I still have fatfobic thoughts. People think that when you’re body positive, the oppressiveness just goes. It doesn’t. I still look at an image of someone bigger than me and still think bad thoughts.

And I remember thinking, “Ok, so I’m body positive and I’m representing for a movement that is about acceptance, and yet here I am still struggling with my stomach.” And I would look at photos of myself and I would pose in a certain way where I would hide my stomach crease. And one day I just thought, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m so sick of not living authentically and living my truth”, so I just posted photos of my stomach. And I didn’t think much of it, I just thought, “Let’s just do it” because I’m done. I’m tired. I’m tired of running from who I am. And I’ve got stretch marks on my stomach and I posted a photo of them. And then since then I’ve done photos of my back rolls and side rolls, and I think I do it as an ode to my past self… My past self would never think that I would do things that I do now and things that I talk about now.

It’s a challenge to my own fatphobic thoughts and it’s a challenge for other people as well. I just think bodies aren’t debatable and posting a photo shouldn’t be that shocking. But it is. And I’m even shocked by some photos that I see of other people, but I enjoy it, I’m like, “Yes, undo this conditioning.”

Yes, I wake up in the morning, I don’t think about what I look like. I don’t cry over my stomach. I don’t have the urge to self-harm anymore. I don’t have the urge to restrict my calories and go back to having an eating disorder. But it doesn’t mean that I’m completely fully healed. I think that there’s a misconception that when you’re body positive, everything is great all the time, and that you love your body all the time, and that’s not real. We still feel insecure and go through all of these things but I think when you know better, you do better. And I know better now. I know… we’re told we’re not good enough, and then we are sold a product that’s going to fix us, as if we need to be fixed and we don’t. And I think it’s really important for people to realise that. The body positive movement started by black fat women, and it was a safe space to showcase your body, because there’s nowhere else in the world that is safe for dark-skinned women, fat women. The movement now, it’s full of the same people that are everywhere already. The world is catered to White people first of all, and it goes against everything that I believe in. Body positivity definitely changed my life. It saved my life at one point. Now in 2018, it doesn’t serve me the way that it used to, because it’s lost the people that inspired me.

Until the last two years, my whole life I tried to lose weight. Every day, I tried to be thinner. Every chance that I could get to lose weight, I took. And I was sick and tired of trying to be something that I wasn’t going to be. I definitely used photos and images of me that I would deem not good enough and unworthy as a way to empower. You can’t empower other people if you haven’t empowered yourself.