With the rise of Instagram, fitness bloggers aren’t rara avis anymore. What is more, each of them has his/her own opinion on different things. For example our recent story about a blogger who stated that cancer isn’t harmful at all. She is another bright confirmation that all the followers subscribed to such profiles may receive adverse influence from there.
Also popularity, gaining could be one more reason for such “bad” bloggers to register their page. Because their strongest point and distinguishing feature would be lateral thinking and “opinion leader.”
However, there are bloggers whose posts can bring something new and useful. Particularly, Anna Rhodes. This girl is a personal trainer from St Albans, UK.
She has a pretty big fanbase on Instagram, with her 24,000 followers who enjoy her posts surrounding her workouts and food. However, despite looking fresh and pretty lovely in her latest professional shoot, Anna has revealed that she was, in fact, feeling emaciated and exhausted at the time.
When taking to her Instagram account, the personal trainer shared two images side by side. The left one of her in a professionally lit environment and the other showing her real physique at the time of the photoshoot.
She admitted that her body was so horrible because of “extreme dieting” and advised nobody to strive for the looks seen in professional fitness photos.
“So I had someone recently say to me “I want to get as lean as you were in your PT photo shoot.” And to be honest, I didn’t feel entirely comfortable with that. It’s inspired a #throwbackThursday because it actually it made me feel kind of guilty. These images are with professional lighting, a lot of fake tan, tonnes of makeup, good posing and a physique that looked that way from extreme dieting.
It’s not probably something that a lot of people would worry about in the industry, as the more shreds, the better, right? It’s advertising material after all? Selling a dream?”
“But these photos don’t represent what I ACTUALLY looked like in real life being that low body fat – which was kind of emaciated and exhausted looking. I weighed 98lbs and freaked out when I went over 100lb – I’m now 128 for a bit of reference. I look back at me when I was like that and I barely recognise myself.
I had a coach telling me “my legs weren’t lean enough” and I became obsessed with the fact I had big legs. It was essentially an eating disorder under the guise of “fitness” and I’m not afraid to admit that.”
Anna is also going to get her images re-shot by a different photographer in order to make sure that her photos correlate with her words.
“Funnily enough I am actually organising getting a new photoshoot done to get myself some PT images looking in shape, but a more obtainable and healthy look. When I enquired with a well-known photographer in the industry, he said I should reconsider getting “shredded” and he didn’t want me to look back on the images thinking I looked “not lean enough” or “fat”.
My response: erm you can do one Arseholes like these are definitely a problem within the industry and there is a lot of pressure to look a certain way – and definitely a reason that you might slip into eating disorder territory without even realising.”
“Yes I know how to get bikini “shreds”. But actually I want to inspire others to feel good – mentally and physically. THIS is the dream I want to sell.
So next time your looking at all your fave fitspos images, please remember that 1. They probably look like that for a very short space of time. 2. That look is often not particularly obtainable if you aren’t a fitness fanatic – and even then it’s pretty tough. 3. Tannnnnn”.