Megan Crabbe, Melissa Gibson, and Anna O’Brien are three body-positive activists who have a combined following of 1.2 million people on Instagram. After months of being online friends, they decided to finally meet in person in sunny Miami Beach.

The girl gang shared fun-filled photos together in bikinis by the ocean and had a great time. But despite the many likes they got and love they received in the comments, body shamers tried to troll the women with negative and nasty comments — but the activists weren’t having it.

“So many people are taught worth is finite and there are things you must be to have it. So they see me, a fat girl being valued and respected by the world, and it breaks the paradigm they were trained on. So their first reaction is to attack, to point out how I’m not worthy,” O’Brien tells Yahoo Style.

After the initial day of trolling, O’Brien uploaded a photo of all three girls in bikinis. For the caption on the bikini photo, she wrote, “So this is for all the fat shaming comments about our bodies yesterday. Haters can kiss our swimsuit hungry booties. Peaches and beaches, people.”

The ladies were not about to let the haters bring them down.

Gibson tells Yahoo Style, “Bodies are glorious, strong, resilient, and that looks different on everybody. When we recognize that we all live in a world that has normalized only a very small portion of bodies and how it does that, we can begin to see the silliness in valuing some bodies over others.”

“So when I’m body-shamed, all I see is that that individual still buys into the lies we are taught and believe about bodies. It isn’t my reality; in fact, it isn’t based in any truth. That takes the sting out of it and lets me see the pain and humanity in each of us.”





All the women had something to say about the experience. On what she has learned from the body shamers, Crabbe says, “When people body-shame you, you are not actually the problem. Your body is not the problem. That person and their idea that other people’s bodies are theirs to comment on are the problems. You do not need their validation to feel like royalty.” Amen.

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