Wellbeing

Megan Jayne Crabbe On The Life-Changing Benefits Of Body Positivity

Author and activist, Megan Jayne Crabbe talks to us about the life-changing benefits of body positivity

Blogger Megan Jayne Crabbe spent her whole life hating her body, starting from when she was just five years old. At 14, she was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and very nearly lost her life. After recovering, she still wasn’t happy and spent years yo-yo dieting, gaining and losing hundreds of pounds. It was only when she accidentally discovered the body positivity movement online that she was able to turn her life around, becoming a best-selling author, activist and supporting other people in their journeys.

The body positivity movement teaches people that no matter how your body looks, regardless of your size, shape, skin colour, age, gender or ability, you are good enough, you have value and you deserve to feel good. I was on Instagram one day looking for fitness inspiration and instead I stumbled across my size 26 friend Melissa, who was wearing a scarlet bikini. She was talking about this thing called body positivity and how she’s happy with her body – it was the first time in my life that I’d ever heard that. That was three years ago and from there I tried to soak up as much of it as I could. I followed lots of people on social media, read books on the subject and started my account Bodyposipanda, which I now post on daily about eating disorder recovery and self-love.

I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that body positivity saved my life. I used to do such dangerous things to myself in order to lose weight and get a physique that I thought I needed. Body positivity swooped in and rescued me, making me realise that I deserve to be as happy as I am. It’s completely changed my life, not just my relationship with my body and with food, but also because now I have this platform where I’m able to help other people every day and I’ve written a book. It’s been the most incredible rebirth for me.

When I first came into the body positive community and saw people calling themselves fat, I hated it. It made me feel sick because I’d spent my whole life believing that fat is the worst thing you can be, that it’s a horrible insult and you shouldn’t say it to people or about yourself. Then I learned that the body positive movement reclaims the words that have been used to bring us down and strips them of their negative power. Fat is just an adjective – it’s nothing more than a word that describes what some bodies are, just the same as brunette or blue-eyed, and it has to be neutral for us to get over the fear of it.

Books were a massive part of my journey in accepting my body and healing myself after my eating disorder. They helped me so much, and I wanted to take what I learned from them, update some of it and put it out there for other people to have. Including other people’s essays in the book was really important for me as well – obviously I don’t want to speak for other people when I haven’t had their life experiences, so I’d rather lift up a voice that can talk about that.

One of the first things I’d say to someone with body image issues is that it’s not your fault – you weren’t born hating your body, this is something that you’ve been taught by the culture around us. We learn from a young age that there’s only one way to be beautiful, happy, or worth something. We’re bombarded with this message everywhere we look and we start to believe we’re not good enough. Once you realise this has been done to you, you can begin to question it.

I advocate intuitive eating over dieting. This means eating what you want, when you want, stopping when you’re full and not feeling guilty about it. All of us are born knowing how to do this, but we forget we can because there are so many other things telling us how we should eat. Intuitive eating gets you back in touch with that, listening to your internal signals of hunger and fullness and respecting your cravings. It also means removing good or bad labels on foods as you don’t need to attach morality to what you eat. If you want to prioritise eating nutritiously, you can do that – eat in ways that are going to make you feel good, not necessarily what’s going to taste the best.

My favourite inspirational quote is from The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf. ‘The woman wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her’. I think that just sums it up because it just shows the problem is not us, the problem is the world and how we’ve been taught to see ourselves.