I've unfollowed 90% of the InstaGay accounts I used to lurk on and it's made me feel 100% better about my body

• I unfollowed popular InstaGay accounts where men post curated photos of themselves and their lives.
• I realized every time I was logging onto Instagram, I left feeling worse.

I've had Instagram since college, but it wasn't until more recently that I noticed I started following a web of often interconnected gay social media influencers, otherwise known as InstaGays.

If you're not familiar with the concept of an InstaGay — a concept parodied in shows like "The Other Two" — these are gay male users who post idealized versions of their life, often showing off things like their homes, their partner, their vacations, and, most importantly, their bodies.

Logging on, I'd be inundated with photos of half-naked men who always had the vibe of college seniors spending endless summer nights with their besties and I was left off the invite list. I noticed myself spending ten minutes each morning and night staring at my skin and wondering why it wasn't as flawless as I wanted, and feeling like I was doing something wrong.

Constant comparisons are one of the biggest downfalls of social media

There's a large body of evidence showing that constant comparisons to others on social media can have a negative impact on our mental health. And that's exactly what I was doing — there were chiseled bodies, sculpted abs, and endless shirtless selfies to make me feel inadequate or that certain queer spaces were reserved for people who never missed leg day.

I was noticing negative lingering feelings after closing the app, and one day decided to start unfollowing some of these accounts.

In about a year, I went from following over 1,900 accounts to 840. I would go to my Following tab in the app and slowly purge out the people who made me feel bad about myself. I probably did three of these purges over the course of a few months, my algorithm feeding me reminders of the few personalities I had yet to snip out of my life.

It felt strange to start unfollowing these accounts at first, but then it eventually felt liberating

The weird thing about social media is it creates parasocial relationships with the people you follow. You feel like you know them — and, to an extent, you do, just the fictionalized version of them.

At first, it felt weird cutting these accounts off. I'd sometimes find myself manually searching up some names to see what they were up to now, what their new look was, or how their wedding had gone.

But eventually, those check-ins grew less and less frequent, and it made my relationship with my body and Instagram as a whole much healthier.

There are still a small handful of InstaGay accounts I follow — I'd be lying if I said it was super easy to totally unfollow all of the thirst accounts out there. But I don't have the same negative feelings I have as I did when my feed was inundated with the minute-by-minute, play-by-play from Fire Island Pines.