BEYOND THE FEED

On this week’s episode of Beyond the Feed, I sat down with Bailee Nolan, a senior sports and mass communications major at Piedmont University. Nolan and I discussed how she transitioned from being an athlete to solely a student, her newly established marathon training and how the pandemic has impacted society’s perception of health and wellness.

The pandemic was a major lifestyle shift, as many of us know. Nolan and I talked about going from a constant schedule of school, activities, homework and social life to nothing — and how that change affected us.

During this time, the uptick in social media use among Gen Z was significant, especially for Nolan. She said she only downloaded TikTok when she realized she had nothing else to do during the pandemic.

That was the beginning of building an algorithm that fed her fitness content. Nolan found fitness creators like Chloe Ting appealing and decided to start watching her videos.

Ting began making fitness content advertised as “20-day ab challenges.” Her already fit physique made viewing and following her videos a no-brainer for young girls.

“It is very misleading,” Nolan said. “People don’t realize how much nutrition affects it either.”

Nolan quickly realized, like many of us, that the workouts were ineffective without other healthy habits in place.

“Body image became such a big thing during COVID,” Nolan said.

We spent more time looking in the mirror and scrolling through what we thought we needed to look like on our phones than we did going outside and developing healthy habits during a time of isolation.

Ting now has more than 25 million subscribers on YouTube and still produces content geared toward developing appealing physiques.

Because of COVID, many of us have learned to fill our downtime by scrolling and trying to find easy fixes for problems that are often far more complex than a 10-day squat challenge. This is hard to avoid when “simple fixes” are often wrapped in a 30-second video geared towards entertainment. The cycle becomes harder to break when the habits we have developed have been slowly integrated into our lives, our mindset and our feeds.

What habits did you pick up during the pandemic?