How are you meant to love yourself if everything you see is meant to make you feel bad about yourself?

Here’s the thing. Marketing is there to make you feel less, because if you feel like less, you will buy more.

A lot of the health and fitness industry is designed to make people feel like less. If they feel like they don’t fit into a certain size, shape, or look, they will be compelled to spend money on gyms, supplements and meal plans.

Ok this probaly sounds weird coming from someone who is in that industry but bear with me here.

Diet culture has spawned so many different products to make you feel that you shouldn’t look the way you do . I am not talking about just gyms and training plans, if anything, for a long time doing anything other than 20hrs a day of cardio was frowned upon, so a gym wasn’t necessary. (all be it a treadmill when its raining is nice)

But what they did sell you was meal replacment shakes, starvation diets and fat reducing pills. (none of which work in the long term, and you feel miserable while taking them, which I am sure many of you know)

But even cellulite. Those visible lines on the backs of our legs and bums, was created to make us feel worse about ourselves! Its not real!

Yes I am aware those lines are real but they are just fat stores, Until in 1968 Vogue magazine named it and told us all it was bad… and then companies started to sell cellulite banishing creams.. coincidence? I think not?

And what exactly the ‘right size’ is changes. When I was growing up it was stick thin, which you could achieve by living on lettuce and sadness or the afor mentioned diet pills that made your body resistant to fat. (spoiler alert they don’t)

Or if you really had the money it was liposuction, but that was only for the elite.

Now its all about havin big glutes and abs, So there is a whole new line of products to sell people who don’t fit into that bracket. We now see young attractive girlrs telling you that if you buy their glute plan and do 1,000,000 donkey kicks a day you can have an ass like hers (Even though that’s neither how she trains or how she achieved it)

Bum implants have shot up in popularity. (which is funny considering its basically the opposite of liposuction.)

So the industry is acting as if it has moved away from those unhealthy standards when really they’ve just rebranded, and repacakaged it. (pardon the pun)

Even the body positivity movement has its flaws. I’ve seen girls labelled ‘not fat enough’ to be a part of it. Which is crazy as there shouldn’t be a size requirement in order for you to qualify, and it completely goes against the thing they are promoting.

There really is no winning!

So what are we to do when every side tells you that you are wrong?

Tell them all to Fuck off!

If you wanna exercise and lose a few pounds, you do it, but do it for you not because a magazine, or some influencer told you to. Do it for your kids so you can run around the garden with them, or because you’ve always wanted to run a marathon, or walk the camino.

If you want to eat pizza on the weekend, and drink a few beers and that means you carry a little extra ‘fluff’ you do that too!

Life is for living for YOU and not what some magazine said!