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...

"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...

People can be right pricks, can't they? It's not often we don't take the blame for a relationship breakdown, be those friendships or romantic relationships. We often tell people it's us, not them. That we're sorry things turned out this way. That we should have tried harder, that we could have done more, that we will regret this. Never do we turn around and say "actually, it's not me, it's you ". Because sometimes, the other person really just is a piece of shit and there's not much that can be done about that. This is something I'm going through at the moment. On some days, I'm having a pretty hard time. In the last twelve months I have had to cut off two people who I considered to be lifelong best buddies, three relatively close friends and a dozen of other distant pals in order to protect my inner peace (lol) and my bloody happiness. And whilst to them, it might seem as if I did this ruthlessly, I've been pretty cut ...

Four years is a long time, don't you think? I'm nowhere near the same person I was four years ago. I'm not friends with the same people, I'm not dating the same person, I'm not in the same job. Everything is completely different, and when I look back on the last four years of my life, I can't help but to think about how everything would be even more different had I not started my little blog - four years ago to the day. Four years ago, I was sat anxiously waiting for my A Level results, I was deciding if I was going to go to the university that accepted me or not, I was wondering if photography was really the career I wanted to pursue - in short, I was totally lost. Until I started my blog and began to create my own career. Blogging helped me to find my way, find myself  and totally change my life and I find that totally mind blowing.  I've been looking back through my Facebook page , right to my first year of blogging, and there's so many excit...