Ashley Graham shared a candid photo one year after giving birth to twins, showing her followers she continues to be 100 percent real about her body
Ashley Graham has never tried to hide any part of her body. As a model and body acceptance influencer, she’s led by example when it comes to loving and honoring your body, no matter what shape it takes. That’s especially true since Graham became a mom, and a recent post honoring her postpartum body is making waves on Instagram.
Graham shared the photo this week, which gives a close-up view of her squeezing her stomach with both hands. She chose not to add a caption, instead letting the image speak for itself.
“The realest one we know,” makeup artist Katie Jane Hughes wrote in the comments.
One of Graham’s fans added, “I wish I saw a post like this when I was younger. The impact of photos like these is substantial.”
It’s been just over a year since Graham welcomed her twin boys, Roman and Malachi. She and her husband, cinematographer Justin Ervin, also share a three-year-old son named Isaac.
The road to loving and honoring her body hasn’t always been easy for Graham, even though she makes it look that way. Last year, she penned a powerful essay for Glamour about how becoming a mom made her relationship with her body so much more “complex.”
“I am the person who has been shouting from the rooftops to you all, ‘Love the skin you’re in,'” she wrote at the time. “Yet for me, the births of my there children threw a lot of that out the window.”
She continued to say that after Isaac was born, she “obsessed over this 20 pounds” she had gained during her pregnancy.
“I tried to brush it off and would say to myself, ‘Girl, you still fine, who cares.’ I got a few stretch marks, and I had a few really good cry sessions over the stretch marks,'” Graham wrote. “Because even as a body advocate, I’ve learned it’s okay if the journey to love the skin you’re in is more complex than you could ever have imagined. Even now, if I’m completely honest, I go in waves. I am still not entirely comfortable in my body, no matter my own body positivity advocacy.”
