The emotional letter was sparked by a day at a beach club in Miami, Cabello said, when she felt compelled to look her best knowing the paparazzi were photographing her. “I tried to pretend they weren’t there, but I couldn’t,” she said.
“I knew I looked ‘good’ in the photos and thought I would feel accomplished and yet I’ve never had worse times on the beach,” she wrote.
“I felt the emptiness and the sadness of the thoughts of our culture that became my thoughts,” Cabello said. She also criticized a “culture that has become so accustomed to an image of what a ‘healthy’ female body looks like that is absolutely not real to many women”.
The note received nearly 900,000 likes on Sunday morning.
“Being at war with your body is so last season,” she said in the video, which received more than 5 million likes. “We are real women, with curves, cellulite, stretch marks and fat.”
But as she explained on her Instagram, her struggles with body image continued. “The messages I receive from our world resonate in my head.”
“Ironically, all of the therapy, all of the inner work is trying to recapture the feeling of being 7 on the beach,” Cabello wrote at the end of the Instagram post. “I mourn her today. Happy, silly, breathing, pretending to be a mermaid, FREE.”