Here’s What You Can Expect if You Body-Shame Ariel Winter Online

Ariel Winter is done with letting online trolls bring her down. The 18-year-old Modern Family actress has amassed 2.5 million followers on Instagram, many of whom, unfortunately, are jerks. Winter has endured relentless body-shaming, and she has some words for her haters.

After reading negative comments, Winter used to fight back in an attempt to boost her confidence. “I realized that just got me into fights with people I didn’t know, and things just got nastier and nastier and the comments got meaner and meaner,” Winter said at a Dove event. “It really just seemed like we were in a fight to see who could hurt the other person more.”

She has since re-evaluated her approach to negative commenters. “Sometimes I decide to not look at the comments and say, ‘I feel great what I posted and that’s what matters, and I don’t really need to see another person’s opinion,’” she said. “But when I do choose to look, I try to write something positive after someone writes something negative to me, and it feels really great. … I don’t feel like I said something mean. I don’t feel like I hurt somebody. I feel really good because I still stood up for myself and I was positive.” Unless you want a personal message from Winter herself calling out your hurtful words, you should probably think before trolling her feed.

Winter hasn’t always been the picture of body positivity we now look to for inspiration, though. “I started on a TV show when I was 11 years old. I was very thin and I had no curves, and I always wanted curves,” she said. “Then, overnight, my body changed completely, and I was curvy and I had boobs and a big butt. And although I loved it, as soon as pictures of me hit the Internet, I was called fat and ugly and was told to lose weight.” Winter revealed that she spent “years” trying to conform to the image that others seemed to want from her. “I tried to lose weight and I tried to change, but after I tried to change I realized that nothing changed on my account,” she said. “People were still posting the same things that they were before, and I realized that changing myself for other people is not worth it. And I realized that and tried to focus on developing a better relationship with myself.”

Having endured the pain of cyberbullying herself, Winter takes her position as a role model very seriously. She recently appeared on the cover of Seventeen magazine’s body positivity issue, launching a campaign that encourages young women to embrace their bodies. She’s also joined Dove’s latest initiative, the Speak Beautiful Squad, which aims to transform social media into a place where girls can feel confident and be themselves by providing them with tips, advice, and resources to armor themselves against negative commentary. “You have to understand that [negative commenters are] coming from a place of insecurity themselves,” she said. “So you have to respond to it positively and do your best to speak beautifully, as the campaign promotes, because it really will make a big difference.”