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 -...

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...

When Ariana Grande released Thank U, Next it was destined to be a certified banger. Girls all over the world could scream about their exes in the form of a catchy tune all over again - something they hadn't really had the chance to do since Little Mix released Shoutout To My Ex . Despite the song being deliberately catchy and one that I automatically loved, I couldn't help but mock it. If memory serves me well, I even put out a tweet saying how much I loved the song, but that I would never, ever be grateful for my ex. My ex, who physically and emotionally abused me for years. My ex, the drug dealer. My ex, the generally nasty piece of work that he was. He put me through endless hell, cheating on me, lying to me over and over - and I was supposed to feel grateful for that? Nah, you're alright. With that being my initial stance, I enjoyed the song without actually relating to it. However, as time's gone on and I've listened to the song more and more (almost da...

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...

Recently I started a new weekly Q and A series on Instagram all about body positivity and self love. A lot of the questions I get really stick with me, and I feel like I need to dedicate more than just one tiny snippet of Instagram story to the answer. A great example of this is this question here: For me, this had one very obvious and simple answer that I had to share with everyone - skinny doesn't equal happy. Plain and simple. (Disclaimer, before we really get into it: This isn't me saying skinny people can't be happy - this is me saying that if you work so hard to get skinny it doesn't mean it's going to make you happy. Hope that makes sense) Really, there's so much more to speak about when it comes to weight and self love. It's all well and good me sitting there telling people that skinny doesn't equal happy but that's not going to be very helpful for them when they want to resolve their issue of having no confidence. This isn...

Bullying is something I have spoken about a couple of times on my blog before because it really is a topic quite close to my heart. However, I'm taking the time to discuss it with you all again because it's an issue that remains as relevant as ever. I have been bullied quite a few times in my life - I was bullied for a short time at primary school, an even shorter time in my first year at secondary school which actually involved the bully being removed from my form and then I was bullied online from Year 10 to Year 13 and throughout my first year at college, resulting in about 5 years of bullying. I thought it was over when it died down in about 2016 but over the last year it's begun to start up again - and it's only since this most recent bout of bullying that I've begun to really notice something; the bullying begins when I become more successful. Just having a lil' laugh in the face of the haters who have tried to bring me down When the o...