Ruby Matthews has come clean about how she maintained her toned bikini body in her Instagram videos and photos. She says she relied on two disgusting habits– cocaine and cigarettes.
Matthews, 25, who hails from Australia, is one of a legion of young women who show off their looks on YouTube and draw thousands of followers with their diet and beauty tips and sexy snaps of their remarkably toned bikini bodies.
While most push fancy diets and exercise routines only a workout fanatic can love, the dirty secret to keeping the weight off is drugs and nicotine.
“I did a lot of cocaine, like a lot, so basically I just smoked cigarettes, had long blacks and did coke,” she told her followers, according to the Australian site news.com.au.
“And in between, had the tapas. Like my life was tapas and cocaine,” she said.
She also said it was “pretty easy” to cover up her drug use.
“A lot of people never really understood like how I could eat and still be so thin. But I guess it’s pretty easy to hide an addiction,” she said. “Whether it’s addiction, depression, anxiety.”
Ruby Matthews: Social Media Influencers Share My Lifestyle
She said other fitness influencers on social media have the same lifestyle.
“I need to be careful what I’m saying here, but in the modeling and influencer industry, everyone loves the baggie [coke],” she said. “That is how most physiques are maintained… that’s how my physique was maintained.”
The fitness influencer told her 193,000 Instagram followers she only gave up the addictions when she became pregnant with her first child.
“I didn’t know I was pregnant. I was with a friend and we were out at a party and I was feeling really sick and went home,” she told the Australian news site.
“I had the worst hangover the next day, and I never used to get them,” she said. “I was really thin and partying a lot and no one thought I would be able to fall pregnant.”
Now, the mother of two says she weights about 20 pounds more and is clean of drugs. She previously weighed 119 pounds. Now she’s about 140 pounds.
It’s “just a number,” she says, although she admits she’d like to lose some weight because she believes she’ll feel healthier.
Fellow blogger and fitness trainer Krystal Hipwell showed her support for Ruby Matthews.
“You are amazing!!!” Hipwell wrote. “In a world where everyone is always trying to project that they are ‘perfect’ you are a breath of fresh air. Thanks for keeping it real,” she said.
Ruby Matthews also revealed that she had a miscarriage when she was 16 years old. She sunk into depression and had thoughts of suicide.
“It was probably one of the hardest times in my whole life,” she explained. “My mum and dad didn’t know what to do with me.”
The social media influencer hoped talking about her past trauma would help others, according to People.
“I have battled with mental health demons on and off for most of my life. It is a topic I am going to be talking about a lot more this year,” she said.
Social media is playing a central role, these days, in the lives of adolescent girls and young women, especially when it comes to body image, according to Project Know, an addiction treatment centers resource
“Social media not only exposes young girls to certain beauty standards and cultural ideals of womanhood, but emerging research shows it may contribute to the development of eating disorders and body dysmorphia, in females as well as males,” the organization says.
As many as 20 million American women and 10 million American men will experience an eating disorder at some point in their lifetime. Most are afflicted when they are teens.
As many as half of teen patients at one treatment center used social media images to justify their eating disorders. A 2014 study by Florida State University found a direct correlation between Facebook use and eating disorder behaviors, according to the group.