ALL OUT OF ESTEEM

How to hack your confidence when self-esteem seems hard to come by

Britain is in the grip of a body-image crisis, with women and girls regarding their physical forms with the kind of disdain usually reserved for morally corrupt bankers. Here, as WH launches Project Body Love, one writer excavates her own experiences in the pursuit of improved self-worth

The sound of my sister’s laughter punctuates the mixtape blasting Blur. It’s the sound of a party I’m missing. I’m on the doorstep, crying Rimmel-laced tears on to the shoulder of my boyfriend’s favourite white band tee. I’m 15 years old.

I’ve taken down enough Malibu and pineapple not to care as people step over me to go inside, but there isn’t enough booze at this party – at any party – to crowd out the pain I feel. ‘I’m ugly, I’m disgusting, I’m nothing,’ I stutter between sobs. It isn’t the first time I’ve said these words, and it won’t be the last. I’ll leave mascara marks on many more T-shirts and miss more parties, job opportunities and school reunions for fear of not looking ‘right’. The sad thing is, I suspect this story could just as easily be yours.

Research suggests that up to 60% of British women and adolescent girls feel negatively towards their bodies. The 2014 British Social Attitudes Survey found that nearly half of adults believe their appearance affects what they’re capable of achieving in life, while a third agree that their value as a person depends on how they look. And unlike your taste for Malibu, it isn’t something you grow out of with age; a 45-year-old woman is as likely to be dissatisfied with her appearance as a 19-year-old. While I don’t doubt that this affliction affects women the world over, the results of the 2018 WH global

Naked Survey suggest that, here on this island, we’re suffering more than most. When asked, ‘Do you feel beautiful?’, 56% of UK respondents said no – a self-esteem score

trumped by every nation except Poland. Sadder still were the responses to the question, ‘What’s your biggest insecurity?’ Among comments about post-pregnancy stretch marks and not-quite-pert-enough behinds, one word jumps out more than most: ‘everything’.

MIRROR IMAGE

My own discontent can be traced back to my teenage years. I held my appearance accountable for everything wrong in my life, and food became my weapon of choice to punish myself. Sometimes I’d restrict what I ate, hiding food in a napkin at the dinner table; other times, I’d sneak sweets into my bedroom to eat in secret. My teenage diaries make for difficult reading; lists of diets, daily calorie totals and self-loathing-laced sentiments scrawled in biro. My body became a thing to control, but even with this, there hung a sense of failure – after all, my weight loss never seemed so dramatic that it worried my parents or warranted medical intervention. I remember sitting in a geography lesson one day, feeling like there was a grey cloud hovering over only me; a cloud that watered the roots of self-loathing, which would take years to unearth and clear away.

This story isn’t extraordinary. There must have been millions of girls like me in classrooms across the country sitting under their own clouds, and those clouds rain consequences. ‘High body dissatisfaction is a factor for a whole array of disordered eating,’ says Nadia Craddock, a researcher at the Centre For Appearance Research at the University of the West of England, who explains that low self-esteem is a risk factor for eating disorders such as anorexia, as well as binge-eating patterns that can manifest in weight gain. Negative body image can also inform health choices, such as avoiding a smear test or mammogram. It could be a coincidence that smear-test attendance among UK women is the lowest it’s been in two decades, but the news from Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust that eight out of 10 women who missed or delayed a test cited ‘embarrassment’ as the reason suggests that it isn’t. And while low self-esteem has been proven to play a role in the development of anxiety and depression, it can be just as pernicious for those who don’t have a diagnosed mental health condition. ‘Regardless of how other people perceive you, if you don’t like the way you look, are you going to put your hand up in class?’ asks Craddock. ‘Years later, are you going to go for that job interview? Are you going to feel confident enough to present in the boardroom?’ Indeed, a 2015 government report found that body image is an equality issue, concluding that a poor perception of her own body not only reduces a woman’s economic, political and social power, but is also associated with low aspirations and social participation.

HIDE AND SEEK

This resonates deeply. Academic achievements did little to convince me I was worth more than the sum of my parts. My self-esteem didn’t magically materialise the day I got my A-level results, and a study I stumbled upon while researching this feature, linking higher alcohol consumption among students with low self-esteem, certainly rings true of my own university days. Internships in my early twenties were agony, when my existing body-image issues were often exacerbated by bouts of angry acne – it’s hard to make yourself stand out in the workplace when your overriding wish is to be invisible. During one placement at a magazine, I felt so self-conscious about my skin, my clothes, my everything, that I even struggled to pick up the phone to make a call. My confidence became so entwined with my body image that I’d watch my peers land coveted positions, all the while thinking I could, too, if only I had thinner thighs.

My career confidence eventually solidified. By the age of 25, I was working on a celebrity magazine with colleagues who became good friends – circumstances that delivered a sense of belonging. And positive feedback reassured me that I was quite good at something, after all. But the search for self-esteem in my personal life persisted. I continued to use food to reward and punish, chasing every hard day, crap date and bad break-up with a binge, only to put myself on yet another diet. My weight bounced up and down, my wardrobe spanned three dress sizes and I felt as out of control as ever.

My breakthrough wasn’t a breakthrough at all; change crept in. It’s only with hindsight that I can identify the habits that led to the behaviours that helped my self-esteem to grow. I suspect it’s no coincidence that my decision to leave a full-time job and become self-employed (read: a decision that took balls) coincided with the start of my love affair with exercise. Fitness-phobic at school, I’d only ever run for weight loss. But a growing realisation

‘It’s hard to make yourself stand out in the workplace when your overriding wish is to be invisible’

that it made me feel good culminated in a commitment to running a half marathon. As my mileage steadily increased from one to five to 10 to 13, my respect for my body grew with it, while worries about how my thighs looked in Lycra retreated. A year later, I committed to a marathon – and research confirms what I learnt as I crossed the finish line, hands raised above my head, tears of joy mingling with sweat. In 2016, Swiss and Iranian researchers not only found that an increase in physical activity led to an improvement in self-esteem and body image (assessed by the self-esteem scale and figure-rating scale respectively), but they highlighted the role of ‘perceived physical fitness’. It means that your fitness doesn’t need to improve for you to see a change in your selfesteem; the simple act of investing time and energy in your body is sufficient to trigger a boost. They’re findings reiterated by the WH global Naked survey: 61% said they feel best about their bodies after exercising, and ‘smashing a workout’ was the most popular response to a question on the biggest source of body pride.

BODY LANGUAGE

Developing a deeper understanding of the relationship between language and feelings has helped, too. My mother’s been providing me with a running commentary on how much weight she’s gained or lost for as long as I can remember. Her mother did it, too. It’s not their fault – diet culture has been pervasive for decades, and they both grew up in a world where a woman’s looks were tantamount to her value. But once I left home, ‘Have you lost weight?’ became the default greeting – a well-meaning one that left me feeling judged. One day, I simply requested she stop asking. ‘Typically, when we talk about our bodies, we focus on their characteristics as seen through the lens of an observer,’ explains Maxine Ali, a linguist and bodyimage researcher. ‘It means language trains us to value our

bodies as objects.’ If it’s a learned behaviour, it’s one that we perpetuate ourselves. Exchanging looks-based compliments is social currency in many female friendships; a ritual as routine as making small-talk about the weather, but it’s doing us no good. ‘Girls who tend to be praised for looking “pretty” and “cute” by their parents tend to ground their value in appearance,’ adds Ali. ‘And research has even found that when girls are preoccupied with their looks, they demonstrate decreased cognitive performance. In a nutshell, body talk can detract from girls’ capacity to think, learn and develop intellectually.’

Let that sink in for a moment. If we don’t sort this stuff out now, not only will another generation of girls grow up feeling fundamentally shit about themselves, but they will be intellectually worse off for it. Of all the tools in my self-esteem toolbox, for me, the most significant shift has come from having a stake in the next generation. When my niece was born six years ago, I felt a stab in my guts at the thought that she might ever doubt her worth in this world. Now, my stake is getting bigger. As I write this, I’m six months pregnant, and my body is more wildly different than ever. As I devote my energy to sustaining this baby – making sure it’s nourished, whispering messages of love – I realise that this is how I should have been treating myself, too.

I still struggle with self-esteem, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. This stuff takes work. Getting older has helped, but experience has also delivered the wisdom to seek

‘As my mileage increased, my respect for my body grew, while worries about how my thighs looked retreated’

help when I need it. Treating myself to therapy was money well spent; and rewriting both my self-talk vocabulary (starting point: speak to yourself like you’d speak to a friend) and the way I talk to the women in my life (‘You’re smashing it at work at the moment’) has been invaluable. But the more I value my body, the more I want to invest in it, too. I nourish it with food that I enjoy and makes me feel good, I treat my mind to yoga classes and hit the weights to feel strong. If I could reach back in time to my 15-year-old self, I’d tell her, ‘Beauty comes from within, kiddo – now go dance to Blur.’ Sit on the doorstep too self-conscious to go in and, sooner or later, you’ll realise you’ve missed out on the party of your own life.