Love from, Florence Grace

This week (13th - 20th May 2019) is Mental Health Awareness Week. This year, the theme is Body Image - how we think and feel about our bodies.  Those of you who have followed me for some time will know that for about two years now, if not more, I have been an advocate for body positivity and self love. More recently, you may have seen me featured in a story in The Metro , talking about a body shaming incident I experienced on holiday and how I dealt with it.  There's absolutely no denying that there is a direct correlation between body image and our mental health. I know that personally, when I'm experiencing a "bad body day" and don't feel very positively about my body, for whatever reason, my mental health goes down the drain too. Yet when we feel good about our bodies, this can be reflected in our mental health too.  When I experienced body shaming in my bikini on holiday, I felt the lowest I had in a while. I believed the words I'd heard -...

Those of you who follow me on Instagram will have probably seen my very long, emotional rant via my stories on Saturday night. Following a nasty comment from a stranger who followed me, I wanted to make something abundantly clear. However, since then, it appears that *some* people are even more confused about my content and the messages I share via my social media platforms, and so I wanted to make my stance on some subjects abundantly clear. Let’s start at the beginning (a very good place to start…) when someone slid into my DM’s to try and defend the ‘benefits’ of Slimming World to me. Clearly this person hadn’t followed me for very long as I have repeatedly shared my feelings regarding Slimming World and similar diet groups, and have even written about them on my blog . However, I tolerated the conversation – she asked me reasonable questions, such as why was I so against it and I gave reasonable answers. I was actually quite thrilled I was able to have a civil conversation ...

Every January before this one, I made one of my goals 'Lose weight - at least two stone'. That started when I was 15 and continued for seven years, until I was 22. This year, upon turning 23 and ready to enter 2019, weight loss was a priority thanks to a health warning from my doctor. No set amount, however, and strictly no 'dieting'. Because over the last couple of years, I've become quite "anti diet". I hate the word, what it means and I absolutely despise all the crappy fad diets that entice vulnerable and insecure women into their clutches with promises of extreme weight loss in minimal time. I think - in fact, I know  - that it's possible to lose weight without going on a 'diet' so to speak. Without depriving yourself of your favourite foods, without starving yourself and without living off appetite suppressants and shakes. I know, because I've done it - and so have so many other people. Dieting sucks and if you're consid...

Before we start, please forgive the title image - it's the only photo I have where any of my cellulite is on show! Zoom in and you'll see it better... You may have missed it, but this weekend an Avon advert was brought to our attention – an advert for some kind of ‘solution’ to cellulite. One version of the advert featured a woman sitting down, thighs on show, and read “dimples are cute on your face (not your thighs)”, whilst another variation of the advert ironically read “Every body is beautiful” It was actually the American branch of Avon, Avon Insider , who created the ad and brought it to life. However, after being attacked by Jameela Jamil on Twitter, both Avon and Avon Insider admitted they’d missed the mark with their advert and advised that it would be taken down and wouldn’t be used anymore. As great as that end result is, I just can’t get over that it’s 2019 and this is still a thing – targeting women’s ‘flaws’ in advertising to make...

Seeing Queen Latifah in a swimsuit on a magazine cover cruelly labelled "beached whale" on my timeline this week was really the tipping point that inspired me to write this. It's 2019 and it's about time we got over women being whatever shape or size they want to be and just let them live. Why is anyone actually bothered?! I speak about women because we rarely see it about men, if at all. In fact, 2018 actually saw a rise in the fetishisation of 'Dad Bods'. So we can accept men with squishy bellies, no questions asked - in fact, they're sexy! But if a woman dares to flaunt the same squishy belly? She's a 'beached whale', she's 'let herself go' and she's 'promoting obesity'. Give it a fucking rest.  Unless someone is stood there wearing a t-shirt branded 'I am promoting obesity', a fat person is not promoting obesity. They're simply existing, and if you think that by simply being alive, just exist...

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...

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...

"Take a diss and turn it into discourse that will encourage us all to see beyond desirability" The above quote is one of my favourites, and comes from one of my all time icons and absolute queen, The Slumflower - aka, Chidera Eggerue. Founder of the #SAGGYBOOBSMATTER movement and writer of bestselling book What A Time To Be Alone , this absolute girl boss has honestly changed my life so much, and has had such a huge impact on so many other women too. She teaches us to love ourselves, to know our worth and to be more than just a desirable object. She might be young, but she is wise beyond her years and is honestly going to change the world - I just know it.  Taking a diss and turning it into discourse is something that I have unknowingly lived by for the last four years - that is, since I've been blogging and creating content on the internet. As someone who has been bullied a lot, on more than one occasion I have used this nastiness to create...