Mental Health Awareness Week - Body Image: My Experience - Thursday Thoughts
There couldn’t be a better theme for 2019’s mental health awareness week than ‘body image’. Body image concerns are a relatively common experience and isn’t a mental health problem itself, but can be a huge risk factor leading to mental health problems in the future. Research has found that high body dissatisfaction is associated with a poorer quality of life, distress and the risk of unhealthy eating behaviours and disorders. And with one in eight UK adults experiencing suicidal thoughts over their body image, awareness and reducing the stigma is more important than ever.
I’m not going to sit here and write about mental health problems from personal experience because I haven’t had any. However, what I have experienced are the feelings of body dissatisfaction and this did end up leading me towards extremely unhealthy eating behaviours. This did not escalate into mental health problems for me…but it could have done. And more importantly, for plenty of other people it does. I am hugely passionate about spreading positivity when it comes to body confidence after experiencing confidence issues and fluctuating in size myself and what a perfect theme for this year’s mental health awareness week.
To be honest, I am extremely grateful social media wasn’t around when I was going through puberty. There weren’t many things for me to have access to for comparing my body with and I am glad of that. I first got Facebook when I was 11, and I got Instagram at around 13. I think Instagram really took off when I was around 15, starting to head the way of where it is today.
My battle with my body image started at the age of 13. I have always been abnormally tall for my age; my Mum is small and my Dad is probably an average height. At the age of 11 I was about 2 inches off the height of my Dad, which looked pretty weird. I was always really aware of how overly tall I was, but what came with this was my weight. Compared to my friends, I was a lot taller, a lot wider and weighed a lot more. I was eating large portions and having 3 meals a day plus a fair few snacks in-between; between breakfast and lunch at school, when I got home from school and supper after tea.
After Easter I decided I was going to cut down my intake of food to just my three meals a day. However, it didn’t stop there. My stomach shrank and shrank over the short space of 6 months to the point where I could physically not even finish one meal in a day. I lost two stone in this period of time and became extremely thin for my height.
It didn’t stop there. I began to not stomach my meals and would eat a couple of mouthfuls, then rush to the bathroom where I would be sick, and get major hot flushes and then not be able to stomach much more when I went back down.
I thought that losing all this weight would have helped me feel better about my body and the way I look and feel in it. It didn’t and I had gone too far. I felt the opposite to what I did before. To thin for my height, unhappy in my body; all I wanted as a 14 year old by this point, was to wear bodycon dresses and feel nice in them. But I didn’t. I had lost my boobs and my bum. And my shape. At this point it could have gone either way and I felt extremely negative about myself and my appearance.
With the support of the people around me, it took me over a year to eat an extra mouthful than I thought I could at every meal and put some weight back on, making me happier and feel I had reached where I wanted to be and where I felt confident within my own body.
Right now, I am at a decent place with my body. My weight fluctuates slightly through different seasons and periods in the year but overall I am a pretty steady size 10. I am currently battling a situation with bloating, in which I am trialling different methods to reduce.
Yes, I do still continue to scroll through endless timelines on social media comparing myself to other girls, and I know that most others do; sad really. One in five adults said images on social media had caused them to worry about their body image. THIS NEEDS TO CHANGE.
Social media can be such a positive place, and negativity needs to be broken through. Future changes such as the commitment from social media companies can play a key role in promoting body kindness starting NOW. And most importantly, take action yourself. It is so important to make sure you are the start of your own happiness; unfollow accounts that make you feel negative, reduce your time on social media and spend more time on yourself. Pamper nights, early nights, exercise and time out from the world.
It’s okay to not be okay. It’s okay to talk. It is okay to speak out and seek help. Let’s all reduce the stigma around mental health together and continue to spread positivity on body image amongst your friends and family as well as on social media. It doesn’t matter what shape or size; no one is perfect. If you’re feeling down, please feel free to speak out.
Find out more about Mental Health Awareness Week and support here:
https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/campaigns/mental-health-awareness-week
Thanks for reading! Keep smiling and have a great day! Liv xxx
