Australian Personal Trainer Debunks Those Infuriating 'Before And After' Weight Loss Pictures

Mel, an Australian personal trainer and owner of MelVFitness, was fed up with misleading "Before and After" pictures used to sell fitness programs and diet pills.

Inspired by a similar project by personal trainer Andrew Dixon, Mel decided to make her own transformation in under 15 minutes (via Gawker).

All it took was better posture, some fake tanning lotion, and black bathing suit bottoms:

"Check out my transformation! It took me 15 minutes," Mel wrote to her followers on Instagram.

"Wanna know my secret? Well firstly I ditched the phonewallet (fwallet) cause that *** is lame, swapped my bather bottoms to black (cause they're a size bigger and black is slimming), smothered on some fake tan, clipped in my hair extensions, stood up a bit taller, sucked in my guts, popped my hip, threw in a skinny arm, stood a bit wider #boxgap, pulled my shoulders back and added a bit of a cheeky/I'm so proud of my results smile. Zoomed in on the before pic, zoomed out on the after and added a filter. Cause filters make everything awesome."

She also followed up with a blog post on how misleading transformation pictures can be, and the dangers of having unrealistic expectations for quick results.

"What a before and after shot doesn’t tell you how the person achieved it," she writes. "It doesn’t tell you if they did it a healthy way or if they starved themselves for weeks on end to get there."

"It also doesn’t show you the persons mental state, their self worth, how the hours of exercise they did, the lifestyle change, the early mornings, the skipped lunches, how they handled social situations or how many skinny mini teas they chugged," Mel adds.

Check out her full blog post here.