For many of us, fitness has a lot to do with the way we look — but fitness blogger Nicole Mejia is opening up about why it means so much more than appearance. On Friday, Mejia took to Instagram to share a video of herself showing her cellulite, and with it, shared a powerful message about body acceptance.
Meijia wrote that her body fat level is currently at the highest it's been since she started her blog, Fit and Thick — and she's never been happier.
"When I was on my quest to 'look the part' of entering the fitness industry, I ended up losing what fitness was for me in the first place," she wrote. "It never used to be about looking a certain way, but about the mental clarity and emotional release that I was able to achieve after an hour of pushing my body past what I thought I was capable of."
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She wrote that fitness, for her, used to be more about how it makes her feel as opposed to how it makes her look — and it's time to get back to what it used to mean for her.
"It was how I was able to find body acceptance in the first place," she wrote. "By placing so much emphasis on my aesthetic goals, I lost touch with the fulfillment that I once experienced through my relationship with fitness."
Now, she realizes that her health and overall well-being are more important than looking a certain way.
"The way I look will never make me truly love myself," she wrote. "I need to reach deeper than the shell and work on the empty parts."
"You are more than the way you look,' she continued. "Why do we place so much emphasis on the way we look instead of focusing that energy on intellectual, emotional, and spiritual growth?"
Though she acknowledges that this seems ironic coming from "someone who gained 1.4 million followers on Instagram because I put my body on the internet," she says that this is exactly why it was so important for her to spread her message.
"It's an important lesson to grasp and I hope that by being open with my revelation, I can light the way for you to connect these same dots within yourself," she wrote.
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