All my life I hated my body. Only now at 69 do I see what a fool I was

In an utterly candid confession that will chime with so many, a top businesswoman says...

TODAY, I sat at my kitchen table and laid out a series of photographs that encapsulate my life from my mid-teens to present day.

As a successful entrepreneur — I launched a thriving make-up line aimed at the over-50s, which made me my fortune — I’m used to seeing photographs of myself in magazines and newspapers. But I rarely look back at those from when I was younger.

In each I look so slim, attractive even — and yet, throughout the six decades they span, my relationship with my body has been awful.

If I wasn’t berating my physical form because my hips were too wide, my thighs and ankles too chunky and my breasts too small, I was trying to control its size through punishing diets.

Dear God, what a shame it is to reach your 69th year remembering, as if it were yesterday, how overweight and depressingly unattractive you felt as a young woman. Only to finally look back on a pile of photographs and realise that actually, you were slim and lovely after all.

We tend to think that the pressure young women feel under today to look a certain way is a fairly recent phenomenon, fuelled by the filtered images of bodily perfection they are repeatedly exposed to via social media.

But 50 years ago, things weren’t much different for us, their grandmothers. Low self-esteem because you didn’t come close to the skinny, long-legged beauty of models such as Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton and Pattie Boyd was rife.

WHO, in the Sixties, didn’t have that painfully thin friend you never saw eat, who lived off an apple a day and whose periods had stopped, all in the days before anyone had heard of anorexia. That is if you weren’t that girl yourself.

When puberty struck and my body failed to turn me into the tall, wispy creature I longed to be, I embarked on a campaign of punishment; manifesting in ridiculous 1,000-calorie-a-day diets that triggered a hunger-binge cycle of eating that lasted well into my late 30s. As well as suffering from a form of body dysmorphia that meant I saw a fat person staring back at me in the mirror. Even though I now realise I never was even remotely overweight.

It has shocked me to look back at pictures of myself as a teenager and see a concave stomach when I felt so huge.

On my wedding day, aged 22, and later as a young mother in my 30s, I was enviably slim. Yet back then I would weigh myself daily, convinced I was a couple of pounds short of obesity.

I’d live off salad and poached chicken for days, and then, desperate for carbohydrates, bring home a tin of golden syrup and slather it over slice after slice of buttered bread.

By my 40s I’d grown so tired of the tone of each day being set by whether the scales showed I’d lost or gained a pound overnight that I finally threw them away.

My confidence rocketed — I’d recently gained a first class humanities degree and had re-launched myself as a career woman working as a management training consultant, having spent 11 years at home raising my children.

But that’s not to say I’d had an epiphany and realised that my body was fine just the way it was; I had simply replaced disgust with studied indifference because I no longer had the energy required to keep up the self-loathing. I stopped the yo-yo dieting and when I looked in the mirror made a conscious effort to look just at my face, the only part of me I felt at ease with.

If I ignored every other physical part of me I could avoid having to appraise these parts and get on with enjoying the rest of my life. I even avoided exercise, because to work out would have meant connecting with my body.

In my later years, post menopause, indifference turned to quiet acceptance. But I still didn’t feel any pride in the body that had enduringly carried me through life. My mindset only changed last year, aged 68, when a bout of flu made me extremely unwell for the first time in my life.

Suddenly, it struck me, as I lay on my sickbed with my 70s looming and every part of me aching, how much this body is worth to me. I need it to contain me through whatever time I have left on this earth. If I don’t learn to love it now then I never will. And it deserves my love. I owe every breath I take to this vessel. It carried my two daughters, delivering them safely into my arms; and it has carried me for every step I have taken.

So the irony is that it is only now, with my body well past a prime I failed to enjoy, that I am forcing myself to embrace and appreciate it, wrinkles, cellulite, saggy bits and all.

I’ve stopped treating it like a relative so unlikeable that every time she visits I am as nasty towards her as possible. Instead, I’ve taken up exercise to help me feel stronger and more connected to it.

And when I try on a dress and it doesn’t fit I rail against the fashion industry with its inconsistent sizing rather than blame myself for being the wrong shape. Now that I have reached a certain age I know I am far from alone in looking back at this element of my life, wondering ‘what on earth was that all about?’ And as a result I’ve had many conversations with my peers — women in their 50s, 60s and beyond, who also look back wishing they could have seen themselves in their youth as they finally do now.

I wish I could return to that young women in those old photographs, who felt so insecure about the way she looked, and convince her of what I know now: that however much I felt my body was lacking back then, it was always much more than good enough.