f you’ve not seen
Megan Crabbe’s
Instagram feed, I recommend you head
over to @bodyposipanda to take a look.
With her mission to spread the word
about body positivity and acceptance,
the plethora of pink and rainbow
colours is instantly cheering.
There’s also authenticity, deep thought,
research, and empathy at the heart of
everything Megan posts and presents.
When we meet, Megan introduces
herself as “an advocate for body
positivity, eating disorder recovery,
and a writer”, noting that she also does
‘influencer’ things. I’m struck by how
modest she is.
As well as having more than one
million followers, Megan has written
a truly brilliant book on improving
your relationship with your body,
writes a regular column for The Unedit,
appears on panels, has just announced
a live tour, and has been in a Little Mix
video... This woman is fierce.
Speaking out about how we can view
our bodies with more kindness and
compassion started just over four years
ago for Megan. “I was on Instagram,
looking for ‘fitspo’ – beautiful pictures
of women that I wanted to look like,
and then I would use those pictures
to punish myself. That was my thing,”
Megan explains.
At this point in her life, Megan had
experienced extreme anxiety, years of
yo-yo dieting and anorexia nervosa
as a teenager, receiving a diagnosis
at 14 after “years of falling down therabbit hole of disordered eating”. Body
dissatisfaction was something she had
felt for as long as she could remember.
However, this one search for ‘fitspo’
changed everything.“I stumbled across someone who
was wearing a bikini; she was maybe a
size 20 to 22 and calling herself fat, but
saying that wasn’t a bad thing,” Megan
recalls. “She was talking about being
fine with being fat, and that she was
fabulous, beautiful, and she was not
dieting anymore. She was living life.
It opened up this whole world that I
didn’t realise existed.”
Megan began poring through books
about women’s bodies, how we’re taught
to hate ourselves, why that is, and – as
Megan puts it – “how that is bullshit”.
“As soon as I found it, everything
clicked into place. It made me realise
that there is a bigger issue, that the
problem is bigger than me and my
body. Everything changed after that.“That realisation allowed me to start
healing,” she continues. “At that point I
was still carrying around the pain from
my eating disorder that I’d never really
healed, because I still hated my body
and I was still completely disordered in
my relationship with food.”
Megan says that books played a huge
role in her self-discovery, crediting
them as game changers on her path
to a better relationship with her body.
“The first book I found was The Beauty
Myth by Naomi Wolf, which is this
manifesto about beauty ideals and
women, written in the 90s. It was so
powerful for me, so fiercely feminist,
and it changed how I thought.”
After this, Megan started to collect
other brilliant books, but realised that
the majority of them had been written
in the 90s or before (with the exception
of contemporary writer Jes Baker, who
she describes as “fantastic”). While her
library taught her more about body
positivity and rejecting diet culture,
many of the books didn’t reflect the
challenges around self-image now – in
the age of social media.
It was through her social platforms
that Megan shared her new-found
knowledge of body positivity, and
her messages resonated with a lot of
people who had not considered that
there could be an alternative to self-
hatred. As a consequence, Megan was
approached to write a book on the
subject, and Body Positive Power: How
to Stop Dieting, Make Peace With Your
Body and Live emerged in 2017.As soon as I found
it, everything
clicked into place.
It made me realise
that the problem
is bigger than me
and my body
Continues >>>18 • happiful • May 2019