We all know by now that a vast majority of the world use Instagram in order to portray a better (albeit unrealistic) version of themselves to their friends and strangers.

Featured Image VIA 

Everyone on Instagram is far more attractive, fit, travelled, social and generally well-rounded than they are in real life and unfortunately this is having a seriously negative effect on people’s confidence and mental health, particularly younger people who don’t know a life before Instagram.

Lauren Tickner, a fitness blogger from Surrey, has decided to uncover some of the visual lies that are told on the social media platform, by demonstrating how deceptive ‘transformation’ photos can be.

Earlier this week she bravely shared three side-by-side images that were taken 30 seconds apart, which show drastically different body shapes. It’s all about your pose and posture:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BXbGeSdlnZH/

It’s incredible that you can make such a drastic difference through posing. As Lauren explains:

I don’t care how ‘overdone’ people say these photos are: I think they are SO important. I sometimes still stumble across a photo and think ‘agh, I wish I looked like that…’ BUT, they uploaded that photo for a REASON! They probably took 10000 others and chose that ONE photo.

So there you have it – the next time you stumble upon someone on Instagram who looks impossibly thin/muscly/toned, just remember that it probably took them ages contorting their body in various poses just to get that one perfect picture. What a time we live in.

For the time an Instagram model asked Reddit to roast her, got destroyed and ended up deleting her account, click HERE.