becoming your truest self has been quietly replaced by a commercial version. One where self care is an upgradeable lifestyle. One where you are always, always one product away from being okay. Frokm being a better person.

That is not an accident. That is a new age business model.

The haunting parasocial relationship

The study used 30 in depth interviews and a survey of 366 women who follow so proclaimed self care influencers. Then they ran the data through structural equation modelling, fancy stats that map how one thing causes another. Here’s the chain they saw.

You see the influencer

you think she’s authentic

you feel emotionally close to her

you want to be like her

you buy things you don’t need.

Every single link in that chain was statistically significant. Every one.

The mechanism they're describing has a name. parasocial relationships. It's the one sided bond where you feel like someone knows you, even though they have absolutely no idea you exist. The most unhinged form of being haunted by someone who isn’t dead. It was first studied in the context of TV personalities and social media has put it on steroids.

The most disturbing finding from this paper is how the researchers say these relationships form. Previous research treated parasocial bonds as something that naturally emerged from likeable content. It seemed slightly genuine. But these researchers push back on that. They argue that some self-care influencers are strategically manufacturing emotional intimacy.

The vulnerability is performed.

The relatability is curated.

The ‘hey guys, so many of you have asked about my morning routine’ is a meticulously planned piece of content with a commissionable link in the bio.

They call it para-sociality. A deliberate engineering of emotional capital to generate trust and purchasing behaviour.

In other words, you think you have a friend but you’re just being pushed head first into a marketing funnel.

I know, it made me want to throw my phone into a hedge.

The authenticity trap

Here’s the part that I keep coming back to because as someone who tries so hard to be myself online, it kinda freaked me out even more.

The researchers found that the more authentic an influencer seems, the more damage she does. Not because she’s a bad person but because perceived authenticity is the single biggest driver of both the desire to mimic AND unsustainable consumption behaviour.

The old model of advertising was… celebrity holds product, you know it’s an ad, you discount it accordingly. Your brain has defences.

The influencer model bypasses all of that. When your favourite girl boss influencer babe shares her ‘genuine’ morning routine. The one where she just happens to use eight products,your brain processes it as a friend’s recommendation, not a hashtag ad. Your defences don’t activate. You trust her not because of her expertise (the study specifically found expertise is irrelevant to how much people trust influencers, it’s aesthetic consistency and emotional relatability that matters) but because she feels real.

I was genuinely livid about this next bit

The study also looked at generational differences, because of course it did, because if millennials can be called out they will. And the findings are interesting.

Millennials are more likely to mimic influencers directly from exposure. We are, apparently, slightly more susceptible to the aspiration because we grew up with the rise of social media and are more accustomed to engaging with influencer driven narratives. Remember, influencers grew with us. They appeared before we even noticed they were there.

Gen Z, meanwhile, is more sensitive to authenticity. When they believe an influencer is genuine, they mimic more intensely. When they don’t, they disengage harder. Which is why de-influencing got so popular with that demographic and also why it became immediately coopted.

Because here is the thing about de-influencing the researchers looked at that too. A word I was completely drawn to and temporarily made my entire personality because I thought it described exactly what I do. Then I kinda went off it.

What the researchers found was that de-influencing content largely mirrors the exact structure and consumption patterns of the content it claims to critique. The creator tells you not to buy the viral serum. She is holding four other products. The form is identical. The only thing that changed is the moral positioning.

It’s still influencing but with extra steps and a cleaner conscience. A detour where you inevitably end up buying something you don’t need.

Our skin and bank balances are in trouble

One of the interview participants in the study said something that hit me like a cold plunge (my only experience of a cold plunge is skirting the ones outside at centre parcs in 2002 because I absolutely refuse to go in one. You couldnt pay me).

“Sleep ugly, wake up beautiful trend made me end up with four moisturisers just because influencers kept recommending new ones.”

Four moisturisers. For one face. That needs one moisturiser.

The researchers document how influencer content ‘restock my bathroom with me, ‘clean girl morning shed,’ ‘Amazon must-haves’ creates what they call imperceptible needs. Invisible desires that didn’t exist before you opened the app. Things you didn’t know you required until an algorithm decided you should want them.

Dermatologists, for the record, recommend three products for a complete skincare routine. Cleanser. Moisturiser. SPF. That’s it. The rest is, at best, nice. At worst, actively harmful because layering incompatible actives is a real problem, and ‘glass skin’ is not a medical concept.

The waste implications of all this are staggering. Products expire. Collections grow faster than they can be used. Another study cited by the researchers estimates over £1 billion in wasted skincare sitting in UK homes. Six percent of everything manufactured doesn’t even make it to sale due to overproduction.

We are producing waste at industrial scale so that people can feel, briefly, like they are taking care of themselves. Four moisturisers at a time.

The bit where I tell you this is actually about something bigger

I want to be careful here, because it would be very easy to read all of this and conclude that the answer is to buy less stuff and feel superior about it. That’s not what I’m saying. That’s also not what Audre Lorde was saying.

The anxiety you feel about your skin is not coming from your skin. The pressing feeling that you are not doing enough, not the right routine, not the right products, not the right glow is being sold to you. Deliberately. By an industry that profits from your dissatisfaction.

The researchers make a point that I think is genuinely important. social media uses the same psychological mechanisms as gambling. Intermittent reinforcement. Dopamine loops. The algorithm gets better and better at knowing what to show you to keep you in the cycle. The purchases give you a brief hit. The hit fades. You need another one. Meanwhile, the dopamine isn’t coming from the serum. It’s coming from the purchase. From the brief illusion of becoming who you want to be. That you’re a step closer to being…well.

And the selfcare framing makes it so much harder to resist. Because when you’re buying a new moisturiser, you’re not being frivolous, you’re investing in yourself. You’re practising self-love. The language of care has been fused with the language of consumption so completely that they’ve become indistinguishable.

This is particularly, as the researchers note, exploitative toward women. We are disproportionately targeted. The divine feminine aesthetic…eye roll. The clean girl trend. Performative femininity as a product category. The implication, always, that the correct way to embody your womanhood is to purchase whatever is currently being marketed as necessary for it.

That is not self care. That is the opposite of self care. That is a multi-billion monies industry telling you that you are insufficient and then selling you the solution.

So what do you actually do with this information??

The researchers have some suggestions. Digital literacy (which seems to be whats driving my content at the moment). Better disclosure requirements. Influencers taking responsibility. Sustainability disclosures on products.

All fine. All probably insufficient on their own.

What I think is actually useful is this is knowing the mechanism doesn’t make you immune to it, but it does give you something to grab onto when you feel the pull. When you’re two minutes into a ‘restock with me’ video and your hand is hovering over the Add to Basket button… that feeling is not your skin telling you what it needs. It’s a very sophisticated psychological apparatus telling you that you need to mimic someone you’ve been algorithmically engineered to trust.

You’re allowed to want things. You’re allowed to enjoy skincare. You’re allowed to buy the serum. You’re allowed to see skin care as self care. I absolutely need a silly little treat to extend my will to live.

But you deserve to do it with full knowledge that the desire was manufactured. That the person recommending it is a monetisation strategy. That your bathroom is not a moral failing, and neither is your face.

The researchers open their paper with a quote from Erich Fromm: “If I am what I have and if I lose what I have, who then am I?”

Audre Lorde knew the answer. So do you.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too.

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Welcome to the pattern interrupt. You’re being played, and the receipts are extensive.

I didn’t have a name for this chaotic opening to a video until I saw a social media marketing account talk about it, using ripping a piece of paper to get your attention at the start of the video.

What a Pattern Interrupt Actually Is

A pattern interrupt is, at its core, a technique lifted from neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) a branch of behavioural psychology and repurposed for the content economy. Originally, it described a way therapists and coaches would disrupt a client’s ingrained, automatic responses the mental loops that kept people stuck in habits they couldn’t consciously break. Something I am familiar with from research on behaviour change, this is bread and butter for a decent personal trainer.

Smart and ethically flexible salespeople clocked this fast. If you can jolt someone out of their usual autopilot behaviour like the reflex to hang up on a cold call, or delete a marketing email without reading it you buy yourself a window of genuine attention. Their defences are down, the subconscious script is scrambled, and you’ve got three seconds to say something that keeps them with you. This blog I found on pattern interrupt examples for the ‘savy salesperson’ is genuinely terrifying.

Then social media happened. And the pattern interrupt became an every day essential for every Gen Zer with a ring light.

Every first three seconds of every video you've ever watched that felt slightly odd, slightly jarring, slightly too loud…that was engineered. It was not a creative choice. It was a conversion tactic.

In content creation terms, a pattern interrupt is whatever stops the scroll. A sudden cut. A zoom that comes from nowhere. An opening line that doesn't make grammatical sense. The creator tapping aggressively on a product. These are all calculated disruptions designed to short-circuit the brain's autopilot and force a moment of active attention.

In some parts of the online world they re also called thumbstoppers. Your thumb has a mind of its own.

Why It Works, and Why That Should Keep You Awake at Night

Here's where it gets a little horrifying. The reason pattern interrupts are now a mainstream content strategy something every influencer marketing course and social media guru teaches as non-negotiable is not because creators are more competitive, or audiences are more discerning, or the internet has more content. It's because our ability to voluntarily sustain attention has measurably, documentably declined. Ooops.

The data is real, and it's grim. Average social media focus dropped from 12 seconds in 2015 to approximately 8 seconds by 2024 a reduction of nearly a third within a single decade. And a 2023 systematic reviewfound that the collective time we spend on any single topic online has compressed dramatically over the past twenty years, with the cycle accelerating as content volume increases.

A 2024 systematic review analysing twenty-three separate studies, found that excessive social media use was directly associated with impaired attention, reduced working memory, and diminished executive functioning particularly in our kids. Translation: the part of your brain that governs focus, planning, and the ability to sit with difficult things without immediately seeking stimulation has been demonstrably altered by the platforms we use every day.

A Serpent Eating It’s Own Tail

And here's the part that makes this a loop that feeds itself. the worse our collective attention gets, the more aggressive content tactics have to become to achieve even basic engagement. Creators who want to talk about something meaningful healthcare policy, housing rights, climate, their own art now have to compete with the same neurological bribery as someone selling collagen powder. The playing field was never level, and it's getting less level every year. Especially when we know from other studies how misinformation and false news travels faster and further than factual content, that becomes even more harrowing.

Blaming Individuals

The conversation around shortened attention spans tends to land on individuals. You're too distracted. You lack discipline. You need a dopamine detox. The self-help industry that has built an entire economy around selling focus back to us the apps, the journals, etc benefits enormously from framing this as a personal failure.

It isn't. This was a structural intervention in human psychology, built by a relatively small group of predominantly male engineers in Silicon Valley, for the express purpose of maximising engagement metrics that translated directly into advertising revenue. The attention economy, the framework in which human attention is the product being harvested and sold, was not an accident.

Deep Regret

Consider the infinite un yielding scroll. That feature one that makes it technically impossible to reach the endof a feed, eliminating the natural pause that might interrupt a session was invented in 2006 by Aza Raskin, then a 22-year-old designer frustrated by Google’s pagination. Raskin has since expressed profound regret. In 2019, he said he had failed to foresee the consequences, describing infinite scroll as one of the first products deliberately designed not just to help a user but to keep them online for as long as possible. He later calculated that the feature wastes the equivalent of 200,000 human lifetimes daily. vomits on keyboard He has since co-founded the Centre for Humane Technology. He helped make the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. He has testified in court about the harm his invention has caused.

It’s the same mehanism that makes slot machines addictive. Research consistently shows that adolescent girls and young women experience disproportionate harm from social media use with higher rates of anxiety, depression, disordered eating, and appearance-based distress, all correlated with time spent on platforms that algorithmically prioritise content that drives these exact outcomes.

The Cruel Irony

Here is what I find genuinely darkly funny about this, in the way you laugh at things when the alternative is despair. the pattern interrupt exists because of the very problem the platforms it lives on created.

The resulting attention landscape is so fragmented users now exposed to over 5,000 pieces of content daily, up from 1,400 just over a decade ago that anyone trying to communicate something substantive must use psychological shock tactics just to be heard for eight seconds. And those shock tactics further accelerate the degradation they're responding to.

Short-form content has been linked to reduced ability to engage with longer, more complex material over time.

Meanwhile, the self-optimisation content that tells you to protect your attention and do a social media detox and stop doom-scrolling is itself delivered via the exact mechanisms it's critiquing. Including, yes, with a pattern interrupt in the first three seconds.

So What Do We Do With This?

I’m not going to tell you to delete the apps. You know that’s not a real answer at an individual level, and it’s certainly not a productive one it places the burden of a structural problem on the individuals who are most harmed by it. Just log off is the digital equivalent of just don’t go to those bars or don’t wear that skirt.

I think naming the mechanism matters. Understanding that every jarring opening, every dissonant sound effect, every creator yelling WAIT into the camera these are not spontaneous expressions of personality. They are conversions of a psychological vulnerability that was deliberately cultivated into a content strategy that was learned from a marketing course. That knowledge doesn't make you immune to it, but it does change the quality of your relationship with it.

The next time a video does something weird in its opening second and you feel that involuntary snap of attention notice it. Not to feel bad about it, but just to see the mechanism. There you are. There it is. Working exactly as intended.

Now you know what it’s called. And see if you can start watching longer videos until the end, sit with them. Put the phone down and watch. Sit on your thumbs.

Reward people who are making longer, important pieces of content by simply watching it.

The algorithm also compels me to ask you to like, comment and restack this post (only if you enjoyed it of course) so that new people can find me. The best way to support me is to either leave me a little tip here or by joining my fitness community - The Snack Pass. There are no paywalls here and I’d like to keep it that way. Despite myself, I also still use Instagram, so maybe follow me there too.

join The Snack Pass