Finnish fitness blogger Sara Puhto is all about keeping it real. On July 8, she shared side-by-side photos of herself in workout gear. In one image her back is arched and her arms up, in the other she’s shown not posing. The pictures look drastically different and yet they were taken only minutes apart.
“Instagram vs real life,” Puhto began in a lengthy Instagram post. “Nobody’s booty looks round and peachy from all angles. Nobody’s body looks the same from all angles.”
The 20-year-old continued: “Don’t eat less or miss out on your favorite meals/drinks or over exercise to ‘look good for a holiday’ or to ‘look good in bikini photos’ because there will always be angles that . . . might make you feel bad when you see them. Instead workout and eat healthy because it makes you feel good, not as a punishment.”
Her inspiring post resonated with many women, racking up more than 12,500 likes and hundreds of comments. “Thank you for helping all of us on our way to happiness,” wrote on person, while another chimed in: “This is a message I needed to hear for sure.”
Puhto, who used to eat just 1,000 calories a day, has been sharing snaps of her healthy transformation since adapting a vegan lifestyle in January 2016. “I restricted because I thought I’d lose weight that way. I was in the mindset that it didn’t matter what type of food I ate as long as as it was below 1,000 calories at the end of the day,” she previously told Us Weekly in November 2016. “Then I’d end up eating everything and anything every dinner and feel weak and hate myself. It was a vicious cycle that I will never go back to.”
