Why Do So Many Women Equate Looking Sexier With Improving Their Mental Health?

Exercising offers an array of physical and mental benefits, and anyone who starts working out for the first time can clearly see how much better they feel after committing to the gym regularly. Your mood is lifted, you have more motivation throughout the day, your immune system is stronger, and you tend to make better choices throughout the day with your diet. But there's another reason why women are lifting weights: for their mental health. Wanting to improve your mental and emotional health is a perfectly understandable goal when you hit the gym, but there's a strange phenomenon going on where women will post before-and-after pictures of their body (usually their butt) in which they look (and dress) much sexier in the "after" picture than the "before." These are always shared in the name of mental health.

Why Do So Many Women Equate Looking Sexier with Improving Their Mental Health?

There's a plethora of photos in the fitness depths of Instagram where women happily post a picture of what they used to look like compared to what they look like today. In the "before" photo, they usually write some kind of caption or overlay about how they used to be unhappy, anxious, and generally lacking excitement for life. The "after" photo displays a woman who is confident, happier, and in possession of much better mental health. But in all of these photos, the "after" image is always sexier, dressed in scant clothing, and usually revealing a much bigger butt.

Before-and-after photos are certainly no new phenomenon on Instagram. Women have been sharing their before-and-after weight-loss pictures for years, ever since Instagram became a trend. But there's something new happening with the before-and-after photos that feature women dressing and appearing much sexier than they did before, all under the guise of mental health.

Some Twitter users have pointed out this trend, sharing photos of a girl who claimed she was "underweight, anxious, unhappy" in her "before" photos. She was wearing a black sports bra and normal high-waisted bike shorts in one of the "before" pictures and a long black skirt and tank top in the other "before" picture. She seemed to be in pretty good shape and dressed quite normally. But her "after" photos were a different tune. She was wearing small black underwear with a tight black long-sleeve top, and very tight gray gym shorts with another tight long-sleeved shirt. The gray shorts were riding up in between her butt cheeks to expose every single inch of her bottom. She wrote "healthy and happy both mentally and physically" in the "after" photo.

Some people are wondering whether it's a subconscious transformation that will help them find a better mate and procreate. "So their happiness with self is determined by how much material their butt can swallow...." one person commented. Another person wrote, "Womens mental health: 'Turns out what I needed was a BLACK WOMANS BODY.'"

There are many other examples online, which are usually online trainers who share their own before-and-after pictures and also help women transform their bodies and improve their self-confidence.

While there's certainly nothing wrong with improving your physique and exercising more, we have to confront the phenomenon occurring with women online. They're equating looking sexier and having more curves with better mental health. It's interesting that this is the message sold by many of the same women who complain about the objectification of women in the media by men. It's okay when women objectify themselves, but it's never okay when the rest of society does.

There's also something flawed with this concept, especially when you consider the fact that there are plenty of beautiful, perfectly sculpted people who are deeply unhappy and unfulfilled. There has to be another element to the conversation that encourages women to invest in their physical health while also understanding that growing a big butt isn't guaranteed to improve your mental and emotional health—or magically improve your whole life.