Rebecca Catherine Smith, a fitness influencer with almost 40K followers, has been on the fitness train for quite a while. She used to be all about cardio, but has since switched gears to weight training, and recently posted this before-and-after [1] photo to ease women's fears about lifting and bulking up. She captioned this amazing transformation: "LIFTING MAKES YOU MANLY?!" It infuriates her, she wrote, that so many girls think the second they pick up a dumbbell or protein shake [2] that they'll "suddenly become the hulk🏋🏽."

She said, "changing my training from cardio to weights changed me completely inside & out and to each their own but I personally don't think I've made my body look at all manly in my past year." Um, we totally agree! Those booty gains [3] are super sexy and look completely feminine.

Rebecca then shared three reasons why she thinks girls should start lifting more:

1. Building Strength and Muscles

Rebecca said, "lifting builds on a woman's natural curves and helps your body be the strongest it can. Ripped abs, sexy strong back, shoulder boulders & a curvy behind alll come from lifting 🍑." Rebecca is all about "#strongnotskinny."

2. Losing Extra Body Fat

Would you believe Rebecca said, "my body fat % saw a MASSIVE fall when I began lifting . . . Before I would spend hours on cardio machines thinking that will get rid of fat but never saw any results [4] and just made me HATE going to the gym." If you feel like you're in the same situation, Rebecca encourages you to switch up your routine.

3. Healthy Relationship With Food and Body Image

When you're doing cardio to burn calories, Rebecca explained that it's easy to look at the food you eat and just see it as calorie numbers, and you "end up feeling guilty for eating too much and feeling like you HAVE to restrict yourself to see results." She said that weight training helped her to realise that food is fuel [5], "and I need LOTS of it to get the best out of my training." She told POPSUGAR that she consumes three times the amount of calories that she used to!

So there you have it. Trading cardio for weights and eating more totally worked for Rebecca, and helped her reach her goals. She said, "If this convinces one girl to try out weight training, mission complete." She wants to see more girls in the weight room and to "get rid of the association that it's just for boys, because it's not."