Growing up, I never had a particularly healthy relationship with my body. I always overate and ended up much bigger than all of my friends, then finding myself focused on losing as much as possible and tettering on the edge of an eating disorder; at neither end of the spectrum was I any happier, because it's not about the size of your clothes or the weight on the scales, but how you feel inside. For most of my life I've dabbled with diets and lifestyle choices aimed at satifying my need to fit into the societal norm, but the results were only ever temporary - as soon as I started eating normally again, or stopped going to the gym to burn off what I'd eaten for lunch that day, I found myself back to square one and feeling all the worse for putting myself through it. My twenties were spent pretending to love myself but actually loathing what I saw pretty much every time I looked in the mirror, but when I hit the big 3-0 something clicked inside me and I really started not to care.
Read more

...