Jolene Jones looked at the photo and felt disgust.
She was 26 and living in Kalispell, Montana, when she posted two side-by-side images on Facebook. On the left, there she was in 2015: a bodybuilder in the middle of a competition, her body sculpted after five years of weightlifting. On the right, about two weeks before the feature, in the middle of a rafting trip on the Middle Fork Flathead River in Glacier National Park. Softer, freer, laughing.
For years, her life revolved around the gym. She weighed her chicken and carried protein shakes in her bag everywhere. She had started bodybuilding after some classmates told her she had too much cellulite. “I was never enough”, she said. She competed just once, in 2015, and it was her last time.
Her first reaction to seeing the current photo was disgust, and guilt quickly followed: why feel disgust toward a body that does so much for her? She knows some people will say she is letting herself go. Her response was brief: happiness has no price.
The post received more than 129,000 positive reactions, according to ABC News. Her final message was simple: be grateful to your body. When she started doing that, everything changed. (2017 story.)