‘This self-love stuff is great for everyone else, but not for me’
– Me, 2014
If you’ve read this far then YOU ARE THE BEST AND I WANT TO HUG YOU RIGHT NOW! I hope by this point in the book you’ve learned some things that have helped you understand where your body-image issues have come from. I hope that you’ve started to question the lies we’ve all been taught about our bodies, and started to heal from the damage that’s been done. However, you might also be feeling a little bit lost, since I’ve basically just dropped a whole load of ideas on to your lap that go against pretty much everything you’ve ever been told about bodies and beauty and worth. And that’s a lot.
So you might still be wondering what you can do, right now, in this moment, to get your body positive journey started. Which is why I thought I’d fill this final chapter with a step-by-step guide of things that you can do today, things that you can work on this month, and things to keep practising always. So that when you close the final page you’ll be ready to start growing into your new, unapologetic, body-lovin’ self.
Before we dive in, it’s really important for me to acknowledge something. I know that some of you will be feeling how I felt when I first found body positivity, which went something like this: all that self-love is great for them! I’ll just lose some weight and then I’ll try it. I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing because it might work this time. I have to keep hating my body because if I stop I’ll never change it enough to be happy. I’m the exception, everyone else deserves to love their bodies, but not me. Sound familiar? Read this next part very carefully:
You deserve it too.
No exceptions. No buts. No weight-loss clauses. You deserve this. You have spent far too much time hating your body, and now it’s time for you to change that. It doesn’t matter what you weigh – there’s no size limit on body positivity. It doesn’t matter how you’ve reached this point, whether you’ve struggled with eating disorders, bullying, yo-yo dieting, whether you’ve just started feeling bad about your reflection, or whether you’ve had a lifetime of never feeling good enough.
Body peace is for you. Every one of you. No matter your size or shape, the colour of your skin, how old you are, your gender, your sexual orientation, or your level of physical or mental ability. Regardless of anything about your body that you’ve been taught to see as shameful, you deserve this too.
Stop thinking that you’re the only one who shouldn’t make peace with their body. You should, and you can. I promise.
This is what separates the ‘self-love is great for them but not me’ people from the ‘I fucking refuse to hate myself for a second longer’ people. If you’re a woman then you’ve probably been taught at some point that anger is not an attractive feminine quality. We’re not supposed to get mad, we’re supposed to be passive, quiet and polite at all times. But guess what? We are human beings with a full range of emotions, each one with the strength to move mountains. And the only reason that we’re taught to keep our emotions small and contained is so that we never realise how truly powerful we can be once we tap into them. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that angry women will change the world.
If you’re like me, then you probably started to get mad around the first chapter of this book. By the time you were finished with the diet-industry chapter, you were probably good and raging. Because at that point one thing will have become abundantly clear: we’ve been set up to hate our bodies from the start. As soon as we were born into a culture that’s willing to sacrifice half the population’s mental health in order to turn a profit, we were screwed. From day one. There was no way for us to escape the body-image issues that were waiting. I want you to really think about that, and how it makes you feel, so that you can channel that emotion into fighting back.
Get mad. Get mad about the first time you were ever made to feel bad about your body. Get mad about the fact that the average age for girls to start dieting is eight years old. Get mad about all that wasted time spent only half living. Get mad about not being able to turn on your TV, open a magazine, or walk down the street without being sold the idea that your body is wrong.
Get mad about all of the people starving themselves to death in a world that refuses to stop idolising the image they’re killing themselves for. Get mad on behalf of all the extraordinary women you know who’ve never been able to see themselves clearly. Remember that none of us asked for this, and so many of us are still trapped believing the lies.
I want you to gather up all that anger, and all that pain, and refuse. Refuse to keep tearing yourself to pieces hoping to finally be good enough. Refuse to spend any more of your life believing that how you look is the most important thing about you. Channel that anger, and use it to decide that it’s time to make a change.
Make a promise to yourself today to stop denying your body the nourishment it needs in an attempt to shrink it into a smaller size. Remember all of the things you now know about diets:
If you need to go back and reread the Lose Weight For Good! (Only £29.99 a Month) chapter, go do that now. Then call a truce.
This kind of detox actually works and you don’t even have to drink any cayenne pepper! All you have to do is go through your life, and throw out anything that makes you feel like you’re not good enough. Think of it as a self-esteem spring clean.
This is the best part: your social-media feeds. It’s time to cultivate a safe online space where you can log on and feel celebrated! Be ruthless, and get ready to tap that unfollow button. Start with that Facebook friend who keeps trying to sell you Herbalife; they can go. Then unfollow those fitspo models who post ‘what’s your excuse?’ quotes – you don’t need an excuse to accept yourself as you are. Next up, that celebrity you’re following as ‘body goals’ inspiration; you don’t need that any more, you are your own body goals.
Then check those lifestyle pages you’re following that post pictures of sunsets and acai bowls, do they also only ever post thin, white, young, able bodies? Because that’s a problem. After you’re done there, feel free to unfriend that person you haven’t spoken to in seven years who keeps posting about their weight-loss progress and saying that if they can do it, anyone can!
Detox everything that’s a source of negative comparison for you. If none of the above ever make you doubt yourself and your own body, then they don’t have to go, these are just things that I personally had to detox from. But be honest about how the things you expose yourself to every day online make you feel. Remember that having a safe space for your mental well-being is more important than being polite to a near stranger by keeping them on your friend list.
If the source of the diet-culture messages is a closer friend, you can try to let them know that sometimes what they post can be damaging to your self-esteem, and ask them to consider that in the future. If that seems like too much confrontation, you can always create a new online account reserved for positivity to go to when you need it. Which brings us to …
Now that you’ve got a blank slate to work with, it’s time to fill it up with real diversity. We might not be able to control all the images of the ideal body we’re exposed to in the outside world, but we can curate our social media feeds, and take charge of what we see online.
Follow people of all different shapes and sizes. Follow body positive and fat-acceptance activists, read their words and learn from them. Make sure that your feed is diverse in skin colour as well as size, and varied in ages. Follow people in the disabled community, and listen to them. Follow people who break the gender binary. Follow all the people we never get to see positively represented in mainstream media. Because those people are living proof that you can lead a full, vibrant, stylish, meaningful and HAPPY life no matter how you look.
What we see every day teaches us how to see ourselves. The more different body types you see and recognise as beautiful, valuable, and worthy, the easier it will become for you to recognise that you are those things as well.
How many items of clothing do you own that don’t fit you? Yep, I’m talking about those ‘When I Lose Ten Pounds’ jeans. That ‘Well, It Fit Me Five Years Ago’ jacket. That one dress you’ve never worn but pull out every once in a while as proof of how hideous you are because you still can’t get it on. It’s time to let those clothes go. Because all they are are reminders of your insecurities that you see every single time you get dressed.
Once upon a time I had a black fitted jumpsuit that made me feel like I’d just stepped out of a music video. The problem was the only time it had ever fit comfortably was after a week-long stomach flu I had one year over Christmas. Every time I tried it on after that it either left dents in my skin and gave me the mother of all camel toes, or just plain refused to zip up.
But I kept it for a long time, it was my ‘When I Fit Back Into That I’ll Be Okay’ outfit. In fact, about half my wardrobe was made up of things that were one, two, or even three sizes too small. I just couldn’t bring myself to let them go; that would feel too much like giving up on myself.
I didn’t realise that every time I stuffed myself into a too-small pair of trousers or a shirt that I couldn’t even lift my arms in, I was reinforcing a belief that my comfort didn’t matter until I was a smaller size. That I did not deserve to feel comfortable because I was too big. But we all deserve to feel comfortable in our clothes. How we feel every day when we get dressed matters. And our self-esteem is worth way more than the number on a lifeless bit of fabric ever could be.
So blast your favourite music, ask a friend to come round for emotional support if it’ll help, and get rid of the ghosts of dress sizes past. You can sell them online and put the proceeds towards some new threads, or donate them! You’ll be amazed at how much lighter you feel without those bits of material staring at you accusingly whenever you open your wardrobe.
Do you remember that statistic in the very first chapter about women having an average of 13 negative body thoughts every day? How many do you have? How do they sound? Do you tell yourself that you’re disgusting? Ugly? Worthless? How the hell are you supposed to feel anything positive about yourself with someone being so mean to you all the time?
The next time that critical voice pops up and starts trying to tear you down, I want you to challenge it. If it calls you fat, tell it that fat isn’t a bad word, and that you’re valuable regardless of how much fat you have. If it tells you that no one will ever find you attractive, tell it that you’re no longer placing your worth in how visually appealing you are to others. If it unleashes a tirade of body shame on you whenever you look in the mirror, shout back. Speak over it. Speak out loud and let it know who’s really in charge.
Slowly but surely, you’re going to replace the negative self-talk with positive affirmations instead. If you can’t think of anything positive to say about your body yet, here are some that you can try on for size:
The affirmation that I find the most comforting is this: my body is exactly how it’s supposed to be. When you’re constantly being bombarded from all directions by things telling you how you should look, there is strength is saying no, this is how I should look, in this moment my body is exactly how it’s supposed to be. After all, your body isn’t supposed to look like anyone else’s, your body is yours and yours alone.
In time, you’ll be able to cut that critical voice short. Eventually, you’ll be ready to fight it off before it even starts. It might never disappear completely; negative self-talk creeps up even on the most body positive people when they’re feeling vulnerable. What’s important is having the weapons ready to fight back. Positive affirmations are your weapons, and even though you might not believe the things you’re saying at first, every time you say them you’ll believe them a little bit more. Try it right now, say something nice about your body. Out loud. I dare you.
There are so many incredible body positive books out there, I definitely couldn’t have written this one without them. I’ve included a reading list at the back with some of my favourites — go soak up that body positive wisdom!
If reading that made your insides flip over, hear me out. I know how scary the idea of letting the scales go can be. How can you let go of that number? How do you say goodbye to something that’s been such a vital measure of your worth for so long? I get that.
When you wake up every day and jump on the scales before you have breakfast, you can end up getting addicted to that feeling. That rush of seeing a number that’s lower than the day before, how proud you get to feel all day long. I also know how easily that feeling shatters when the number isn’t what you want it to be. Suddenly instead of pride, you feel shame.
All your clothes somehow feel tighter than they did yesterday. You’re so sure that everyone around you can see the difference. You spend the whole day drowning in negative self-talk, feeling guilty for everything that passes your lips, and praying for a better result tomorrow. That daily weigh-in can make you or break you. And that’s the problem.
Every time we step on to the scale hoping to see that magic number, we’re handing our happiness over to a hunk of metal, plastic and glass. We’re letting whatever digits pop up dictate how we feel about ourselves for the whole day. We’re buying into the idea that the number the hand settles on defines us. Which is why the scale has to go. Because your happiness is more important than that number, and always will be.
From now on, instead of relying on an inanimate object to tell us our value, we’re going to decide it for ourselves. And instead of forcing our bodies to match a certain number that we think will make us better, we’re going to start trusting our bodies’ set-point weights, and accepting that fluctuations are normal. We’re going to stop giving our power away to the scale.*
*Note: if you’re currently in recovery from an eating disorder and you’ve been told that weight restoration is necessary, you probably won’t be able to say goodbye to the scales just yet. But you can limit your usage of them to when it’s medically necessary for you to be weighed, and try your best to let go of the numbers outside of that. Once you’re weight – restored and in a better place mentally, you’ll be able to banish them from your life, so keep going.
Here are a few options of what you can do with your current scale: hide it out of sight. Throw it away. Give it a weight neutral make-over (search for Marilyn Wann’s Yay! Scale on Google; it’s a scale made body positive by replacing all the numbers with words like ‘hot’ and ‘perfect’ instead). Or, my personal favourite, take a sledgehammer to it! Channel all that anger about being made to hate yourself for so long, and go to town on that scale. Make sure you’re wearing the appropriate protective gear! Safety first, even when smashing diet culture.
Go back to the Dessert Every Damn Day and #BODYGOALS chapters anytime you need to refocus on ways to heal your relationship with food and exercise. Remember that you deserve to eat without guilt, your body deserves nourishment and you deserve to find joy in movement. Also remember that if your physical movement is limited, if you don’t have resources available to you, or you’re just not interested in intuitive eating or exercise, you are still worthy of self-love. You are invited to the body positive party no matter what.
I’m willing to bet that every single one of us has been body-shamed. Maybe it was a stranger in the street. Maybe it was a backhanded compliment from a friend. Maybe it was that one family member who’s always berating you about your body. Maybe it was a plain old Internet troll. Whoever it came from and whatever they said, body-shaming is never okay. So it’s time for you to stand up for yourself and shut it down.
Fact: anyone who feels the need to attack a complete stranger’s appearance – online or in person – is not happy with themselves. Often those people believe that tearing you down will boost their self-esteem. Sometimes they’re pissed off that they’ve spent their lives striving for happiness through attaining the ideal body, and you daring to exist visibly in a body that isn’t societally ideal devalues their efforts (they’ll be extra pissed off if you’re daring to be happy in that body, too!). Or maybe this person is simply a grade-A wanker who needs to step back, drink a glass of water, and re-evaluate their life choices.
But do you notice something that all these instances have in common? YOU ARE NOT THE PROBLEM. In fact, it isn’t even about you. It’s about them and all the poisonous ways they’ve been taught to think about other people’s bodies. They are the problem, and their words say a whole lot more about who they are, than who you are. With that in mind, you can choose how to react:
Sometimes a friendship turns toxic without us realising, it can start to feel like a competition, back-handed compliments pop up out of nowhere, and body-shaming becomes the norm. This can be especially common among groups of female friends, since we’ve been trained to see each other as competition (more on how to escape that in a bit).
When you witness body-shaming among your friends, whether it’s about you or anyone else, call it out. Let them know how much damage their comments could do. Tell them that it’s hard enough being okay with your body without your friends picking on your insecurities as well. If they really are friends, they’ll be apologetic as hell and they’ll stop doing it. If they carry on, then it might be time to admit that they’re not worthy of your friendship. You deserve friends who lift you up and make you feel like royalty, and nothing less.
This is, without a doubt, the question that I get asked the most. What do you do when a family member won’t stop criticising your body? How do you make them see the effect that those comments have, without causing arguments or family divides? Especially if you live with that family member and see them every day.
Here’s something I want you to know first of all: as difficult as it might be for them to understand, not even your family gets to dictate what you should do with your body and how you should look. You shouldn’t have to be around someone who chips away at your self-esteem whenever you see them. Here’s a way for you to stand up for yourself.
There will be a time in the near future when you’re around friends/ family/colleagues, and the conversation turns to how much weight everyone wants to lose. Or how bad someone was for *gasp* ordering dessert! Or what the best way to prepare broccoli is to harness the mystical fat burning powers within the stalk (I’m just waiting for this to be the next big miracle diet method, the book would be called Stalk Your Way to Your Best Brocco-Life Yet!).
My point is, diet talk is unavoidable. It’s our socially conditioned go-to small talk topic. But if you’re just starting to break free from diet culture, or if you’re in recovery from an eating disorder, those conversations can be toxic for your mental health, and you’re not required to listen to them. If you don’t feel like you can just back away and leave those people to their group self-deprecation, you could shift the conversation instead. Depending on your relationship to the person speaking, try one of these:
We have been conditioned to see each other as competition. Since there’s only one kind of beauty, according to the ideal body rules, we must always rank ourselves against one another to see who gets the prize. When we see someone who we think is beautiful, our mind immediately reminds us that they must be more beautiful than we are. Their hair is glossier than ours, their skin is smoother, their legs are more toned, their smile is brighter. Before we know it we’ve been swept away on a wave of negative comparison.
Suddenly the complete stranger with the glossy hair is our fiercest competitor, and we go home plotting how we can improve ourselves to outrank them. Not only does this alienate us from connecting positively with other people, it means that every time we go out we’re expending huge amounts of mental energy rating ourselves against everyone we see. It’s exhausting, and it doesn’t need to be that way.
The next time that you see a beautiful person, instead of listing all the ways that you fall short against them, I want you to try something different. I want you to consider that no matter how perfect this person looks to you on the outside, they might be drowning in just as many body-image issues as you are.
The parts of their body that you’ve compared to your own might be their greatest insecurities. While you’ve been wishing away your features and coveting theirs, they might have been doing exactly the same thing to someone else. No matter how perfect you think that their body is, there’s an overwhelming chance that they don’t see what you’re seeing when they look in the mirror.
The truth is that you have no idea how that person feels about their body. They could be struggling with an eating disorder, they could be obsessively dieting and over-exercising, they could have body dysmorphic disorder. To you, they might be flawless, but there’s a big fat chance that they’re still not happy with their body.
So instead of seeing them as competition, try to see them as someone who’s up against the same unrealistic beauty standards, and the same fatphobic diet-culture bullshit that we all are. Instead of ranking ourselves against one another, it’s about time we realised that there is room for all of us. Another person’s beauty is not the absence of your own.
BEFORE I GO, I want to leave you with my favourite quote, written by Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth:
‘The woman wins who calls herself beautiful, and challenges the world to change to truly see her’
So get out there my loves, challenge the world to change, and remember that you are more powerful than you will ever know.
