Part One of Three: The Body I Learned to Watch - The Reality of Body Dysmorphia
This is the first part of a three-part series about my relationship with my body and society's conditioning that makes a staggering 93% of women hate their bodies. This first part is where it began for me, how it fractured, and where I am now. It’s not a redemption arc, nor is it yet another transformation story. It’s an honest opening into a life lived inside a body that has been watched, judged, measured, and misunderstood for over three decades.
I’m not a body-advice writer. I’m not an advice writer at all. I’m simply someone trying to tell the truth about what it’s like to exist with body dysmorphia in a world that profits from your discomfort — especially now, when we’re being told that body positivity is dead and shrinking is back in fashion. Something sharp moved in me when I read that headline; not because I care about celebrity weight cycles, but because I’m living inside a body shaped by trauma, grief, stress, neurodivergence, and survival — and I’m still being asked to make myself smaller.
The Beginning: Learning to See Myself Through Other People’s Eyes
Some of my earliest memories — around five or six years old — are not of playing freely or feeling safe in my body, but of comments; chubby, puppy fat, strong legs, broad girl, not like the other girls. Adults commented and children echoed it. Peers bullied me for my body before I had the language to understand what a body even was, let alone that mine was supposedly wrong. By the time I was old enough to form a sense of self, I had already learned that my body was something to monitor, correct, and apologise for.
That early conditioning sparked a battle with self-confidence and self-acceptance that has lasted more than thirty years. I live with body dysmorphia now — a condition that distorts how you see yourself, how you interpret mirrors, photos, and reflections — and even that has been minimised, belittled and dismissed by others. Doctors have shrugged it off, laughed it down, or treated it like vanity instead of what it is: a mental health condition rooted in long-term harm. In those moments, the medical system became another bully and added another place my body wasn’t safe. Social media only amplifies this. Living with body dysmorphia in an image-saturated world is mentally exhausting. You’re constantly negotiating reality; what’s real, what’s distorted, what’s yours, and what’s being projected onto you.
2018: The Year Everything Shifted
In May 2018, I was three months postpartum with our second and final addition to the clan. At the same time, our family lost one of my aunts after her battle with cancer. She was joy personified — unshakeable, unfiltered, and radiant. When she passed, something inside me whispered: Enough. I didn’t want to spend my life hiding from cameras, avoiding memories, or shrinking myself out of existence. Did I go to therapy? No. Should I have? Absolutely. But conditioning is powerful, and mine told me the same thing it always had: You’ll be happier when you’re thinner.
So, I joined Slimming World. I had tried all the other options before; fasting, Weight Watchers, slimming powders, skipping meals, and all the other fads out there.
This one — with me being unknowingly at the time neurodivergent, gave me dopamine hits with rewards, certificates, and pressure being weighed in a group of people— so within six months, I’d lost 3.5 stone. This was the smallest I’d ever been in my adult life. I bought UK size 10/12 jeans for my eldest son’s birthday party and, for the first time, trying on clothes didn’t feel like a punishment. I thought I was finally getting life right, until it all came to a plateau.
When the Narrative Flipped
The way people spoke about me changed — abruptly and violently. I’d spent years being criticised, picked apart, turned into a cautionary tale or a punchline and now, suddenly, people who had barely acknowledged me were stopping me in shops to tell me how amazing I looked. I was worthy now; desirable and interesting. It twisted my mental health in ways I couldn’t begin to process when once again the script did a full one-eighty and the compliments curdled. The championing disappeared and I heard lines like:
“You’re getting too thin.”
“You’re going too far now.”
“Skinny bitch.”
Online, random men sent messages I hadn’t invited. In person, strangers felt entitled to not only comment on my appearance still but also ask deeply inappropriate questions — including whether I made videos on Pornhub. Women began to accuse me of being an attention seeker for simply existing in photos and I experienced ‘witch hunt’ type of behaviours on my stories. What I learned then is something I still carry now: people celebrated the shrinking of me — not the healing of me. They applauded my disappearance and no matter what size I was, I was still never enough. When my weight plateaued and my mental health began to unravel further, my soul dog passed away — and everything I was holding together collapsed.
The ‘Syn’ Problem
Even at my smallest, I criticised every photo I took, every angle and inch. I had the body size I’d chased for years — and my inner voice was no kinder, in fact it only grew louder and darker. My hips still needed ‘fixing’, thighs still needed work, I could still be better.
At the same time, I was learning another brutal lesson: a woman who feels confident in her body is often treated as a provocation. Confidence gets misread as invitation, self-assurance as arrogance, and visibility as permission. I wasn’t more comfortable in my skin nor safer,
I was just smaller and lonelier inside my body than I’d ever been.
Slimming World taught me to moralise food and in doing so, I made an already fragile relationship with eating fracture further. ‘Good’ food, ‘bad’ food, ‘Syns’. All I really was learning was that joy had a price, pleasure had to be restricted, and satisfaction required an apology. Over time, a quiet fear crept in, the belief that food was something to control, not enjoy. I wasn’t becoming healthier; I was becoming afraid.
At first, it felt like power, like I’d cracked the code between me and acceptance. The numbers dropped and the praise rose, opening doors that had always been closed. But it wasn’t empowerment, it was simply an illusion — perfectly designed for a woman running on anxiety, unhealed trauma, and a lifelong hunger for approval.
The Body That Returned
Life doesn’t pause for diets; this is something that has been proven to me times over.
Trauma arrived at my door without an invitation and grief reshaped everything. My nervous system, that had already been locked into survival mode for years, reached new levels as old wounds reopened and new ones appeared. I was diagnosed with Autism and ADHD (AuDHD) and my body responded the way bodies do when they’re trying to keep someone alive. It protected me; It held weight and shut down what wasn’t essential. What I failed to realise was that my body wasn’t failing me, it was witnessing the strain of the load I was carrying.
There is no pill, injection, or plan that reaches the root of this. No quick fix for trauma stored in the body. Healing here is shadow work, accountability, and many sessions with a therapist. Nervous system regulation; slow, unglamorous, deeply human work — and none of that sells.
When I look in the mirror now, I don’t just see a body; I see history, survival, and how often I mistook protection for unsightly.
Where I Am Now
Looking back through the lens of trauma and mental health, everything makes more sense.
I don’t shame my past self —she did what she knew— and in all honesty, there are still moments where she does take over my thinking when it comes to my body. I am however, doing all I can in therapy and through trying to relearn something different: Gentleness over punishment, embodiment over shrinking, and small magic moments over measurement.
It’s hard to remember sometimes we are living a life — not a diet.
Some days are soul-destroying; There are moments when I want to sign back up just to see a different body in the mirror, but I know that voice now. I know where the call is coming from and it is usually the loudest when the energy I used to feed it is disappearing.
I still feel embarrassment. I still hide myself away sometimes. I’m still doing the work. It’s deep-rooted, and it’s going to take time, however, finally speaking about it feels like another step toward true empowerment.
Part Two will explore how weight loss online has shifted the narrative of health outcomes and toward aesthetic minimalism.
Written by Rochelle Hanslow
