Instagram is a platform that is awash with fitness and body-positivity bloggers. The past year or two has seen the movement explode, with women preferring to adopt the "strong, not skinny" body type and move away from the often-archaic nature of western beauty standards.

One woman who is certainly pioneering this movement is Mackenzie Puricelli. The fitness coach, who has over 12,000 followers on Instagram, is trying to change our relationships with the scales.

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For many people that are attempting to tone up for the summer, weight becomes an obsession. However, Mackenzie wants people to know that the number on the scales is, well... just a number.

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While it may be easy for someone with a figure like Mackenzie to say this, she also has pretty solid evidence in order to drill her message home.

Taking to her account, Puricelli uploaded three pictures of herself at different weights - 130 lbs, 145 lbs, and 136 lbs. Although her body massively differs in each image, she only varies between a few pounds in each of them.

Talking about the transformation, Mackenzie wrote:

"YOU can become the girl you have always looked up to. That girl standing on the right who is 100% comfortable in her skin is someone I never thought I could become! But I’m freaking here now and cannot even put into words what it took to get here  (each beauty tagged has made some impact on my life these past 4 years, have supported me, and ily all).

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"Fitness is NOT always a linear journey nor will it be easy, but you have the decision RIGHT NOW to decide how you want it to impact your life. 

"I’ve been working at my body since 2015. At the beginning I let fitness take control. Food, exercise, and my body image consumed every thought. In the middle, I faced my ED and made mental health my priority. Gaining weight had to happen to overcome my fear of food. I also had to lose the perception that exercise was just for fat loss. Today I focus on my health in ALL aspects. I eat for fuel AND enjoyment. I now exercise for strength, empowerment, enjoyment, and mental clarity."

The personal trainer goes on to implore her followers to love themselves, saying that when they begin their journey into the world of fitness "you will have to accept yourself even at the darkest of times. You will have to believe in yourself even when no one else does."

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"You will have to STOP letting food control your life! You will have to be the one that pushes yourself to become the best you.

"You will have to trust that there is a way out of your current behaviours, and that you can become that girl who you aspire to be like".

It's not the first time that Puricelli has opened up about how the scales can warp our self-perception. She posted something similar back in 2017:

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In fact, a lot of her posts focus on external factors and how they can influence the way we look and feel.

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While some people may feel like Puricelli is a position where it is easy for her to talk about how weight shouldn't be an issue, her message is one of positivity. Essentially, don't feel bad if you put on a pound or two, you can still feel amazing even if you aren't at your slimmest.

Many people out there let their whole lives be dictated by the scales. It's crazy how one number can completely influence how you feel about yourself, making you reevaluate your entire self-worth, yet it happens to millions of individuals out there every single day.

But you know the saying age is just a number? It turns out that the same can sometimes be said for weight, as shown by personal trainer and lifestyle blogger Kelsey Wells.

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Before she got pregnant, the young mother reportedly lived on fast-food lunches and fizzy drinks. But after suffering from hormonal changes after giving birth, she was recommended by her doctor to exercise more and five years on eventually became the world’s most popular “fitness mama”, with more than 1.3 million fans following her every rep and squat.

However, although she has been through dramatic changes in her weight over the past few years, Kelsey - who spent a year and a half doing Kayla Itsines's BBG program - still believes that the scale is an unhealthy way to judge yourself, and took to social media recently to share this with her followers.

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Uploading three different pictures of herself at different weights - 145 pounds, 122 pounds and 140 pounds - she pointed out that in the most recent snap - her at 140 pounds - she looks much more fit and healthy than she does at 122 pounds.

"YOU GUYS. PLEASEEEEEE STOP GETTING HUNG UP ON THE NUMBER ON THE STUPUD SCALE!" she wrote on Instagram. "PLEASE STOP THINKING YOUR WEIGHT EQUALS YOUR PROGRESS AND FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING PLEASE STOP LETTING YOR WEIGHT HAVE ANY AFFECT WHATSOEVER ON YOUR SELF ESTEEM, like I used to."

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She continued to share her own weight journey, highlighting how ridiculous it is to put all of your focus on one number, saying:

"To any of you who are where I once was, please listen to me. I am 5' 7" and weigh 140 lbs. When I first started #bbg I was 8 weeks post partum and 145 lbs. I weighed 130 before getting pregnant, so based on nothing besides my own warped perception, I decided my "goal weight" should be 122 and to fit into my skinniest jeans. Well after a few months of BBG and breastfeeding, I HIT IT and I fit into those size 0 jeans. Well guess what? I HAVE GAINED 18 POUNDS SINCE THEN. EIGHT FREAKING TEEN. Also, I have gone up two pant sizes and as a matter of fact I ripped those skinny jeans wide open just the other week trying to pull them up over my knees. My point?? According to my old self and flawed standards, I would be failing miserably. THANK GOODNESS I finally learned to start measuring my progress by things that matter -- strength, ability, endurance, health, and HAPPINESS."

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Kelsey, who suffered with anxiety and low energy following the birth of her son Anderson, has also spoken out about how women can easily get their mojo back after giving birth. Speaking to The Sun, she recently said: "I really struggled with who I was after becoming a mum. When did it become automatic for us to look at ourselves negatively? I want to reverse that.“Empowering yourself through exercise is my goal. Fitness isn’t a timetable or a box to tick. It’s re-teaching yourself how amazing you are."

The fitness instructor launched her programme, PWR Post Pregnancy last year, and seems to be going from strength to strength (literally, as well as metaphorically). May she long teach women and men to love their bodies!

When it comes to judging appearances, a lot of us have this misguided idea that being skinny is the same as being healthy. We glorify celebrities with tiny waists and pencil-thin legs, and judge ourselves in comparison to people who are slimmer than us. But having a petite body doesn't always mean that a person is leading a healthy lifestyle. In fact, sometimes it's an indication of the complete opposite.

Johanna Sophia, a 23-year-old former bodybuilder from Toronto, Canada, used to have a figure that many would consider enviable. She was thin but muscular, and weighed just 117lb.

However, she achieved her look through obsessive exercise - sometimes working out three times a day - and, even worse, through purging herself of any food she'd eaten. At the time, she thought she looked great; but, after a while, her lifestyle started to take its toll, and Sophia realized that she wasn't actually being healthy at all.

"In my first year of competing, I knew I needed to eat a whole lot less and do cardio up to three times a day," she said. "I developed an eating disorder, bulimia. Eventually, I realized that I needed to stop but I was so deep in the competition world and the superficial bubble that it took a long time to figure it out."

She continued:

"At the worst of my eating disorder, I was super-light and was making myself sick at least once a day.

"I was consuming the low-calorie diet that my coach put me on but also was binge eating junk food - whatever sugary or fatty food I could get my hands on.

"The fixation caused me to constantly pick out the imperfections all over my body, I always felt like I wasn't enough or didn't measure up."

Thankfully, Sophia finally realized that - while she might have appeared healthy from the outside - her lifestyle was doing her far more damage than good. And so she decided to change.

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After quitting bodybuilding in 2014, Sophia made the first step towards achieving a healthier, more curvaceous body: the 100-day squat challenge. The challenge changed her figure substantially, but also helped her to feel more comfortable in herself.

"I ended up increasing my squat 1RM from 225lbs to 320lbs in just 70 days, and with that came an extra three inches on my butt," she said. "People would call my rear a 'Thanksgiving table' because it stuck out so much."

But she prefers it that way.

"When I used to compete people saw me as ripped and disciplined, but I felt awful and looking back now, all I see is how unhappy I was compared to how happy I am now."

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Sophia now weighs in at a much healthier 145lbs, and explains that her healthy lifestyle is now about balance rather than an extreme approach.

"For 80 per cent of the time, I'm eating healthy and working out, doing things that will keep my body alive and the 20 per cent is eating what I truly enjoy or while socializing, I'm not afraid to indulge anymore.

"What I am mindful of is keeping my protein high, healthy fats moderate and carbohydrates complex - meaning I get the majority of my carbs from foods like sweet potatoes, quinoa, rice and others.

"As a result of all these habits and this free way of living and eating, I can say that I pretty much never crave anything, and I feel more healthy and energized."

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Since changing her lifestyle, Sophia now works as a personal trainer, and uses her own experience in order to motivate others to sustain a healthy, productive attitude to fitness and body image.

A lot of our ideas about beauty come from the media, and a lot of the media tells us we need to be thin. Unfortunately, this isn't always a healthy route to go down, and many of the models we see in adverts and on runways are severely underweight.

So, when 26-year-old Charli Howard first tried to break into the modeling world, she expected to be told to lose weight. However, no matter how much she lost, she was still told she was 'too big' - despite wearing pretty much the smallest sized clothes available.

This is what she looked like at the time:

Since getting rejected, however, Howard realized that she wasn't living her life in a healthy way (she'd previously suffered from anorexia and bulimia), and decided to speak out about the standards in the modeling industry. "I refuse to feel ashamed and upset on a daily basis for not meeting your ridiculous, unattainable beauty standards," she wrote in a post on Facebook.

In a strange twist of fate, the post ended up getting her a job as a model - but she's now classed as plus-sized.

"I have a D-cup. I have hips. I'm never going to fit the super-skinny category anymore. If we're going by industry standards, I'm only going to fit the curved market," Howard explained "There isn't really a section for me. There's no-one really representing the UK size 10-12, you either have to be really skinny or really big."

Despite being labeled plus-sized, though, Howard doesn't feel the label is particularly accurate - and neither do many others.

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"Plus-size in an industry term, that's not something I've given myself. And I've had very successful plus-size models say to me 'Well you're not plus-size, I find that really offensive,'" she said. "But what I'm looking for is the unification of women, and to see women on one board, where they don't have to be put into categories based on their sizes."

However, Howard does admit that there is an advantage to being classed as a bigger model.

"I'm very young to be a plus-size model, most of them are in their 30s. And the 'straight-size' models, their work kind of dies out around 25, 30 if they're lucky. So I do feel quite lucky in that respect."

Through her transformation, the 26-year-old has been able to truly see the dangers of advertising an unhealthy body weight to people - especially young women.

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"[With] fitspo accounts, thinspo accounts, you see models who are super-toned - I think that sends a completely different message as well, so it must be really tough," she said. "I don't think I could be a teenager now. I think I would literally have a breakdown if I was a teenager now.

"But I think that's exactly why we need the Body Positive movement."

In order to spread the word about body positivity and the dangers of promoting unhealthily thin ideals, Howard has written a memoir called Misfit. She hopes that her personal experiences detailed in the book will help others come to terms with eating disorders or personal issues they have with their bodies, and show people that being healthy doesn't always mean being a size zero.

Making a change in lifestyle is no mean feat, especially when you are trying to turn hard ingrained habits on their head.

Eating habits are often built up over childhood and into adult life, and thus can be extremely difficult to break.

And now, perhaps more than ever before, a premium is placed upon the way we look. The rise of Instagram has allowed the genetically-blessed to profit from their good looks in hitherto unprecedented fashion - simply by endorsing the latest in charcoal toothpaste, or detox teas held strategically next to their washboard abs.

If you're fit - both literally and in abstract - then Instagram has quite literally made life a beach for you.

Of course, there are many more important reasons to get yourself fit and into shape than Instagram followers or the meaningless comments of strangers on your beach selfies, of which health is surely the chief one.

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Well Lexi Reed, an Instagram influencer who has been documenting her weight loss journey on the photo sharing app has managed to combine the two in spectacular fashion, after losing an astonishing 312lbs over the course of two years. She has been sharing her journey with her followers, and recently underwent surgery to remove 7lbs of excess skin from her butt, thighs and stomach.

Commenting on the surgery, Reed wrote;

“This surgery is something that is not easy for me to do as it means I have to take off time from the things I love, my work, my workouts, my routine, my life, and my many responsibilities. However I know that it’ll be worth it,”

She later described the surgery itself on Instagram, writing;

"Drain life. I'm not going to tell you I've felt great because to be honest I've been in pain the last few days more than in my entire life. The surgery I had was a major surgery and I am so swollen plus so sore over my entire body that I cant pull myself out of bed without being lifted by @discoveringdanny.

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"I spent the last few days sleeping but I am determined to show my body the care it deserves and heal at my own pace. I am slowly able to use the bathroom on my own and getting better at walking daily. I am getting over my fear of needles and accepting the shots. I still cant laugh or cough due to the pain in my abdomen from where it was repaired. If I do it hurts so bad that I start sobbing.

"However I know that I had to go through this pain to get to the other side. I know I have to be strong because there are too many counting on me for me to be weak. One day all of these struggles will be worth it. Thank you for all your support and dealing with me while I heal!"

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Losing a considerable amount of weight is a long journey that requires a lot of hard work. Lexi Reed is two years into her journey, and the results are there for all to see.