Learn how influencers like Emmaline Howard are changing the fitness industry for women, and see the impact that unrealistic content can have on the positive changes being made. Discover how her identity as a coach and as a woman, allows her to authentically connect with her audience and inspire change.

Introduction

The engagement with social media by female scientists, accredited personal trainers, professional athletes, influencers, micro celebrities and more, has rapidly help change the fitness industry for women. Not only through influencing our understanding of our relationships with food and exercise, but also our understanding with ourselves and each other. These women have been able to use their professional identities to create a safe online community for women in the health and fitness space, surrounding positive relationships with our health and wellbeing. Many of these creators’ content is supported by lived experience and science, allowing for the far easier access to reliable and trustworthy information about health and fitness than previously possible. Emmaline Howard is one such changemaker in the fitness industry for women, whose highly relatable, educational and entertaining content, particularly on Instagram, helps her to authentically connect with her viewers and promote positive messages around women’s health. As a young Australian woman living in the UK, she has been able to connect with a wide range of viewers through the sharing of her life online. Coupled with her bubbly personality and highly conversational video style, she has effectively marketed herself as a trustworthy and relatable voice in the industry. Her identity as both a professional personal trainer and her identity as a woman in the fitness industry enables her to authentically advocate for positive change. However, despite the many powerful and positive voices online today, there are still many creators that promote unrealistic health and beauty standards that can have a multitude of negative outcomes on consumers. It is the role of creators such as Howard, to combat these negative portrayals and to continue to advocate realistic messages. Emmaline Howard’s identity as both a personal trainer and woman in the health and fitness space, enables her to advocate for healthier relationships with food, our bodies and our minds, and helps to overcome negative standards set by other creators, and impact viewers in both the digital and physical world.

How her identity as a coach inspires change

Emmaline Howard’s identity as both a professional online coach, and as someone who has personally struggled with diet and fitness, allows her to advocate for the better understanding of women’s health in the fitness industry, and inspire realistic change. The prevalence of social media in today’s world and reliance on the information found within this space has provided a platform for micro celebrities such as Howard, to build an identity and community that primarily focusses on “fat loss, fitness & food relationship made real and relatable” (Howard, 2025). With micro celebrities being defined as “ordinary people who seek to develop personal brands through self-disclosure and continuous engagement with a niche audience online” (Xu et al. 2024). As an accredited personal trainer, she is well positioned to debunk misconceptions about how to lose weight and build a healthy relationship with food and sustain fat loss goals. Drawing on her own experiences of yo-yo dieting and having personally “battled disordered eating habits” (Newsweek, 2023), she teaches her audience how to “eat generous portions of nourishing food while still losing weight, all by favouring volume foods” (Newsweek, 2023), with professional nutritionists backing her claims within the article. Howard highlights how “fat loss isn’t all about cutting things out. It’s more about what things you can add to improve your life” (Howard, 2024). This shift in mindset away from the restriction and reduction of food when trying to lose weight, and towards what you can eat and do while still hitting caloric goals, helps promote a healthy relationship with food. Howard’s perspective on this methodology is backed by her own personal experiences, with her sharing photos online of the way her body has changed since adopting healthy eating and exercise habits. The rawness of these posts helps her to authentically engage her audiences, with the realistic setting of body image standards inspiring real, uplifting change. Her messages around food intake also helps to debunk common weight loss myths, including “skipping meals”, “eliminating whole food groups” and “intermittent fasting” (Better Health Channel, 2024). Changing the perception from food intake/ restriction being a punishment, and towards it being a path to a healthier and more sustainable lifestyle is how she effectively advocates healthy, sustainable change. In addition to her messages online, Howard actively seeks to supports her followers live by her messages and achieve their goals, through the option to purchase her recipe book “Ripper Recipes For Fat Loss”, as well as the option to sign up for coaching by her. The combination of her sharing her own unfiltered journey with health and weight online, with her professional qualification as a coach, enables her to effectively advocate positive mindset shifts towards better relationships with food and health in the fitness industry, particularly for women.  

How her identity as a woman inspires change

Emmaline Howard’s identity as a woman in the health and fitness industry allows her to authentically advocate for women and inspire positive change. Her relatable videos posted to social media about her lived experiences as a woman in today’s world, enables her to teach others how to build a resilient mind and body, as well as break down traditional gender stereotypes and empower women. Historically, men have dominated the gym space with research showing that “while 70 percent of men surveyed are self-employed gym owners, only 29 percent of women are” (Sports Alliance. 2022), a statistic that also reflect the gender divide in everyday gymgoers too. This gap between male and female representation in the gym is significantly driven by the many stereotypes and misconceptions around women’s bodies and the impact of weightlifting on overall health. Research into these stereotypes has shown that both men and women often perceive weightlifting as a “mainly men’s sport”, is “unwomanly” and “spoils a woman’s body shape” (Stepanova et al, 2018). Howard seeks to rebut these claims, passionately explaining how “feminine looks different for everyone, but it is not defined by what other people think, it is up to the woman whose body it is, and in this new age where more women than ever appreciate the benefits of weight training, you can bet there’s gonna be a lot more women out there who define feminine as physically strong AF” (Howard 2024). This advocacy for women building muscle and confidence, is exemplified by Howard herself, through the way she leads by example and shows “Proof you can lift weights and still be feminine” (Howard 2024) in a post of her in a feminine dress showing off her toned back and arm. Not only is “lifting weights so good for our bodies, especially as we get older. It [also] allows us to keep a strong, fit and able body right through life.” (Howard 2024). This point is supported within academia too, with research highlighting how strength training “helps women maintain muscle and bone mass and reduces risk for numerous chronic diseases.” (Seguin et al, 2013). Despite the scientific proof that exercise and weightlifting positively impact our bodies and minds, women are still faced with negative commentary about our appearances. Howard’s use of her online platform enables her to share her unfiltered personal experiences with dealing with such commentary. With the content fuelling her discussion surrounding the importance of building physical strength, but also resilience and mental strength to advocate for ourselves in today’s world. Emmaline’s identity as a woman has influenced her passionate work in advocating for women in the fitness industry and engaging in weightlifting and strength training exercises. Not only does it have physical and mental health benefits that are backed by science but also helps to empower women and debunk gender stereotypes within society.

The negative impact of selective content creators on mental and physical health

Despite Howard’s continued advocacy for the betterment of women’s health on social media, the online identities of influencers and micro celebrities with highly curated content can result in the disconnect between realistic, and only aspirational health goals. It is a well-known fact that social media often offers a rose-tinted perspective on the health and fitness industry, with many utilising the affordances of the digital space and the power of editing technologies, lighting, posing, clothing and even steroids to control their online personas and identities. One such example of an influencer that perpetuates unsustainable health practices is bodybuilder Kat Poulopoulos. While she is undeniably fit and lean, the content and lifestyle she advocates is far from what is achievable for the average person. Her posts consistently involve incredibly well-lit and posed photos and training videos, with captions like “happiness dump” and “push day highlights” (Poulopoulos, 2025), that only focus on the positive events in her life and training regime. She talks about the need to “build habits, muscle and discipline” (Poulopoulos, 2025) all while failing to acknowledge how the “lack of time, lack of motivation, and lack of accessible places” (Ferreira silva, et al. 2022) greatly impacts on everyone’s, but particularly young people’s own fitness journeys. Poulopoulos also fails to advocate a balanced view of how living with very low body fat and frequent exercise can interrupt “many hormonal functions in the body… and contribute to the loss of periods… infertility and problems with pregnancy” (mayo clinic, 2023), as a result of her lifestyle. The issue with this unbalanced perspective is that it sets an unrealistic standard for the everyday consumer and particularly young adolescents struggling with body dysmorphia that are consistently online. Research has indicated that “Instagram was used by more than 70% of adolescents” with “42%” showing a “tendency to develop eating disorders” (Mushtaq et al. 2023). This is only set to rise, should these fitness influencers and micro celebrities continue to perpetuate only aspirational and unsustainable health practices. Howard has outspokenly recognised this trend for unrealistic creators and the harmful impact that they can have on both our mental and physical wellbeing. In one of her videos posted to Instagram, she explains how “the years I spent beating myself up over the fact I didn’t look like everyone I saw on social media, when in reality, they rarely looked like that either”, Inspired her to want to “show in real time with no edits, so you can instantly see the difference lighting and posing can make.” (Howard, 2025). Filtered exposure to the health and fitness industry via unbalanced influencers in the online space, can not only contribute to eating disorders, but also enable body image struggles. It is the role of creators like Emmaline to continue to promote healthy, sustainable lifestyles and work towards supporting and changing the fitness industry for women, for the better.

Conclusion

The significant changes to the health and fitness industry over the past 20 years has greatly been influenced by the rise of social media, and the work of powerful women like Emmaline Howard. Being able to convey an authentic voice and realistic expectations around food, weight loss, body image and mental health/ strength, has allowed her to promote positive messages and inspire her followers. Her identity as both a personal trainer and woman in the health and fitness space has significantly driven her work around advocacy and positive change and the breaking of gender stereotypes and health misconceptions. These actions help to empower and inspire audiences to start their own health journeys and create social change. The prevalence of other content creators that offer a distorted perspective on women’s health, food and fitness, such as Kat Poulopoulos, only fuels the need for the content of creators like Howard. While there are many issues and challenges within the fitness industry for women and the online space, movements towards empowerment, equality and authenticity will only continue to grow.

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References

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Poulopoulos, K. [@gainsbykatt] (n.d). Home [Instagram profile]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/gainsbykatt/

Seguin RA, Eldridge G, Lynch W, Paul LC. (2013). Strength Training Improves Body Image and Physical Activity Behaviors Among Midlife and Older Rural Women. National Library of Medicine. 51(4) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4354895/

Sport Alliance. (2022). The fitness industry remains male-dominated. https://www.sportalliance.com/en/press/the-fitness-industry-remains-male-dominated/

Stepanova, O. N., Stepanova, D. P., Pirogova, A. A., & Karpov, V. Y. (2018). Womens Weight Lifting As Sport Discriminated Against On Grounds Of Gender. Research Paradigms Transformation in Social Sciences. European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences 35(1) 1325-1332. https://doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2018.02.155

Xu, H., Weninger, C., & Chen, D.-T. V. (2024). Microcelebrities’ identity construction on social media: A systematic review and synthesis. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 28(2), 493-518. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494241246077