ASHLIE MOLSTAD
BODY
IMAGE
episode
no.01
She Was #1 — and She’d Never Felt More Lost
Ashlie Molstad went from Nike to #1 Beachbody coach in the world. Then she walked away from it all.
By the time Ashlie Molstad hit the top, she’d already been running for years.
The pattern was always the same: set the goal, crush it, skip the celebration, find the next one. It had worked at every level — through a corporate career, through building a six-figure coaching practice, through the viral moment that put her in front of millions overnight. But when there was finally nowhere higher to climb, the thing she’d been outrunning caught up.
What followed wasn’t a breakdown. It was a reckoning — with depression she’d carried since her twenties, with an industry that measured transformation in before-and-after weight loss photos and with a voice inside that kept asking whether the woman who taught other women to bet on themselves had ever actually done it for herself.
On the photo that changed everything
In 2016, Ashlie was exhausted from contorting her body into flattering poses for fitness content — the arched back, the sucked-in stomach, the tippy-toe stance. So she sat down, posted a side-by-side of the posed version next to the real one and said: if I’m going to show you the polished version, I’m going to show you the raw version too. By the end of the weekend, the post had been shared by Ashton Kutcher, covered by CNN and featured in People magazine.
On depression — and what it actually looks like
Someone once asked Ashlie to share a photo of herself when she was depressed. She posted one of herself smiling at a party. “Depression doesn’t always look like someone hibernating in a dark hole somewhere,” she said. “I was good at performing. And it was in the quiet of my mind or when I was alone.” The turning point wasn’t medication or a single conversation — it was Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability, and the realization that talking about depression openly didn’t make her less inspiring. It made her human.
On reaching the top and feeling nothing
After becoming Beachbody’s number one coach, Ashlie’s corporate mentor asked her how it felt. Her answer surprised even her: “The same as it did when I was 10 and a hundred.” She’d spent her whole life in the same cycle — hit the goal, move on, never stop. It wasn’t until there was literally nowhere higher to climb that the real crisis hit: “I don’t know who I am without having the next goal to set.”
On walking away from what was working
Ashlie called Beachbody’s CEO and told him there was a market for what she was teaching: sustainability over quick fixes and intuitive eating over calorie counting. His response was respectful but clear: the company was about weight loss and before-and-afters. She’d gotten to number one by doing the opposite of what Beachbody was selling. She loved the company. She stayed grateful. But at that point, she knew she had to go.
On what she knows now
Life coaching taught Ashlie something that rewired her relationships, her marriage and her sense of self: “Me thinking I’m right and feeling like I know what’s right for everybody is just keeping me very unsettled.” The guiding principle she lives by now came from a quote by Iyanla: I don’t get to tell people how to love me. I get to see how they love and decide if I want to participate.
Follow Ashlie on Instagram.
New episodes of At the Brink drop every Wednesday. Watch the full conversation on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
