Be Proud of Who You Are

So yesterday on the news, there was a lot of coverage about the new pack being giving to parents and young girls about body image. It comes on the back of the coroner's condemnation of the fashion industry for the suicide of a 14 year old girl after she had been suffering from an eating disorder. The fashion industry has been blamed for the death of Fiona Geraghty because of its obsession over weight and being thin and ‘perfect’ as their models are shown to be.

This is something that has really touched me, in a way that both saddens and yet angers me greatly. The photos that have been shown of Fiona are positively stunning and it is with great regret that she obviously had no idea that she was beautiful. Having been through, and still going through, paranoia about my own body and the way I look, I can understand, to a certain extent, how young girls must feel when they are constantly bombarded with images of perfect bodies from the media. I know all about retouching in photographs and I am so supportive of magazines and companies which have employed a zero-retouching policy or use what they call ‘real women’ for their advertisements. Even as I was looking through a magazine the other day, my friend said to me “But Rachel, they don’t actually look like that” as I was busy getting depressed over what a state I felt my body look like compared with the skinny size 6 girls. This brought everything into proportion.

I am often described as living in a fantasy world where I have an extremely romanticised view of life which often is never fulfilled and the very fact that I ogle at these ‘perfect’ people and wish to be like them actually shows how deluded I am sometimes. But I am fortunate enough to have had my eyes opened unlike many of the young girls in society today upon whom the pressure to look and be perfect can only be growing.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that this fake perfection seen in celebrities has actually come to be seen as ‘normal’, as what girls are ‘supposed’ to look like. Meanwhile, what is actually normal, what girls and women actually look like has come to be seen as imperfect and undesirable. Let’s be realistic- there are going to be those women out there who are gorgeous, who do have that perfect body with seemingly no flaws but they are either extremely, ridiculously fortunate or a slave to their appearance. Personally, I would never want to be so hung up on how I looked that I became that obsessed with being thin and working out all the time (I also don't have the time). Yet unfortunately this is becoming more and more common.

I will be the first to admit that I am far from ‘perfect’. 90-odd per cent of women have cellulite (and the majority of the remaining women were probably lying), a similar amount have stretch marks and many, including me, will complain about an unending amount of things that is wrong with them, probably with weight being at the forefront of it all. But perhaps what is the most comforting thing is that it is normal. So many women share these so called ‘imperfections’ that even Britney Spears released unretouched photos of her Candies shoot a few years back to support women with their body image. (Check the photos out here. I personally think she looks better in the unretouched ones simply before she doesn’t look like a plastic dolly).

The pressure on women and girls to be the 'correct' weight is only further triggered by stick thin celebrities in the media. One thing that has always puzzled me is why size 4 or size 6 (UK) or sometimes even thinner models are used to model designers’ clothes. Not only do I often think that the clothes look a hell of a lot better by the time they’ve hit the shops anyway but that a woman with curves would make the actual clothes look amazing! Women are meant to be curvy, we’re meant to have a waist, a bum and boobs. None of this stick-like shape seen on the catwalks which I personally find gross and if any man out there wants to disagree, go ahead and try and persuade me that these women are more attractive than, say, Beyoncé. For the record, this woman is my idol. She’s super talented, grounded and, yes, whilst many of her photos are probably retouched, she is not a stick! She simply celebrates being herself and being a woman.

The whole point is that the human body is not perfect. If it were, everybody would be the same and lack individuality- everybody would be a nobody. If it were meant to be perfect, we would have been made to be perfect. But the perfection in the media isn't a perfect which is beautiful, stunning and gorgeous, instead that type of perfection is unrealistically flawless, plastic-like and manufactured, something which is often never real and can only be achieved via computer editing.

Over the last year and through meeting my uni friends, I have come to realise that I am too hung up on the way I look and the suicide case of Fiona has made me want to change. Here is a photo of me: no make up and nothing to enhance anything. A few months ago I would have hated to look at that and picked out so many things that I wanted to change. For ages I have always hated what my mum calls my 'J Lo bum' and my thighs. Now, I look and think, what the hell was I thinking? That’s me. I am completely unique and my big bum and those spots (which looking at this photo I now realise you can hardly see and this was a 'bad' day!) are what make me, me. So if anybody tries to tell you that you should look like anything other than yourself, screw them because it’s a load of crap. There is only one of you, and you are who you are, so make the most of your life and go and celebrate that gorgeous body... Rant over :) xoxo