How often do you look in the mirror?
How often do you feel proud of what you see?
I bet you rarely do either of these things. I bet sometimes you avoid the mirror completely.
I know that – I feel it in my core – I feel it in my heart.
In my line of work, it would be easy to label me as someone who thinks that you can only love yourself if you are a certain size or body shape. In fact, I have been given that label. I have been criticised for spreading a message that women need to lose weight in order to be ‘right’ or ‘happy’.
Not true. Quite the opposite in fact.
If you read my content – I mean really read it – if you listened to my podcasts, watched my videos or had a conversation with me, you would realise that I am not here trying to create an army of stick-thin women. Women who don’t eat cake, or drink wine or enjoy a packet of crisps or a bar of chocolate. Women who spend all their free time in the gym, or in a yoga class. That’s just not who I am and it’s not what my business is about.
For years you have been told that you need to look a certain way and wear a certain dress size to count and matter. You have been a slave to the scales and the queen of restriction and deprivation. You have bounced from fad to fad, tried all the restrictive diets and plans and your Instagram feed is full of influencers with their perfect hair, perfect legs, flat tummies and toned arms.
I’m on a personal mission to STOP that.
Why – why am I on that mission?
Because I spent most of my adult life hating the skin I was in. Wishing my body was different. Covering up under baggy clothes because I didn’t want to be seen. Or training so hard in the gym that I had next to no energy. Or being pulled into a cycle of restricting myself from everything that I deemed ‘unhealthy’ from Monday to Friday, only to blow it come Friday evening because I was so fed up with how hungry I was and how obsessed I was with food.
I have tried most diets. I have abused laxatives in a bid to lose weight. I have hated what I saw in the mirror and I’ve wished I could afford surgery to make myself feel better.
I have done it all. And more. And none of it worked for very long and none of it made me feel better. Until I changed the relationship I have with food, exercise and, most of all, my body.
Instead of seeing food as the enemy and exercise as punishment, I am now able to see food as fuel that is to be enjoyed and exercise as an activity to keep my body and mind strong. A body that I am now proud of, that I treat with the respect it deserves for keeping me going every day.
Yes, I help busy working Mums lose body fat, I help them get fitter, have more energy, feel less stressed and be able to do that whilst still enjoying food, without grueling gym workouts and without the silly rules and restrictions that so much of the diet culture has made you believe is ‘the right way’.
But more importantly, I help women to learn to love who they are, love their bodies and see exactly what I see and what other people see.
That they are beautiful. Just like you!