Love from, Florence Grace

We don't like fat women being confident. It's not a question, it's not an opinion, it's true. When fat women become visible to us, when fat women have their voices heard, we are appalled . "How dare this fat woman upload a selfie to Instagram in her bikini? She's promoting obesity!  Think about her followers! How disgusting, she's so unhealthy, she needs to diet" I mean, wow. Telling anyone  they need to diet is never really a polite thing to do as it is, but when it's done on social media, under a photo a fat woman has uploaded because she thinks she looks great, it's just ten times more venomous. This is not an "unpopular opinion" by any means, and is not an uncommon post either. I see at least one tweet a day that looks like this. Of course, the discussion of visible fat women and body positivity has really become more prominent since Tess Holliday made it onto this month's cover of Cosmopolitan magazine - a...

It's no secret that I'm a huge  advocate of body positivity and self love. What that means is that I celebrate people with bodies of all shapes and sizes , I don't hate or discriminate against people of a certain size and I encourage people to do the same. I also encourage people, particularly women, to learn their value and worth and fall in love with themselves for who they are and the traits they possess, rather than based solely on physical appearance. However, it's no secret that I have spent a lot of this year documenting a weight loss journey. It started in March, ended in July and then restarted again this month. Understandably I receive a lot of questions about how I can advocate body positivity and self love whilst actively losing weight and sharing my progress on social media, so I thought I'd use this space to explain it in more detail than anyone cares to read in an Instagram caption. So... Am I trying to lose weight? Yes, I am. However, I...

I've been blogging for over four years now and I must say it's become abundantly clear that I just don't fit into the blogosphere. Never have done, probably never will do. This isn't a bad thing, by the way. Let me explain. I get on with a tonne of bloggers. I have more friends online than in real life, let me tell you that now! I have regular conversations with them and really have some very close friends, all who I've met through blogging. When I say I don't fit into the blogosphere, it's not about the people or how I'm treated - because for the most part, the people are great! Absolute gems. The problem actually lies with me. I'm just not 'blogger material', you see? I wear skimpy clothes and giant hoop earrings, I go to clubs, festivals, wild gigs that end in huge mosh pits... I listen predominantly to R&B, rap and dance music, I share every single detail of my life online and don't have an Instagram theme by any me...

Slimming World.  Those two words really make me cringe. It's 2018 and people are still buying into what I believe to be one of the biggest diet scams to exist. Group weigh in sessions? Classing foods as "syns" (read: sins, ie bad )? Giving out leaflets that advise you not to hang out with overweight friends? Yeah, it's a no from me.  Slimming World has always been a fairly tenacious subject in the press, but there's been another blow up recently, when the company announced that Muller Light yoghurts would no longer be "syn free" and would now contain 1 syn . The nutritional content of the yoghurt hasn't changed at all - it contains exactly what it did before - so how is this yogurt now magically a "syn"? Nothing has changed, nothing at all, and it literally proves that Slimming World make this stuff up as they go along . And yet people are still buying into it. As someone who has struggled with food and body image for so much of her...