Cheryl Burke took some serious heat on social media for her recent vacation photos – shots that made some of her followers think she had plastic surgery or lip injections – but the “Dancing with the Stars” pro is denying she’s gone under the knife.
“It’s one thing to see negative comments about yourself in the press, it’s another to be criticized by individual people on your own social media pages. It’s much more personal, it hurts,” she said in a statement to Access Hollywood.
“It’s not something I’m used to, I’ve been lucky enough to have a great group of fans who have always posted incredibly kind things on my pages. I was actually looking forward to posting vacation photos since I’ve been eating healthy and feeling so good. I totally let my guard down and wasn’t expecting people to start hurling insults, especially things about me having fake lips and plastic surgery? That’s literally crazy. There are other photos where my lips look like that. I started thinking about re-posting those photos and then I realized I had to take a step back,” the 30-year-old “DWTS” champ continued.
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The intensity of some people’s negative comments shocked Cheryl, but she’s been able to move past it.
“I started wondering who these people are and what would make them look at a photo of another person and write something mean on it. It’s not just kids being thoughtless, there are a lot of really mean posts from people whose profile pictures are of themselves and their children,” she explained in the statement to Access.
Adding, “I’ve had some time to think about it all and I’ve found strength in just letting it go. I can’t let myself get hurt by it. I also can’t shut down and not post anything online. There are all different types of people out there who are going to say all kinds of things, online and in real life. The important thing is to know which ones to listen to.”
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This is not the first time Cheryl has spoken out about handling criticism of her body.
In 2011, she spoke to Access about being the target of tabloids and the great lengths she went to in order to lose weight.
“It was a horrible feeling,” she said of past tabloid stories criticizing her figure. “I tried to not eat, that didn’t work… I tried all these diet pills that just made me feel shaky… but at the end of the day I sit back I look at it and I’m just so thankful that I didn’t go to that extreme. That I just did it the healthy way and I did it because I wanted to do it, not because people were telling me to do it. I wanted to feel healthy and I knew I gained a few pounds, but I wanted it to let it shed off in a healthy, way not in any way that was not right.”
Adding at the time, “I just feel that I think people are always going to criticize, no matter what. You can’t make every single person happy.”
— Jesse Spero
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