I spent decades being ashamed of the way I look. Then a visit to the Natural History Museum changed everything
I
still remember the moment my body image issues began as if it were yesterday. The shaming came before the bingeing: I was 18 and my mum told me I needed to start being careful with my eating, because I was “getting fat”.
She would say: “You’d be so pretty if you’d just lose weight!” I wasn’t overweight at the time, and I felt so angry. But young women aren’t allowed to be angry – so, with nowhere to put those feelings, I channelled them into food, spiralling into binge-eating as an act of revenge. Then came remorse and shame: a cycle of bingeing and restriction.
By 25, I was attending Overeaters Anonymous, but it didn’t help. Over the space of the next two decades, I tried every diet – the “cabbage soup diet”, Slimming World, Weight Watchers, SlimFast, Atkins, low-carb, intermittent fasting. My weight fluctuated as I had two children – I just thought of myself as a blob. I’d tried to tentatively engage with the body positivity movement, but it was hard.
