Can you say this?
We live in a world that constantly tells us we’re not enough. Don’t age. Don’t be too fat. Don’t be too thin. Don’t have wrinkles. Don’t take up too much space. Our bodies have become trends, judged and dissected in ways that previous generations could never have imagined.
Social media intensified that pressure. Suddenly, the “perfect body” wasn’t confined to glossy magazine covers — it was in our hands every single day. Filtered. Airbrushed. Edited. Carefully posed. And now, with AI-generated content everywhere, some of the bodies we compare ourselves to aren’t even real people at all.
If, like me, you’re a 70s baby, you’ll probably remember the obsession with thinness in the 80s and 90s. Soup diets. Special K diets. Fat-free everything. Magazine spreads cruelly zooming in on celebrities on beaches, circling cellulite and declaring they’d “let themselves go”. Diet culture didn’t begin there, and unfortunately it didn’t end there either. It simply changed shape and found new ways to sell us the idea that we need fixing.
We are immersed in this narrative from such a young age that many of us don’t even question it anymore. The generation above me often thought nothing of commenting openly on someone’s weight or appearance. I still remember an elderly aunt saying, “You’re a big girl now,” when I was a teenager — with particular emphasis on the word “big”.
Those comments stay with us.
Many people stand in front of the mirror and instinctively scan for flaws. We criticise ourselves in ways we would never dream of speaking to somebody else. Meanwhile, companies continue to profit from our insecurities, selling us creams, diets, pills and programmes that promise to finally make us “good enough”.
And now we risk passing those beliefs onto the next generation.
Young people are growing up surrounded by impossible standards, believing they should shrink themselves to fit an ideal. Of course, some people are naturally slim, just as others are naturally curvier, taller or broader. Human bodies were never meant to all look the same. Imagine how freeing it would be if we regularly saw and celebrated a genuinely diverse range of bodies instead of one narrow definition of beauty.
Because your body is not an ornament. It is the vessel carrying you through your life.
This incredible body breathes for you without thought. It heals. It carries you through heartbreak, stress, laughter, illness, childbirth, grief, joy and ordinary Tuesdays. In my case, my body carried three children, walks miles every day and can lift some pretty heavy weights too. It deserves far more respect than years of criticism.
When I work with clients struggling with body image, we often uncover just how deep the damage from diet culture runs — sometimes across generations. Together, we work on letting go of those unhelpful beliefs and rebuilding a kinder relationship with themselves.
Because the goal isn’t perfection.
The goal is learning to love your body.
