The Truth About 'Fitspiration'

It's pretty ironic that at 18, I am writing an article about the 'fitspiration' trend we all know and are forced to love. Being so young, you wouldn't expect for me to have something to say about this; my life just started, so how would I know the hardships of becoming fit or eating a perfect diet, or even having an extremely detailed and organized exercise plan? That's the problem: I know. Maybe a bit too much.

Once I hit puberty at around age 13/14, I wasn't the stick that I grew up being. I started to develop curves as one would say, "in all the right places." Long story short, I hated it. I was not okay with putting on the weight for a few reasons. My biggest reasons were my parents. My parents were born and raised in Ukraine until they got married and moved here with my older sister. With that being said, their perception of beauty was completely different than what was considered attractive here. Being curvy with a bit of extra weight was pretty frowned upon in my household. I was always told to eat this, not that, or else I would "get even fatter." My self confidence started to plummet severely. I guess I can thank whatever happened in my early teen years for the severe body dysmorphia I have now. At this point you're probably asking yourself, what does this have to do with 'fitspiration'? I am getting there!!

Fast forward to me at about 16 years old. That is when I seriously became addicted to things like Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter; you name it, I probably had it downloaded onto my phone. I can remember that being the time when all these fitness models started showing themselves off on social media, and actually getting paid for it! I thought to myself "Well if they get paid for looking good, then I need to look exactly like that." I became glued to the Instagram 'explore' page because all of the fitness models' pictures would pop up there. Every caption contained fitness advice, with every piece of fitness advice being totally different; I didn't know which piece of advice to take! All I did know was one thing: I wished I looked like them. To me, they were curvy; they had wide hips, a tiny waist, but they were still STICK THIN. I wanted to look like them so bad, to the point of me having breakdowns because I couldn't achieve what I really wanted. And yeah, yeah, I know, body positivity and all that. But that never worked for me. It worked for others, and props to them for loving their bodies in whatever conditions they were in. But I couldn't love myself if I didn't achieve what I believed was physical perfection. I wasn't going to love myself until I had rock hard quads, a chiseled jaw line, and strong, thin arms.

Getting over this idea of being the epitome of fitness and perfection is something I struggled with to the point of tears, something I struggle with now even. But through all of these hardships that I encountered being a young teen trying to find herself and the love that she was so missing, I realized one thing. You need to love yourself the way you are, no matter how muscular or not you are, no matter how many stretch marks you have, no matter how many scars, bruises, whatever may be on your body; it's you! And that is what social media is NOT teaching us, no matter how it may seem. Although all of these models are preaching about self-love and how everyone is perfect, they're still putting their perfect selves out there for us to see and remember that sure, we're not perfect like them but we just have to settle for ourselves. That is not how is should be. I propose that anyone who reads this really takes into consideration what I have thrown out into this space and truly remembers that no matter how many of those fitness models you may see, looks will only be able to take you so far in life. Work on yourself in whatever manner you seem fit, but take one thing away from this article: Outer confidence stems from inner confidence. Keep that badass personality, be a strong-minded figure, and always remember that just because you're not getting paid 10k for a picture you post of your body on Instagram, that does not mean you're insignificant. Do you.