Side By Side Snaps Prove That When It Comes To Photos, Angles Are Everything

Celebrity Trainer Jen Widerstrom has a body positive message to share

You know those times you open your camera app having forgotten it’s on selfie mode, and you contemplate throwing the whole phone out the window? Yeah, well, we all feel that way. Celebrity trainer Jen Widerstrom took to Instagram to share one such unflattering photo to remind people that we all feel terrible when we see a pic from an unflattering angle. If only our friends would stop tagging us in them on Facebook.

Widerstrom is a trainer on The Biggest Loser and frequently trains celebs like these two funny guys pictured below. But during a recent glamorous photo shoot, the fitness expert explained how she opened her camera app and was horrified. “I was doing a photoshoot last week and I had an amazing hair team and makeup and all these people finding outfits for me,” she explained to Shape magazine. “I was sitting there with my cell phone in my hand…and as I opened my phone, it caught the shape of my belly hanging out of in front of my spandex.”

Widerstrom snapped the photo below from the unflattering angle and then proceeded to feel the types of things we ALL feel after a less than stellar picture. “I was like, ‘That’s what I look like? I can’t do this photoshoot. I look terrible. I’m fat! I knew I shouldn’t have had breakfast today’ … I started thinking all these really unkind thoughts and down the rabbit hole I went,” she shared. It’s super easy to get down on ourselves when we’ve just taken a bad pic. “I had to stop and say, ‘You’re just sitting down!'”

And that’s exactly why she decided to share the image with the world – to remind people that no one looks their best sitting down. That’s why celebrities are always draped over couches in Vanity Fair photos. But a trainer not looking 100% at all times it isn’t something you see every day. Widerstrom was hesitant to share the photo at first. “I thought, ‘do I lose credit as a trainer?’ And I thought ‘no, I ask you guys to be vulnerable so you deserve my vulnerability back,'” she shared.

More than 20,000 people on Instagram liked the photo, because we’ve all been horrified by that damn camera angle. “I wanted to share it because we all have these weird moments where we shame, label, or are hard on ourselves for no good reason,” Widerstrom told reporters. “I wanted people to know it’s normal… it just makes us all human.”

So next time you open your camera and want to die, remember, you don’t really look like that.