Starting my coaching practice and this blog made me realise there were strong parallels to be drawn for me personally between acne and chronic dieting. As I sat with this idea, it occurred to me there could be many more links to draw between skin and weight stigma. I thought it’d be interesting to delve into this a bit further, and to take you on this journey with me.

If you spent years obsessing over food and exercise, like I did, there is a good chance it slowly engulfed whatever free time you had on your hands. It can go as far as defining your whole identity among colleagues, classmates or your family as the ultra-fit, diet-obsessed gym freak. In most cases, there is a point where this identity suffocates us, for physical or emotional reasons. But how do you find your ‘real self’ again after being defined by your food and exercise routines for so long?

For the biggest chunk of my first 30 odd years on earth, I was a perfectionist. Perfectionism insinuated itself in my mental and emotional life without my conscious knowledge. It felt like the safest thing to pursue when the world around me was scary, unfair or uncertain. It felt like the ‘proper’ answer when teachers, then later employers, asked me what I thought my ‘biggest weakness’ was. In fact, this constant chasing of perfection was highly toxic. But there are ways to let go of the self-abusing habit…