We all know the Internet can be a horrible place, but for people sharing their lives on Instagram it can become unbearable.
New Zealand woman Simone Anderson, 25, has been documenting her weight loss journey on social media for two years in the hope of inspiring others. Instead, she faced a huge amount of abuse including online commenters claiming she had faked her weight loss.
The journey started when Anderson was 23 years old and weighed 169 kilograms (372 lbs). She decided to make an effort to lose weight as she believed she wasn't living her life to the fullest.
"I was living a half life. I was constantly lying to myself that [my weight] wasn't stopping me from doing anything," she told Mashable Australia. "I was turning down so many opportunities and day-to-day things, like walking on the beach with my friends."
In 2014, Anderson underwent gastric sleeve surgery, and changed her lifestyle, diet and exercise habits in an effort to shed the extra weight. Although all these tweaks to her life were hard, she said facing people's judgemental comments on her Instagram page has been the most difficult.
"I started the page only for me. It was my little space to keep myself accountable," she said. "I never expected it to grow into what it has, now opening [me] up to a whole world of judgements and opinions -- I find that really hard."
It's something that's evident in a post that went viral last July, which showed Anderson before and after 11 months of weight loss. The post attracted a horde of comments from users accusing her of faking her achievement.
"For me it was tearing down my hard work, and I had worked so hard for it ... most of the comments was stuff like 'oh she doesn't have the same hair colour, so it can't be the same girl,'" she said. "It was really base level comments like that."
Anderson fought back, uploading another photo of herself two days later, in which she added a revealing image of the excess skin gathered around her torso -- an inevitable result of shedding so much weight. It was a strong and brave message to her detractors, along with the undeniable proof that she was who she said she was.
"It was definitely a very scary thing. It was something where I had struggled for five or six days as to whether I'd share those all those images, but I thought I needed to," she said. "From day one, I said to my followers I'd be really honest about both the positives and the negatives of extreme weight loss."
Fast forward to 2016, and Anderson has truly shown the haters.
Anderson's massive transformation has been aided with surgery to remove her excess skin, plus a breast lift and an augmentation, all of which occurred in the U.S. last September. Some of her loyal followers even helped to pitch in for the surgery via crowdfunding.
"I said 'no' quite a few times, because I didn't want them to pay for it ... but it got to the point where there were so many people willing to put in one or two dollars," she said. Since then, she has gone from strength to strength and her Instagram following has continued to grow.
Anderson, who is also a hair and makeup artist, has lost 92 kilograms (202 pounds) since she started her weight loss mission 90 weeks ago. Still, those comments about faking it appear every now and then. "I think now I've grown a much thicker skin and I try to not read them too much or reason with it," she said.
Anderson has hit 141,000 followers on Instagram and fortunately in recent times most of the comments she receives are from people inspired by her journey.
"It still something that blows my mind every day ... and it makes me really, really proud," she said. "If one person has decided to go running every day because of it, that's really huge."
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
