Someone is scrolling your feed right now with a complicated history with her body. Maybe she’s been through the diet cycle. Maybe she’s in recovery. Maybe she just spent six months learning to stop measuring herself against other people’s bodies, and it’s still fragile.
She sees your post. Split screen. Before. After. The caption says something kind.
Her nervous system doesn’t read captions.
It reads the image. And the image says: the before body is the problem body. The goal of working with a practitioner like you is to become the after. Smaller. Tighter. Fixed.
That message lands whether you intended it or not. Research consistently finds that viewing before/after weight loss content predicts increased body dissatisfaction and dietary restraint in viewers — not correlated with, predicted. The National Eating Disorders Association flags before/after imagery as explicitly triggering and advises practitioners to stop posting it. Full stop.
The clients most harmed by this content are the ones your practice was built to serve. That’s not a small design flaw. That’s a values misalignment — and the practitioners posting it are, almost without exception, people who genuinely care.
Which is exactly why it’s worth saying.
What to post instead
You can document progress and celebrate wins without the split screen.
Capability milestones. She held crow pose for the first time. He ran his first 5K. She got through a full class without stopping to apologise for her body. Real wins that don’t require a body size comparison.
Qualitative testimony. Quote your clients directly, with permission, about how they feel. Not how they look. I sleep through the night now. I stopped dreading Mondays. I feel like myself again. These are the transformations worth celebrating.
Process documentation. Share the work, not the result. People showing up. The practice itself.
Your own story without the split screen. You can talk about your health journey, your relationship with your body, your practice — all of it — without the before photo. The story doesn’t need the comparison to land.
The before/after format isn’t neutral. It has a mechanism, and the mechanism causes harm — including to the people sitting in your waiting room, on your mat, in your inbox. You don’t have to use it.
Janelle — Matriarch Studio buildwithmatriarch.com
Further reading
- Fardouly & Vartanian — Social comparisons on social media and body image concerns, Body Image, 2015
- Tiggemann & Zaccardo — The effect of fitspiration imagery on women’s body image, Body Image, 2015
- Rodgers et al. — Social media use, body image and dietary restraint, Computers in Human Behavior, 2023
- National Eating Disorders Association — Toolkits and practitioner guidance