The Insidious Way ‘Health Coaches’ Are Targeting New Moms on Instagram
The DMs are all the same.
After dozens of them, new moms like Christina Andreola, who lives in Dallas, can recite the script: “Hey mama. I see you recently had a baby. I know how hard it is to get that prebaby body back. I’m sure you’re ready to jump back into it. I’m building my accountability team and would love to have you join us.”
Whitney Roop, whose daughter was just 11 months old when I interviewed her, estimates that she gets at least two DMs or follow requests per day from people she doesn’t know who want to sell her weight-loss products.
It’s gotten so out of control that Mia O’Malley from Jersey City, who has a nine-month-old,* has picked up on the triggers: “Every time I use #plussizemom [on a post], I get targeted by a health or lifestyle coach.”
It’s a social media pandemic: These so-called health coaches are spamming new moms, determined to sell them on weight loss—supplements, workout programs, protein shakes, and more—in one of the most vulnerable, complicated periods in their life: the postpartum months.
Targeting new moms is not a new marketing tactic. The group tends to have both some spending power and no small amount of desperation—an ideal combination for not just retailers and big companies but influencers. Entire industries in nutrition, fitness, and apparel have sprung up around the notion of “bouncing back” from having a child.
And it’s no wonder new moms feel an inordinate amount of pressure: We live in a world in which Kylie Jenner posed on her Instagram in a waist trainer less than two months after giving birth. We’ve all been made to feel that our bodies are never good enough and that even a shred of evidence that another human once lived inside it must be erased. While ads and #sponsored posts that are designed to make a mom feel like she needs to “do something” about how she looks are terrible, at least the message isn’t specific to a person. But when the veiled criticism is delivered via DM, the effect is blatant—and personal.
What separates the women behind these messages from run-of-the-mill trolls is that these users tend to have something to sell. Some work for multilevel-marketing companies, also known as MLMs. In an MLM structure, participants sign up to become sellers for a brand for a start-up fee and the cost of some product to sell outright. The goal is both to sell the products purchased and to recruit more sellers. So once a seller has exhausted her personal network, she might turn to social media to find potential new customers—and to reach moms like Andreola.
“I always respond that I am not interested,” says Andreola. But the sellers push. Once, when pressed, Andreola admitted she was just exhausted. The seller was quick with an answer: “I shouldn’t put my body on the back burner or ‘lose myself’ just because I had a baby,” she was told. Andreola was outraged. “The first year of my daughter’s life is a reason my body is on the back burner. As new moms, we are tired and sleep deprived. We are stressed. We don’t feel human in this stage of our lives. Some of us may be struggling with postpartum anxiety or depression. The last thing we need is someone messaging us to help us lose the baby weight,” she says.
Andreola is right: A 2017 survey found that 52% of parents admit to suffering from loneliness, which they often attribute to a lack of money (and therefore childcare options). Sixty-eight percent felt cut off from the friends they had before they had kids. New parenthood—especially new motherhood, since the balance of parental leave often leaves moms at home with a baby and no adults to talk to—can be isolating.
Enter Instagram, believe it or not. The social network provides a safe space for new moms to commiserate, connect, and learn from one another, especially during the first weeks of parenting, when moms who are fortunate enough to be able to take leave from work are cooped up and in need of support. Women who want to sell product know this. “As soon as you hashtag #plussizemom, #newmom, #postpartummom, even #fatmom, you will get at least three of these accounts following you,” O’Malley explains. (In addition to her own account, @miaomalley, O’Malley coruns a page called @plussizebabywearing and has worked in social media professionally.)
It happens, too, whenever Brandy Casebolt, a new mom from Missouri, posts with these hashtags. “I have had body dysmorphia since my teenage years,” she says. “I absolutely hated myself. And then I got pregnant. It was like something inside me was just like, Hello, you’re fabulous! It made me realize I am not an awful person just because I exist in a larger body.” It was that epiphany that led Casebolt to start using plus-size motherhood hashtags on her posts in the first place. “The hashtags remind me of what I feel whenever I see other plus-size women flaunting themselves: That’s my community; I don’t have to be fat and sad,” she says. Getting a weight-loss DM does the opposite; it reminds her of her old feelings: “It enrages me. It makes me so angry that somebody would use a positive outlet for something so awful.”
So if this practice is so gross, why does it keep happening? Melissa Blevins, the blogger behind Perfection Hangover and a former coach in the world of weight-loss MLMs, believes the women behind the messages honestly don’t see themselves as online bullies. “They believe they were sent by someone—God, maybe—to help these women,” she says. “They probably believe that when other women are hashtagging, that’s an open invitation to come and help that person.”
Regardless of why it’s happening, “from a body-positive perspective, it’s a terrible source of bullying,” says O’Malley. “Women who follow hashtags like these, they usually have come to a place in their life—after many years of struggling—of accepting their body or learning to love their body,” she says. “To target women who are exploring the world for the first time from the perspective of ‘Hey, I like myself the way I am’—you are completely degrading that.”
These communities are important too: Recent Pew research found that 50% of moms say they’ve received social or emotional support about a parenting issue from online networks—and using hashtags like these is an effective way to find women in similar situations to your own. “There’s a huge amount of vulnerability as a new mom—your body is changing, your relationship to the world is changing. Having other people to go through that with is powerful,” says Amanda Lenhart, program director of health and data the Data & Society Research Institute in NYC and one of the researchers on the Pew study. “But because of the way you’re looking for those people—through hashtags—it means other people can find you, whether that’s to market [product] to you or worse.”
It becomes a catch-22: “The way to create the strongest connections online is by letting your armor down and being vulnerable, but if you have to keep that armor up because you’re afraid of the comments or messages that might come in, you won’t get the very thing you were looking for.” Roop says that’s been her exact experience—that these DMs have corrupted her relationship to social media overall, and she’s gone from connecting with other moms across the platform to retreating into her private account. “I’ve stopped using hashtags because of this,” she says. “It sucks. You want and need to have a community as a mom, and then that community preys on you.”
Jane Marie, host of the podcast The Dream, which delved deep into the world of MLMs in its first season, adds that there is really only one solution—ignoring the messages, even if it might feel good to try and tell someone off. Sellers for MLMs or other companies tend to have an answer for everything. “They don’t care that they’re invading your space,” says Marie. “If you get a request from somebody you don’t know, just let it go to the garbage.”
Ages reflect how old children were at the time of interviews.
Sara Gaynes Levy is a writer and editor in New York City covering women’s health, parenting, and culture. Her work has appeared in New York magazine, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, and others. Follow her on Instagram (but please no solicitous DMs!) @saragayneslevy.
Originally Appeared on Glamour
