Longtime fans of Whitney Simmons’s YouTube channel are very familiar with a phrase that opened nearly every video of hers for years: “It’s a beautiful day to be alive.” After that, she’d launch into a tough-but-doable strength-training routine, a chatty video about her favorite beauty products, or one of her viral meal-prep sessions.
The sentiment rapidly morphed into a merch line, the slogan for her fitness app, and an Easter egg stitched into the lining of her GymShark activewear collections. It really started as the inspiration for Whitney’s brand, something she said out of a desire to inspire others, but over the years, it became her lifeline. It’s “taken on a whole new meaning for me,” she says. “It went from this positivity statement to a personal reminder.”
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Connecting joy to movement is a thread in Whitney’s life. During college in Utah, she stopped cheerleading (at 5´6˝, she was deemed “too tall” to stunt with) and moved home after her sophomore year. Feeling lost without the structure of sport, she realized that activity was the thing that supported her mental health the most. Her dad, an avid exerciser, brought her to the gym and she “fell in love” with lifting weights.
By the time she graduated and started her first job in marketing, “the gym was my world,” she says. She launched her YouTube channel in January 2016. And that September, Whitney lost her job. So she decided to go all in on YouTube.
As her content ramped up, so did the views. However, the gym “used to be my escape from work, and now it is work,” she says. It’s also a job done in front of millions of people who have opinions on everything from her voice to her glutes; for the first time, she started struggling with body image.
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In August 2020, Whitney was working out at a local gym when she received a text that a close friend had passed away from cancer. She sped home, curled up in a ball in the shower, and cried. Almost immediately, her perspective on the physical gym space shifted. It reminded her of that text. When she passed that spot, she couldn’t breathe. She didn’t go back for over a year. She didn’t even want to get out of bed, let alone exercise.
She tried to pull back from social media—“I didn’t even know who I was at that moment”—but she had a job to do. And the Internet notices everything. Some accused her of faking a mental illness; others said her attempts to smile through pain promoted toxic positivity. When her birthday came around the next February, Whitney struggled to understand why she—a person being picked apart online—had lived to celebrate another year when her late friend didn’t.
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One evening in May 2021, after reading a particularly mean-spirited thread, she was driving alone in Utah when she approached a U-turn with a concrete wall in front of her. Driving toward it, Whitney contemplated ending her life. But “at the very last second, I decided, ‘Not yet,’” she recalls. Those thoughts terrified her. Within a week, she was seeing a therapist, who diagnosed her with severe depression and anxiety.
As much as the unkind side of social media nudged Whitney into that dark place, its bright spots are what ultimately encouraged her to share her story a few months later. She didn’t know how to answer followers’ questions about what happened to the fun, goofy Whitney they thought they knew. “I was tired of feeling ashamed of something when there was nothing to be ashamed of.” So on September 13, 2021, she told her story on the Fleurish podcast, and the positive response gave her the confidence to keep discussing her mental health on YouTube and Instagram.
She’s taken the same approach to her psoriasis, an autoimmune condition that causes itchy, scaly patches of skin. “The more severe it got, the more I wanted to cover it,” she says. She worried that showing it would make people uncomfortable. But now, she chooses to be vulnerable. “I have so many women in my DMs who say, ‘I used to cover every inch of my body at the gym, and now I just don’t care. I am going to wear the shorts.’”
Today, Whitney speaks as candidly about therapy and Lexapro as she does about her love of shoulder day and her two dogs. Her fitness app, aptly named Alive, places emphasis on mental health. The certified trainer credits her therapist with teaching her to take things a day at a time, and her husband of one year, Stefan, with helping to heal her inner child.
Her confidence is back, and it’s palpable. “From seeing nothing beautiful in any day, to now—I am so grateful that I made it through that,” she says. “It is a beautiful day to be alive.” Turns out, she was telling herself what she needed to hear all along.
Meet The Rest Of WH’s Forces of Fitness:
Photographed by Caleb & Gladys. Styling: Kristen Saladino. Hair: Ty Shearn. Makeup: Rebecca Alexander at See Management using Danessa Myricks Beauty. Manicure: Nori for Chanel Le Vernis.
Amanda Lucci is the deputy editor of content strategy at Women’s Health and a NASM-certified personal trainer. She has more than 10 years of experience writing, editing, and managing social media strategy for national and international publications.
