Love your BODY the way it is!

What kind of world do women occupy when 97 per cent admit to thinking ‘I hate my body’ at least once a day? Being thin will solve all your problems. Being thin will make boys like you. Being thin brings you worth. Being thin gives you control. And never underestimate how fiercely girls will grab on to the opportunity to feel in control of their lives. The flipside of these messages is pretty terrible for the average girl to contemplate.

I had an eating disorder at 13, and after I had regained most of the weight I had lost, during a meal with my mother she admonished me as I reached for a second helping. I stared at her, hand in mid-air, a mixture of humiliation and indignation swirling inside me. ‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because I think you could do without it,’ she replied. ‘You once made me promise to tell you if you started to get fat again, and I’m just keeping my promise.’

I was astounded that she’d remembered something said years ago by a child in the grip of an eating disorder, and that the existence of that illness seemed to have been erased from her memory. Fatness is considered a sign of weakness and failure. A woman has the responsibility of making the ‘best’ of herself. I remember my father getting very agitated one day because my stomach was peeking out between my shorts and T-shirt. I was just schlepping about at home but he suddenly pointed to the exposed flesh and yelled how my stomach was ‘hanging all over the place’. Another time he observed how unfortunate it was that a woman he knew was fat, ‘because she’d be pretty if she lost some weight’.

I learned to like myself more when I started playing roller derby [a contact sport on roller skates]. Being in a community of women athletes was fun and it was also empowering. I began to look at my body as something with a use and a purpose, something that could do things, rather than something that existed just to be looked at and critiqued.

Find something that your body likes, then do it regularly. When you’re feeling down or insecure about yourself, remember that you have a good body. Try to banish negative thoughts by replacing them with something positive. As comedian Luisa Omielan says, grabbing her tummy, ‘Do you know what this means? That I go out for dinner with friends. This is my present to myself.’

Fatness is not a disease and it’s not contagious. The only thing that is contagious is the temptation to pile hatred into a completely random and often genetically determined physical self and turn it into a symbol of disgust and worthlessness. We need to stop passing on the toxic messages that have travelled down from generation to generation. We need to tell our children that they are everything that they need to be. We need to tell our girls that their bodies exist for them to use, not for others to look at.