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 -...

It's January, and with the start of a new year comes the mindset of a "new me"... which, more often than not, involves losing substantial amounts of weight in order to get "beach body ready" for the summer. As gross as this is, it's sadly nothing new - it happens every year, without fail. But this year, there's been an interesting story that's caught my attention... Over the last two nights, I've seen the same story crop up on ITV Meridian, sharing the dangers of Fitbits and how dangerous counting calories is and how all of this can lead to anorexia, a horrific eating disorder that affects many people, but in particular young women. ITV shared that a special programme had been made about the dangers of calorie counting and Fitbits to help share knowledge and I thought what a good thing it was that rather than just push weight loss in January, a media outlet was also sharing the dangers of losing weight in unhealthy ways. On the same day I...

There's absolutely no denying that right now, life is pretty sweet for me. I think a lot of people have noticed a change in my tone of voice when I write over the last year or so. In 2016, I was blogging every single day- there were a lot of posts about the heartbreak I was going through, about how miserable I was feeling and about some really low points I was going through, particularly near Christmas time. December 2016 was probably the lowest point I hit that year, and I couldn't even explain why. Whilst overall, 2016 was my year of self discovery, the year where I really began to love and appreciate the person I was, there was a lot of low points for me. A lot. 2017 has definitely seen a new side of me - in fact, I'd even go as far to say that it's seen a brand new version of me! I have had a truly spectacular year and if I thought  I couldn't be happier than I was in 2016, I was wrong- 2017 me has reached new levels of happiness altogether. I made new frien...