Why could my body not even allow me to eat normally, like the balanced people I continually read about? "Will I ever be a proper, functioning grown-up?" I thought, almost permanently, on a loop. "Will there ever be a time that I don't feel like a complete and utter failure?"
And then I had a revelation that would change the way I viewed my body for ever. It prompted me to enter the London Marathon — and then to enter it again, running in my underwear. At 36, I did my first handstand. I am planning to do an Ironman triathlon, and will (hopefully) run my third marathon next month — a trail run along part of the Cotswolds Way.
So what changed?
This: I realised that I was not alone in my self-loathing. Because self-loathing is what it is, really. Not insecurity — that's too light a word to describe the default position that most women are expected to take on their bodies. Of course I knew that others had qualms about themselves. I had heard supermodels and film stars talk freely about the bits of themselves they disliked the most. And if they genuinely disliked their legs, what hope the rest of us?
And I thought, because of the numerous articles I had read about developing confidence, that being confident was the normal way, the mindset to aspire to. I thought that if I could just be a bit less this and a bit more that, then maybe I could get this miraculous feeling too — the feeling that was sold to me by glossy models beaming happily and sexily from magazine covers and billboards and movie posters and, and, and ... I had no idea that confidence was just a trick, that even glossy models sometimes disliked themselves, that the grass was always greener and lusher and that, basically, I was just one woman out of billions who had been brought up to believe that they were either never enough or far too much (pity the girl who was arrogant enough to appear "full of herself").
It was only when I started to talk about my own mental health and self-esteem, that the penny started to drop for me. Writing my last book, Mad Girl, about my battles with mental illness, opened me up to a community of other people who had felt the same way as me — and had not only recovered, but achieved remarkable things in the process.
Thanks to the book, I was becoming open to the possibility that the only thing standing in the way of feeling confident and happy was the negative talk in my own brain. It wasn't a teacher who said I would never amount to anything, a bully who stole my lunch money or a man who broke my heart. It was me.
At around the same time I was sent out to New York to interview Tess Holliday, a plus-size model who had started the hashtag #effyourbeautystandards. Holliday was at the forefront of the body positivity movement, whereby women who had traditionally been ignored by mainstream media used social media to let the world know that they existed too. I left that interview feeling inspired and, most of all, represented. I did not feel so strange and other. The tectonic plates were shifting under my size 18 to 20 body, and I liked the way it felt.
I knew that exercise would help my mental health but I was terrified of taking that first step in case some lean and leggy lovely in Lululemon laughed at me. It never occurred to me that said lean and leggy lovely might have other things on her mind, or that Lululemon made leggings for women my size too (they do). Still, the offer from the charity Heads Together of a place in the 2017 London Marathon gave me the nudge I needed.
And so began my journey to prove that the best thing to do is quite often the thing you think you can't.
By the time I completed the marathon in 2017, I had noticed a huge increase in my followers on Instagram. Every time I posted a picture of my runner's body (lumpy, bumpy and very, very wobbly), I was struck by how many likes I got: thousands upon thousands. Like everyone else, I had always assumed that social media was a sort of evil, a way of making you feel inferior. But as the messages flooded in from women telling me about runs they had been inspired to go on (by me? Was this really happening? Yes, yes it was, and every damn day at that), I began to realise that social media was setting many of us free.
I remember posting a picture a week after the marathon, me standing in my granny pants and a sports bra, chafing scars on my thighs and cellulite clearly visible. The show of support was so incredible that I was convinced of the need to do it more — there is something incredibly empowering about posting a snap of your saggy boobs in a bikini while on holiday and the overwhelming response being "You go, girl!" instead of "Yuck, go away."
As I followed more and more body-positive accounts, I realised that social media was enabling us to feel seen for the first time, and when you feel seen, you are far more likely to get out and about. It was then that it became obvious to me what my next book had to be about. It had to be about the unexpected way I had come to love my body — bumps, boobs, birthmarks and all. How I had stopped the endless negative chatter in my head simply by doing the things I feared most — and how in the process I got closer to my husband and became a far more present parent.
I wrote Eat, Drink, Run as I trained for marathon number two, which I ran alongside the plus-size model Jada Sezer. I met her, ironically, on a Lululemon "influencers" weekend, where she expressed utter astonishment that I had run a marathon. "It hadn't ever occurred to me that girls like us could run," she beamed, before begging me to do another one with her. It was a little while later that we decided to do it in our underwear, to prove to people that a runner's body can come in all shapes and sizes. The response we received was incredible. And yet it also broke my heart to see how many people — both men and women — approached us on the day to tell us how insecure they were. If I needed proof that people were becoming sick of body negativity, then I got it on marathon day.
Of course, there were trolls. There are always trolls. The people who sent messages telling us that we were disgusting; the ones saying we would probably die; the usual suspects droning on about how we were promoting obesity — even while running a marathon. But the trolls were outnumbered by 30 to one and each negative comment only added fire to my wobbly belly.
When I was growing up, being wholeheartedly proud of yourself was looked down on. Then self-love became a radical act. Now, body positivity is something people are embracing in droves.
And so, for my daughter's sake, I have stopped thinking of what my body can't do. Instead, I thank it for what it has done, and what it will do in the future. I still don't have masses of confidence, but do you know what I do have? I have a body, a vaguely functioning one at that. I will not be getting another, so I may as well be kind to it.
Eat, Drink, Run by Bryony Gordon, (Hachette, $38).
