Social Media Influence On Health And Wellbeing

Introduction

The purpose of this project is to research how social media impacts our eating habits, health and wellbeing. I will be looking at groups of people from the ages of 16-20. This area of study that I will be researching and can be used with my A level subjects, Sociology, English and Health and Social care studies. The motive behind this research is to look into how media influences our eating habits, health and wellbeing. Due to the rise of 'lifestyle' bloggers, I want to know to what extent we trust them and live our lives by following them, and how this effects us. I have addressed this issue by carrying out quantitative data through questionnaires and, in addition, two semi-structured interviews to gain my findings.

Aims and

Tara is also a personal trainer, spinning instructor and believe it or not a wife and mother too. I feel that Tara would instantly gain more followed on any social media platform by putting 'wife and mother' into the 'about me' category as it implies to other women that the is very relatable. Tara explains how she doesn't like Facebook and only uses it as a platform to keep up with her other friends and track their fitness through it. She believes that social media does in fact have a big impact on our health. However, the impact that Tara believes it has is very positive. For example, she explains that she has always wanted to do a half marathon, and seeing the medal on a social media platform a few weeks before the actual run, motivates her even more to want to complete it and score a time. Social media loaded with images, especially Instagram and Pinterest are a good influential platform. Tara also makes a valid positive point by saying that the ability of being able to link social media with certain health tools and technology, such as 'myfitnesspal' and 'fitbit' makes it easier to keep track of your

The first one is the fact that is is very addictive. Internet addiction is a very real problem and is classed as clinical disorder. Being addicted to something is very draining on your mental and maybe even physical health. For example, you may be so addicted to reading through Facebook every night that you miss out on sleep, making yourself ill. Slowly, as like any other addiction, you do not realize that you would not be able to go without it. Many young people, when faced with overcoming something like anorexia, find it harder to tackle the issue if they have access to certain websites, as the websites fuel their addiction to become thin. Another negative impact that social media has is that it makes us compare our lives to others. Social media is there because it helps us to mask who we really are and sugarcoat our lives. When we get too sucked in, we start to compare our actual lives with a life that someone has more or less made up. This can give us phycological issues and cause us to be very obsessive, especially if it's that we are comparing looks or image. Cyberbullying is a very big factor that has only been around in the past 10 years or so, since social media. A very frequently used site called 'ask.fm' became popular around the year 2013. It involved people writing anonymous comments to each other. In August 2013, ask.fm literally got so out of control that a