Write for Body Love

...or kindness, appreciation and acceptance.

Hello Dear One,

How are you? How is your body?

I have a long, twisted journey with body image, one I haven’t written about here. So, this is a disordered eating content warning – if it’s not for you right now, check out the archives.

The messaging around dieting during January can be vicious; I don’t want you to think you have to shrink, change or be anyone other than the glorious person you are. I also know words only have an impact when can stand behind them, when they are or feel like our own. What I can do is share my story - and some practical tools.

For a very long time, I hated my body. At twelve having been called big and fat (I still have my diaries), I wrote that I needed to lose weight: listed everything I’d eaten and how much exercise I had to do. I punished myself when I fell short, by being nasty. A twelve-year-old doesn’t get that message from themselves - they get it from society. It led to decades of dieting, starving myself and bulimia. 

My recovery was long and there were many tools which helped: therapy, writing and getting clear on my pattern of self-criticism. Last week I was invited on to Anti-Diet Health Coach Gillian Wilson’s Instagram to discuss journaling, self-compassion and how I think it can help. If like me, you used to be incredibly critical and negative in your notebook it might not be the first place you think to go. 

But it is powerful to love on yourself in black and white. To write kind, compassionate things. To challenge beliefs that might not even be yours. 

To me body love feels beautiful and, to be honest, I never exist there a hundred per cent of the time. But I love reminding myself that my body lets me do so many things: feel the wonder of tight hugs, hold a pen and listen to it move on paper, see, smell and touch flowers, walk onto an aeroplane and wander around a new city.

And I’m fierce in not criticising it. A thought might go through my head, but I never vocalise it or write it down. It’s just an old idea that doesn’t work for me anymore.

If you struggle with this know it’s ok to go to slow. I’m already proud of you.

Thanks for being here and being you.

All love,

Jo

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