Fitness Influencer With 1m Followers Quit After a Big Realization

• Madalyn Giorgetta, 35, sold fitness guides to help women achieve a curvaceous, muscular figure.
• In 2019, she switched gears when she realized her message was one that celebrated thinness.
• By posting photos of her body online, Giorgetta became constantly obsessed with what she saw as her flaws.

This essay is based on a conversation with Madalyn Giorgetta, a 35-year-old Australian fitness influencer turned nutritionist. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

In 2019, I ran a fitness empire and had 1 million followers on Instagram. Now I’m a nutritionist, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.

I was getting 60,000 likes on my bikini photos, becoming a GymShark athlete, and selling my own workout programs. Once I realized that I was supporting harmful ideas about body image, I shifted gears. I now have 500 likes on a graphic I created about nutrition. I’m very happy that someone likes my content, even if my body isn’t featured.

It all started back in 2016 when I ate terrible food and didn’t exercise. At the time, I was running a social media management business with my sister. My boyfriend at the time, now my husband, said it would be a good idea for me to start taking care of my body with love. I started going to the gym. It was to prove to him that I could do it.

I signed up for a fitness app created by Kayla Itsines, a well-known personal trainer and fitness influencer at the time. About 6 months later, she reposted the before and after photos I had uploaded and gained about 10,000 followers overnight. Back then, if Kayla posted someone, it would explode.

My following grew from there, but I didn’t really have that much experience in fitness. People have asked me for advice and I thought, “Oh, I’m a fitness person now.”

I wrote my own program and people liked it

This was a time when everyone was tired of burpees and mountaineers, and beauty standards were shifting from skinny to muscular and curvaceous.

The guide I was following was designed to be used at home with minimal equipment, but after a while I started to get frustrated that my body wasn’t building muscle the way I wanted it to. .

I wanted to get stronger and have a muscular body, so I started researching and reading books about how to do it. After falling down the rabbit hole of how to build muscle and the best techniques, I developed my own program that incorporated weights.

I was always thin, but through the gym I was able to shape myself into the aesthetic that I aspired to at the time. Essentially there was a solution.

At this stage, I was running an influential social media business. What made an impact was my side hustle income source.

I started selling guides around April 2017, and sales exploded. It got really big and then I started working on my own fitness app, working with brands and gaining more and more followers. I was very excited. It took me about a year in total to be able to quit my social media job and work full time in fitness.

My body became my calling card and it led me into an obsessive headspace

I’ve always been very sensitive to people’s criticism and compared myself to others. But when I became an influencer, that feeling became a thousand times bigger.

I became obsessed with everything from the engagement on my posts to the number of guides I was selling to how my body looked in photos.

Before I started fitness, I didn’t really look at my body. My body was my body. However, since I started looking in the mirror and taking pictures all the time, I became more particular about everything.

I strongly believe that my body is my business card and if it looks a certain way, I can get more likes, sell more products and make more money. I was aware of it. I wasn’t really interested in money itself. That was validation. More money means more people will like me.

It was insane that I could grow a business by posting my body a certain way and knowing what it should look like. I had to pose in a certain style, work on my abs, avoid eating before training, get a full face tan, apply eyelashes, get Botox, and get fillers.

Even though I was very successful and people wanted to look like me, I never felt good about the way I looked. My phone was lined with selfies of me trying to get the best angle. I felt like I wasn’t good enough because there was always someone who was more toned, more beautiful, and doing better financially. It ruined my mental health.

I started looking into the messages I was sending.

In 2019, I started to reflect. I visited my sister in San Francisco and tried the hallucinogen psilocybin. This opened my mind to ideas I had never thought of or allowed myself to think about.

It made me question what I was promoting and what I had been accepting. For example, why do people have trouble losing weight when diets are supposed to “work”? I used to think people weren’t trying hard enough or didn’t have the “right” knowledge. However, after this experience, I began to recognize the complex factors that influence a person’s ability to manage their weight, such as socio-economic status.

I became genuinely interested in reading and understanding more deeply. The messages also had an even deeper impact on me, as I felt more open, caring, and accepting.

A few weeks later, I stumbled across an article about how diets don’t work. It mentioned a study and the various experiences of several people. Suddenly it felt so true to me. I just remember crying and thinking, “Oh my god, this isn’t working. What was I doing? This is a scam.”

Although my content wasn’t specifically about dieting, I did post before-and-after photos of women who lost weight and now looked thinner after using my program. I talked about low-calorie diets and used phrases like “lose weight” in the app. I promoted the idea of ​​”no excuses” when it comes to going to the gym.

I started looking into what that word actually meant and the underlying message I was sending. It’s not saying, “Be your best self,” it’s saying, “Be your leanest self.” It was clear that I was telling people that their bodies were not good enough and needed to change.

Naturally, it took me a while to accept it emotionally as I made excuses for why I did what I did. I feel guilty about so many things I said.

But overall, we felt we needed to take action immediately. I thought, “What can I do to change this?”

I completely changed my message and got a lot of hate.

I became very obsessed with learning about food culture, fatphobia, and public health.

I quit my job at a supplement company because they had a protein powder called Lean Protein. I thought, “No, I can’t do that.” I stopped working with activewear brands that didn’t sell clothes larger than XL. These deals were thousands of dollars, but I was just cutting back.

My content then centered around anti-diet culture and I received some pretty bad backlash.

I got a lot of hateful comments every time I posted, and I lost a lot of followers and friends in the industry, which was really sad.

People either don’t follow me for that kind of content, or they feel like I’m shaming them because I’m saying things like, “Ditch your fitness apps.” It kind of created a vortex of shame and anger, and it was a scary space to be in.

I decided to study for a Bachelor’s degree in Nutrition because I felt people wouldn’t take me seriously because I didn’t have the qualifications to back up what I said.

I wish I didn’t care so much about what people think

It was really hard to suddenly and drastically change my message in front of a large audience, but I don’t regret anything.

I currently work as a functional dietitian and see clients one-on-one remotely. I used to have a more extreme anti-diet stance. Now I am more focused on my beliefs. I recommend a whole food diet and eating foods that give your body energy and make you feel full.

I still have a lot of followers on Instagram, but I don’t really consider myself an influencer because I rarely work with brands. I use this as a way to gain clients, connect with my community, and share educational content about nutrition and fitness.

I recently started going to the gym again after a 5 year break. I stopped going because I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror without thinking, “I look so bad, I don’t have this, I don’t have that.”

I’m proud of my decision and happy with myself and what I’ve done. My relationships with myself, my body, my partner, and my friends have also improved.

I wish Madalyn didn’t care so much about people’s opinions back then.