It was a Tuesday evening in a room above a pub, and I was standing nude in front of a group of strangers.
After assuming a pose, I stayed still for 30 minutes. All eyes were firmly on me, examining every part of my body – and I felt magnificent.
As a frequent model for life drawing classes, I get the opportunity to regularly celebrate myself and my figure.
Posing while strangers draw me allows me to feel fully present and grounded in my body, and in doing so, build a great sense of body appreciation.
I haven’t always felt like this.
Growing up, I was at war with my body and even developed disordered eating. It started when I was 9 and boys in my class would make fun of my body, even mimicking the way my thighs rubbed together. They made me feel so uncomfortable about the way I looked – as if there was something wrong with me.
None of this is surprising when hating our bodies is the norm.
I remember Heat Magazine’s ‘Circle of Shame’, where they took images of celebrities and used a red circle to highlight their fat rolls and cellulite to shame them. This taught me and many others that these normal parts of ourselves were something to be ashamed of.
Even the Bridget Jones films centred around Jones’ obsession with dieting – she would regularly describe herself as fat as if it was a bad thing. Hearing this character talk about herself like this when she was barely a UK size 12 made young me feel like anything more than that was a problem that needed to be fixed.
When I was navigating all this as a teen, I didn’t get a reaction from family or friends because having an unhealthy relationship with my body was normalised – most of them also shared the very same discomfort about their bodies.
Most often than not, my friends would skip lunch at school because they didn’t want to become ‘fat and ugly’ – they believed that fatness and ugliness were synonymous.
Sadly not a lot has changed since then – recent studies show that body image dissatisfaction in teenage girls range from 35% to a whopping 81%, and 16% – 55% for teenage boys.
Now, the media we are surrounded with via Instagram and TikTok exacerbates the relentless voice of diet culture – it’s no wonder that we struggle with how we look.
It wasn’t until I got to university in 2011 that my relationship with my body started changing for the better.
My sociology professor did a series of lectures about fatphobia – the hatred and discrimination against fat people – something I’d never heard of until then.
That’s when I realised that hating my body wasn’t the default, rather, I’d been taught to hate it by the very same societal influence that teaches us to hate fat bodies and subjugate them.
I learned this during the time that the body positivity movement was gaining traction on Tumblr, where people were posting pictures of themselves celebrating their bodies.
This movement made me realise that if I start to challenge the media’s messaging about how I should feel about my body and start treating it with kindness, not nastiness, then I could really change how I felt.
It was difficult at first. It takes a while to essentially deprogramme yourself from body hate, especially when it’s instilled into you from such a young age.
But in my journey, there were three tools I took away from my experiences.
Firstly, unfollow people on social media that make you feel bad about yourself. Social media invites us to negatively compare ourselves to others, or witness content that doesn’t make us feel good – like fitness influencers who are constantly promoting weight loss, or content creators who make fat jokes.
How do you feel about practicing body positivity?
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I think it's a powerful and needed practice.
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It seems interesting, but I haven't tried it much.
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I am indifferent to it.
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I don't really agree with the concept.
When I removed that kind of content from my feed, I felt happier.
Secondly, write down something positive you need to hear about your body. When thoughts about your body become nasty, it’s in these moments you need to provide yourself with an affirmation.
For example, I’ve previously written ‘I do not need to change my body to be worthy’ on a sticky note and put it on my bathroom mirror.
And finally, do something that makes you feel grounded in your body. I like to take an opportunity to lightly stretch, and pay attention to how it makes my body feel. Savouring the taste of my favourite snack or going on a walk has also helped me get out of my head and into my body.
These steps have provided me with positive actions to directly counteract the negative influence around me. When you repeatedly see and say these mantras, they help you to combat the negative thoughts so they become quieter over time.
Learning to love your body is a journey, one with ebbs and flows. No matter how your body looks, how it changes, or how your relationship with it changes, but it’s key to remember your body is worthy, and enough.
Each day you commit to doing something that goes against the societal norm of hating your body, you’re engaging in a radical act of resistance.
And with this, we can break the toxic cycle of body shame by taking it into our own hands and turning it into something beautiful.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk.
Share your views in the comments below.
