Fitness coach's body-confidence photo goes viral on Facebook

A photo posted by an online health and fitness personality has gone viral for its message of self-empowerment and body confidence.

Molly Galbraith, a strength and conditioning coach who founded Girls Gone Strong, an online resource for fitness and wellness tips, posted on Facebook Jan. 1 to express a different kind of New Year’s resolution: to love her body as it is.

“This not a before picture. This is not an after picture,” she wrote in the post, which features a photo of Galbraith in a bikini on the beach. “This just happens to be what my body looks like on a random Tuesday in December of 2015 — it's a LIFE picture.”

Galbraith, whose company has nearly 55,000 followers on Facebook and who maintains a personal website, continued the post by rattling off comments from critics— who’ve called her body “too fat,” “too thin,” “too masculine” and “too strong,” among other adjectives— and then vowed not to resolve to look different in 2016.

“This is the first year in as long as I can remember that I have made NO resolutions to change the way my body looks,” she wrote. “This is a kind of freedom I didn’t think I’d ever experience, and it feels really, really good.”

As of Friday evening, when Galbraith took to Facebook, the post has garnered nearly 100,000 likes, more than 8,000 comments and nearly 15,000 shares.