One of the best things you can do for your body image, hands down, is going through your Instagram and unfollowing anyone who makes you feel bad about your skin, your body, or just yourself in general.
However, one woman's open letter to the photo-sharing app is asking for Instagram to flat-out ban a certain kind of content, and it's something that shows up on everyone's feed, regardless of who you're following.
She pointed out that almost every single ad featured nearly naked, thin women.
"I’ve started feeling like maybe you don’t realize what being exposed to an endless string of half-naked, extremely thin women is doing to people like me?" she wrote. "You know, I mostly just came here to see pictures of my friends’ dogs and kids and shit, but every time I fire up the old ‘gram these days, I gotta waste a ton of mental energy comparing myself unfavorably to Kayla [Itsines]."
She also pointed out that some women might find the ads triggering.
"If you’re a woman who finds this triggering, who thinks that lots of time spent looking at these images is bad for our overall mental health and sense of self-worth, or that the sheer quantity of this stuff says something really depressing about our value as women in the world — there isn’t really a way to opt out of it," she wrote.
Wait, hold up. There isn't a way to opt out of seeing ads like this?
The short answer: Nope.
The long answer: You really can't. While you can control the feeds you follow on Instagram, you can't control the ads you're served by the app. Instagram pulls information it knows about you (like your gender, your age, what your interests are) and makes some judgements about what you're likely to be into and potentially purchase. In Hallden's case, her love of yoga translated to a ton of bra ads.
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