Why I Love & Hate Pinterest
I’m sure a lot of you, maybe even most of you, have come
across this site due in no small part to Pinterest. I use Pinterest a fair
amount, primarily because it’s an easy way to get free exposure for my writing
and, eventually, my services as a personal trainer. As a whole, I really love
Pinterest, there’s some great stuff on there and the community that ‘pins’
seems to be without the judgemental trolls that inhabit other social media
outlets like Tumblr and Imgur.
Unfortunately though, as far as I’ve seen in the Health & Fitness bracket
of the site, Pinterest does offer a platform for some pretty suspect stuff to
get a great amount of exposure.
The way I see it, Pinterest is a great place for great training practice,
nutritional advice, and encouragement, but there’s an awful lot of stuff that’s
the complete opposite appearing and, worse, getting frequently repinned.
There seems to be 3 major ways in which Pinterest is not well-serving the fitness
community, and they are: promoting warped goals/ideas, extolling poor
understanding of realistic attainment, and lack of actual information.
Over the next few weeks I’ll go through examples of each of these three
headings, and talk a little bit about why they’re not helping you, or your
fitness goals (or even your mental health, some of them). Given that each
heading is averaging around 500 words, I’ll separate each heading into 2 weeks,
so it’s not just massive article after massive article.
This week, we’re going to go through example 1 of how
Pinterest can give exposure to, and potentially promote, warped goals/ideas.
