"When I was younger, I would save [photos of] all of these beautiful fitness models," she says. "From a young age, I had this idea that to love myself meant to look like these girls... I should work out excessively... I should eat really, really small meals." O'Neill felt so far from the perfection that her idols represented to her, but "after enough tanning, exercise, makeup, turns out I fit their standards, and I posted images like this of myself, and everyone told me how much of an inspiration I was, and how they looked up to me as a fitness inspiration."

She says, however, that her eating and exercise habits — which included skipping meals and restricting calories — had nothing to do with self-respect and everything to do with image. "​I am an inspiration for meeting society's impossible standards for women," she stresses. "That is not inspirational. Being as slim and as toned as I was in the picture is not creating world change. It's creating other people to want to be as slim and toned as I am."

Watch the video above for O'Neill's refreshingly straightforward account of how the endless pursuit of thinness is packaged as self-love on social media.