Digital Health and Weight Loss Culture: Social Media Shaping Modern View of Weight Loss

Social media continue to influence individual choices on diets considering the trends of weight loss culture. Digital platforms have been influential in reshaping the modern dietary habits where the idea of body image is emerging as a priority. For instance, users share photographs of themselves on Instagram and recipes for food that allow them to maintain their ideal body weights, usually with few to no calories, thus transforming people’s approach to health and weight management and becoming extreme. Because of this, it has become necessary to understand the significance of such phenomena as mobile health applications and health-promoting communication employing social networks in transforming cultural attitudes towards beauty, health, well-being, and well-being in particular and society in general. These are social constructs that are influencing individual diet choices in pursuit of weight loss goals. In this paper, we first clarify the concept of digital health in the field of healthcare, find relevant articles in the existing literature concerning the effect of social media on body image and eating habits, present Instagram as an example, and finally, draw a brief conclusion on the role of social media in promoting dieting.