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Last week, a photo that was posted nearly a year ago took the Internet by storm. That photo was of British fitness competitor and mom Abby Pell, who goes by the apt handle of “@superabs” on Instagram. Well, it was a photo of part of Pell, anyway: her midsection, along with her young daughter pointing at it in awe, a meme-style caption reading, “I have a kid, a six pack, and no excuse.”

Oh, boy, here we go again. The situation sounds eerily familiar to one sparked by another member of the fit-and-smug mom crowd, Maria Kang, who posted a similar photo last year with a simple, “What’s your excuse?”

Pell’s explanation for posting the picture? “I thought it would be funny,” she told ABC News in an interview. And motivating, too: “My message was about having a choice and showing people that it can be achieved if you want to achieve it,” she says.

That’s the thing about both Pell and Kang: Both wholeheartedly appear to believe they are spreading positive messages. And I applaud them for demonstrating a commitment to their fitness in spite of busy lives. But the ripple effect of the many photos they post of their ripped abs—or, more to the point, their challenging, abrasive “no excuses” captions—is not as clear.

An increasing number of teen girls are steering clear of high school sports because Facebook and Instagram are making them feel body conscious, according to a 2014 study out of Flinders University in Australia. “A lot of the girls who were interviewed actually spend a fair bit of time on ‘fitspo’ [fitness inspiration] pages,” said Claire Drummond, Ph.D., associate professor of social health sciences, in a post about the study on the Flinders site. “The problem is a lot of these pages contain images of fitness models with six packs and skinny bodies that are completely unattainable to everyday young women.”

This broader impact is what many mothers are pointing to as the problem with “no excuses” as a fitness mantra. A friend of mine, Jennifer Campbell of Mama Lion Strong, had this to say in a Facebook post: “I want you to ask yourselves not how you feel about the ‘I’m a Mom, I have a six pack and no excuses’ meme. I want you to ask yourself how you feel about your sons and daughters turning to oiled up, six-packed headless bodies for motivation.”

To be honest, there are plenty of good excuses not to have a six pack: genetics, physical impairments, medications that interfere with fat loss, scheduling issues, lack of access to nutritional education, and so on and so on. But the most important one, the one it all boils down to, may simply that you have other priorities. And that’s not only okay, it’s great.

Like Kang and Pell, I’m a fitness professional. I don’t, however, have kids. I also don’t have a six pack. Or a care in the world about that fact. I am simply not interested in being hungry enough to fight that battle.

Our bodies are our own business, and truly empowering messages revolve around what we can learn to do with them rather than how we can shift and starve and shape them to look a certain way. If Kang and Pell want to truly motivate others, they would be better off dropping unwittingly combative, shame-inducing comparisons. When it comes to real inspiration, “Come with me” always trumps “Look at me.”

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Jen Sinkler is a longtime fitness writer and personal trainer based in Minneapolis who talks fitness, food, happy life, and general health topics at her site, jensinkler.com, and writes for a variety of national health magazines. Earlier this year, she authored Lift Weights Faster, an e-library of over 130 conditioning workouts for fat loss, athleticism, and overall health.

Jen works with clients at The Movement Minneapolis, a facility that uses biofeedback-based training techniques. She is a certified kettlebell instructor through the RKC (Level 2) and KBA, and an Olympic lifting coach through USA Weightlifting; she also holds coaching certifications through Primal Move, Progressive Calisthenics, CrossFit and DVRT (Ultimate Sandbag).

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