This week is the start of The Mental Health Foundation’s “Mental Health Awareness Week” 2019 (13-19th May). In honour of this, I will be posting a blog post each day this week with the theme of mental health. The theme of this year’s MHA week is body image, therefore I am starting out with that.
I’ve struggled with body positivity since I was really young. I was a chunkier kid, which kids picked up on and weren’t so nice about it. So I started hating how I looked pretty early, and “fat” became a word that would always hurt me.
I eventually overcame that and lost of a lot of weight, and I was of a healthy weight for my (tiny) height but I still wasn’t happy, I still saw myself as “obese”. It didn’t seem to matter what I looked like or what the scales said, I always saw myself as fat.
Then I had my spinal fusion in June 2016 which meant it was really difficult to do much exercise, especially as I was only really allowed to walk and that was exhausting for a good while. This paired with the fact that I did a lot of comfort eating did not do great things for my weight.
Then I really struggled and still do with my deformities, I’m proud of my scar luckily but there are other parts of me are so unusual and I’m just glad they’re relatively easy to cover, especially with living in chilly Scotland; I can wear baggy jumpers whenever I want!!
I’ve always struggled to shift weight, once it’s there it seems to stay put for a loooong time. So instead of being miserable about how I look, I’m trying to have a more positive attitude about it, so I feel like if I write about it then maybe it’ll stick in my head more, and maybe she of the things I’m telling myself will work for others.
I try to think of it from this perspective; Your body does so much for you.
Think of it as a person. If someone cared for you 24/7 but they maybe didn’t look the way you want them to, would you hate them based on that?
Chances are you definitely wouldn’t, so why hate your body after all it does for you, keeping you healthy, just because of how it looks?
Everyone has imperfections and insecurities. You may not see them but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. They may be hiding them, or it may be something they’re self-conscious about and others don’t even notice. It’s important to think of things like that when you’re comparing yourself to pictures on social media because as I highlighted before (https://caitlin.travel.blog/2019/03/28/the-toxicity-of-social-media/) social media is rarely an accurate representation of our lives.
Speaking of social media, I’ve started following some body positive accounts such as @chessiekingg who shows different angles and highlights her imperfections to show the inaccuracy of most posed Instagram posts.
And most importantly, remember that it is what’s inside that counts most ♡.
instagram @c_tawse / @caitlinswanderland 