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Can you ever feel comfortable
in your own skin if you’re
never comfortable, well, just
in your own skin? Dolly
Alderton strips off to find out
I
remember the first time I realised I was naked.
I was seven, it was a sunny afternoon and I was
running around my childhood home. It was
only when I careened into the living room, and
saw my mum, dad and a few of their friends
drinking wine in their jeans and shirts that
I noticed I wasn’t wearing a thing. I’ve often
longed to return to that carefree, flushed-cheek
naked fairy, running around, laughing her head off over
the intervening 20 years. And I’ve never quite got there.
Like many women, my adolescence was spent work-
ing out a series of tricks to conceal my naked body – even
when naked. At 13, my mum and I had a complex
secret-nodding system when we were on family holidays
that meant she would know exactly when I wanted to get
out of the pool and would stand there with an outstretched
towel so no-one would see me in a bikini. At school, I dis-
covered how to get changed in the gym changing room
without ever having to take a single item of clothing off – I
was swapping clothes rather than removing them. When
I started sleeping with boys I learnt early on to always
have a shirt oh-so-casually thrown next to my side of the
bed to grab whenever I stood up to get out of bed.
In my early 20s, I suffered from an eating disorder.
Since then, my weight has always been up and down. My
eating and exercise routine are now under control and
never in a state of extremity, but my body image certainly
isn’t. I still retain a feeling of embarrassment over my
naked form – that perhaps I wasn’t made quite right.
Emmy Brunner, founder and director of Recover Clinic,
a leading eating disorder facility, tells me this feeling
of shame is worryingly common among women: “It’s
saddening just how common it is for women to think their
body is ‘wrong’ or ‘embarrassing’,” Brunner says. “Part
of building acceptance, self-love and self-respect is
acknowledging that there is no ‘right way’ to look. It’s very
empowering to accept that you are so much more than
a clothing size or certain body shape.”I went
CHALLENGE