Antonia Eriksson is an 18 year old fitness blogger who lives in Sweden. She looks pretty and is in enviable shape. But after dissecting her account, and if you reach the end, you'll see that she wasn't always like this.


Eriksson was admitted to the hospital 15 months ago for anorexia. She used Instagram to document the entire thing. Her road to recovery is pretty inspiring.

"When I first started @eatmoveimprove, it was actually called @fightinganorexia and it was an anonymous account," Eriksson says. "It took me a while before I decided to share my identity. So I had this account alongside my personal [Instagram account] to track my recovery, and then it grew and changed into what it is today."

Today we can see tons of body positive, encouraging messages and a lot of good, healthy good. She talks about how it all began.

"My anorexia started in the beginning of 2012, but didn't get out of hand until the summer, and in September 2012 I was admitted to the hospital where I had to stay for two months," she says. "My heart and organs were giving up, my bones were weak, and my reflexes had stopped working."

"I had given up, and if I hadn't been admitted to the hospital then, I don't know if I would have survived another night. My weight was at 38 kg [about 84 pounds] the day I was admitted."

Eriksson decided to turn her life around and also to document her process of recovery using Instagram. At first, behind a mask, because she didn't want to share her identity.

"I wasn't sure I wanted to share who I was so my friends couldn't read it," she says, explaining that this was largely why she chose to use Instagram instead of another social platform. Instagram's all or nothing privacy policy means Eriksson could shield her identity. "Even when I did come out as myself, it was only people who searched for those types of [health-related] account or those types of hashtags, so I was able to connect with people who understood."

"If I put it on Facebook, it would be everyone I knew, and they'd know everything about how I felt and maybe judge me. It's just one part of my life and I share it with people who also had that part of their lives."


There's also a fine line between trends like fitspo and thinspo where it may be difficult to distinguish between which is healthy. Well, actually, not so much. The thinspo accounts had a profound impact on Eriksson. She wanted to get better.

"The thinspo accounts did affect me while I was sick. When I got into recovery I stopped following all those accounts, but before I got to that point I found it affected me a lot," she explains. "They are made to make girls feel awful about their bodies and they often succeed. It was those accounts that 'helped me' starve myself and stay sick."

"They are like an extension of the already evil thoughts [I had]. Probably because the girls who write posts like that are sick themselves. It's really quite sad." 

Many fitspo accounts flirt with thinspo, but Eriksson is focused on promoting fitness and she's careful not to fall into the gray area between fitspo and thinspo.

A great deal of her followers suffer from eating disorders, something Eriksson says other fitness promoting Instagram accounts may not be aware of. She gives her followers her email address or Kik account, and she's incredibly honest about her disease and how she's conquered it.

"I'll tell people off when they ask me how to lose weight. Me losing weight was me almost losing my life. You shouldn't ask me how to do that. That's like asking me how to commit suicide."

"I try to teach people who don't understand. I'll tell them what they doing and asking me is wrong; an eating disorder is not something to strive for."


This type of interaction, though, is limited, and she says that most of the connections she's made and comments she's seen are positive.

Check out the rest of Eriksson's past 15 months on Instagram and watch her get better. It is actually very inspiring to see.

She's sponsored now, too, and two companies (Fitness Guru and Vitamin Water) brought her on board. "I was really happy, it was overwhelming to me, that these brands see me as a health inspirer."