End Fitness Influencers

Every. Single. Day. Another famous fitness upstart dead or hospitalized. Please, let us exert a little more discretion before heaping praise upon inexperience and/or people who live in perpetual life imbalance in the fitness industry.

Here’s a newbie who right out of the gate takes drugs she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t bust her rear with hard work for 10-20 years first. She doesn’t gain any experience in fitness progressions without drug abuse. Before we know it, she commands the minds of tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, directing them on behavior before she’s learned to manage herself appropriately.

The drugs create a heightened environment for leanness and strength, which produce excessive sweating. If she knew anything, was mentored by anybody, she could downdose or offdose. But then she might lose followers. Then she might lose endorsements. She would lose collaborators.

So instead the newbie touts an anti-sweeting procedure which requires anesthetic that doesn’t mix with the drugs she refuses to discontinue. In her hubris she doesn’t disclose said drugs to the clinic; and predictably she dies. 100% preventable.

This craziness isn’t rare. And young people are not going to just magically become internally grown-up, intrinsically motivated, and self-confident in hard work. While the market place rewards foolishness and short-cuts and inauthenticity with attention, attention-seeking youths are going to keep trading their lives and health for your attention.

Yes, the individual is responsible for her own decisions. The many many other influencers who've been dropping like flies in the past months are personally responsible. But the community is responsible for the incentives. If we keep rewarding physical and mental unhealthiness with our attention and our likes, we too are part of the problem.