LOS ANGELES — Cassie Ho’s fitness videos on YouTube have a huge following.
But like most public personalities with a vibrant online persona she gets wildly personal and often inappropriate comments on a daily basis.
Many of the comments on Ho’s Blogilates videos focus on her body.
While some people ignore such comments Ho decided to take them to heart, sort of.
She took some of the comments about what her body ‘should’ look like and she Photoshopped herself to match.
She posted that photo to Instagram.
“Finally got my perfect body,” she wrote in the caption.
Ho did not tell her Instagram followers that the image was Photoshopped. Instead she directed people to watch her latest video on YouTube where she revealed what she had done and why she did it.
The next day Ho checked the comments on her Instagram post.
“There was a weird phenomenon that happened when I posted this photoshopped picture,” Ho wrote. “On the very same photo, I got some people praising me and others degrading me.”
What worries me is this: 1. That some people think this is real and that it should be “goals.” 2. That some people still think it’s not good enough.
So Ho shared the photo again, explained what she had done and then posted more than a dozen of the comments she received.
Ho wrote that she knows it is tough seeing what is real and what is not with everything from magazine covers to music videos being photoshopped and so many women turning to surgery to compete.
How are we to know what kind of beauty can be naturally achieved when everything around us is so deceiving?
Which is why she asked her fans to share her recent posts and her video.
If you want to know what you can do to help stop body shaming, all I ask is that you share the video with at least 1 person. That’s all.
Ho told People Magazine she wants to inspire others to stop criticizing other people’s appearance.
“The goal is to show that cyber-bullying and mean comments really affect people, and to think before you say something,” she says. “I hope that people do the exact opposite after seeing this video, which is enlighten everyone around them with positivity.”