This Stomach Carried Me Through a Fucking Breakdown, Show Some Respect

A soft clapback anthology from the thighs that did nothing wrong.

I have never existed without comparison. Not as a child. Not as a teenager. Not now. At eight, I was reading Now Magazine with my Nan, looking at women with circles around their thighs and captions that said “piling on the pounds.” I didn’t know what a pound was, but I knew it was something to be ashamed of. At eleven, I stopped eating carbs for six days because someone said Adele was “brave” for wearing a sleeveless dress. At thirteen, I saw my reflection and felt like a draft version of someone better.

I was never fat. But I was always “before.” Before hot. Before healed. Before worthy. Before someone might love me and post about it. Even when I looked “after,” I didn’t believe it. Because somewhere, a magazine said I still had work to do. Celebrity media taught us that transformation was the most valuable arc a woman could have. Adele lost weight and suddenly her vocal cords weren’t the main headline. It didn’t matter that she wrote the soundtrack to three collective female breakdowns. What mattered was that she “looked amazing.” Like she’d finally earned her fame.

When a woman changes her body, the world applauds. When she doesn’t, we assume she’s given up. The Before and After cult is not about health. It’s about obedience. A woman is only allowed to be visible if she promises she’s improving. You can be curvy, as long as it’s curated. You can be soft, as long as it’s intentional. You can even love yourself, as long as you still buy the protein shakes.

The female body is not a story arc, it’s not a suspense thriller that ends in abs.

Still, we all watched the same montage. The sad girl running in the rain, then six weeks later she’s got a spray tan and a boyfriend. Bridget Jones had to lose weight before the audience could accept her getting loved. Anne Hathaway got contacts and suddenly we called it a makeover. Magazines in the UK built entire empires off grainy beach shots of women just... existing. God forbid someone has a normal stomach and a Tesco bag.

And we absorbed it all. Through whisper-thin paper and sunbed-lit headlines. Our mums read them like scripture. We read them because we wanted to be women. And by the time we became them, it was too late. The damage was done by osmosis. Psychologists call it body image internalisation. Capitalism calls it “aspirational marketing.” I call it the reason I still look at my stomach sideways when I think someone might fancy me.

Even now, knowing it’s a scam, knowing it's propaganda for the female self-hate industrial complex, I still sometimes wonder if I should try a new serum and post a soft-launch selfie in better lighting. That’s the thing about this kind of conditioning. It doesn’t die when you get smart. It lingers. It thrives under compliments. It pretends to be self-improvement. It disguises itself as health, wellness, glow-ups, fitness, femininity, softness, style. But what it’s really doing is marketing shame in pretty fonts.

I’m not a Before picture. My body is not a trailer for the version of me men will finally find manageable. I exist right now. In soft light and bad moods and bloated mornings and dresses I don’t owe to anyone’s aesthetic. I will not apologise for being in process. I will not edit myself into someone’s fantasy of who I could become if I just hated myself a little harder. You don’t have to find me inspiring. But you do have to get used to the fact that I’m not going to shrink to make you more comfortable with the way I’ve stopped apologising.