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Fitness trainer shows 'bad angles' to make a point about photos

Instagram star Anna Victoria shared side-by-side photos showing the reality behind so many photos on social media.
/ Source: TODAY

If you follow anyone on social media who's been on a diet or exercise plan before, you've probably seen it a dozen times: the ubiquitous before-and-after shot, demonstrating how much progress has been made — be it pounds lost, muscle gained or limbs toned.

This isn't one of those.

Instead, fitness trainer and bona fide Instagram star Anna Victoria is out to prove that photos aren't always what they seem, and every body has both good angles and bad angles. (Not that we would really call any of Victoria's angles "bad.")

"Picture on the left was taken one week before the wedding," Victoria wrote of a recent split photo, one side showing her standing straight up, tummy flat and taut, and the other showing her sitting. "And the picture on the right was taken ... 2 minutes after! Somebody recently said to me that we all have our good angles and we all have our bad angles, so why do we let our bad angles carry so much more weight than our good angles?

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"If you focus on how bad you look in the bad angles, at least focus on how good you look in the good ones too!" she continued in the post, which has been liked about 60,000 times.

Victoria, who has close to 1million Instagram followers, is the creator of the Fit Body Guides, a series of 12-week diet and exercise plans. The 27-year-old told TODAY her post was all about transparency and being honest with fans.

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"You see all these women on Instagram and you don't really know that they're posed," she said. "Girls see that, and they think, 'This is what that woman looks like 24/7.' And that's not true."

"For me, I'm posing, and then I go sit down, and I have this belly," added Victoria, who currently lives in Rome, Italy, but is originally from California. "I almost feel like it's not fair for girls to see pictures of me posed and then not know that when I sit down I look like a normal person. You can barely tell I have abs!"

Of course, Victoria is plenty aware that her insecurities might seem ridiculous to some followers. But that's not the point, she said.

"I'm not saying, boohoo, look at my bad angles," she said. "It's more about knowing that with pictures, there's more than meets the eye, and that the pictures you see online are posed. It's more about the message than it is about me."