Flakes of white will be dusting Revelstoke soon enough, but for 31-year-old Jesse Zahacy, things are already snowballing.
The fifth-generation Revelstokian, who since 2018 has garnered a massive social media presence by sharing lighthearted messaging about body positivity and self-love regardless of shape or size, has surged to 100,000 followers this November.
Taking to Instagram as an online diary for sharing daily ups and downs during her battle with an eating disorder — an isolating experience in an outdoorsy mountain town prided on fitness — she quickly found that “a lot more people resonated with the online story.”
“It’s just kind of blown up,” Zahacy remarked, scrolling through her Instagram that’s skyrocketed from 82,000 to around 100,000 followers in just a few weeks.
Her most-watched video racked up 10 million views, and her TikTok boasts another 14,000 followers.
But Zahacy, a well-rooted Revelstoke local who simultaneously doesn’t see herself represented in the town’s hyperathletic crowd, aspires to also get her messaging off the screen and into the community she loves.
Following a years-long cyclical struggle with her weight and diet — sometimes losing up to 70 pounds, only to regain it — she sees herself in a much better place now than even a couple of years ago. Sometimes, her quest to shape herself into the perfect body strained not only her health, but also her relationships with others.
“I feel like mental health and weight go hand in hand,” she said. “I just want people to realize your weight doesn’t equal your worth.”
When not working weekdays at Grizzly Auto Repair as a service writer — where her front-desk coworker Brennan makes a point of keeping up with her posts — Zahacy spends weekends filming dance videos and other content from her home downtown.
This last year, “I’ve really branched out — shown my silly side, shown my dancing side,” she said. “Anything that is going to make people laugh, those are my favourite videos.”
Her social media style, which she calls “humour filled with an impactful punch,” includes using humour to put a positive spin on fatphobic content she encounters on the internet. Zahacy strives to change people’s minds about ideal body types, to make the digital world a healthier and more vibrant community.
“In a world so full of hate, we just need more space for people to bring out big, beautiful things,” she emphasized.
Though it took years for her messaging to accumulate enough traction, key to her success is that “it’s all about authenticity,” she advised. “If people don’t see themselves in you, you’ve got nothing.”
The past two years, Zahacy hasn’t gone more than four days in a row without posting. But the bigger her online presence gets, the more realistically she thinks it could become a full-time gig. Her Instagram already reaches some 23 million people, though with a 70 per cent concentration in the U.S., which she hopes to diversify with more Canadian viewers.
When asked about other body-positive creators she looks up to, Zahacy mentioned Sarah Nicole Landry and Alecia McCarvell, both of whom have more than two million Instagram followers.
“These two are the biggest body influencers in the world and, not to toot my own horn, they both follow me,” she noted. At first, when she messaged them, “they ghosted me — only for them to find me, which was quite a boost for me.”
Zahacy said she’s also made impressions on big names such as Sports Illustrated, Victoria’s Secret and U.S. singer-songwriter SZA.
Yet, she feels that the positive boost she’s giving tens of thousands of people around the world is getting missed by those who need it in her own community.
“This is a predominantly active, sporty town,” Zahacy said. “I would like my message to go out to people in this sporty community that aren’t as active… but want to showcase.”
Especially for more rural and blue-collar communities such as Revelstoke, finding support for her cause can seem challenging.
“This kind of advocacy wasn’t a thing when I was growing up in the early 2000s,” she recalled. “It was all about heroine chic and how to be as skinny as possible.”
But today, her goal is “breaking the stigma of (the fact that) health is not linear in a mountain town,” Zahacy said. “Health is different for a skier or snowboarder than someone who works a sedentary job.”
In some ways, opening up with more locals about her Instagram page and mantra of body positivity won’t be easy for her, as someone who’s learned to handle criticism and rejection better on social media than in person.
Still, as a Revelstoke-based social media creator, “this is my home, and I want people to know what I do,” she said.
Reflecting on whether Revelstokians will come to embrace and echo her body-positive messaging in time, “I feel like the community’s always there if it shows itself,” she reasoned. “I just wanted people to know that I am here for a community, in a way they may just not know.”
As for handling negative comments online, “it doesn’t hurt my feelings anymore because I have that large community,” Zahacy explained. Even when haters do hate, she can at least still appreciate them for boosting her page.
Her advice for others in her shoes, whether struggling with an eating disorder or their body image, is unfollowing toxic social media accounts and reaching out to like-minded people in the same headspace. Of the thousands of commenters who react to her videos, the ones that always touch her the most are those who say, “You’ve helped me today.”
Despite Zahacy’s increasing Instagram metrics, her husband and high school sweetheart, Josh — though perhaps not making quite as many cameos in her videos as she’d like — remains her biggest supporter.
“As long as you like you, who cares what anyone else thinks,” she said. “I’d really like to set the bar, for when I have kids, to have a better world to grow up in… a less judgmental place.”
Zahacy can be found on Instagram at @yourdailydoseofselflove.