Warning: The content below could be considered triggering to some.
After recovering from an eating disorder, Megan Jayne is using her body-positive attitude to inspire others.
According to the Daily Mirror, the 22-year-old from Colchester, England, was diagnosed with anorexia when she was 14. On her site, "Bodyposipanda," she wrote about her road to recovery.
"It took me 2 years to claw my way out of anorexia," she wrote. "2 years, one institutionalization, one hospitalization, and countless tears from the family members' hearts I’d broken along the way. I had chased the holy grail of thin with everything I had, traded in every part of me to end up 65 lbs., barely alive, still worried that people would see my stomach fold as I sat in my hospital bed."
She also wrote that over the next five years, she dealt with crash diets and binge eating. "My weight never relapsed back down to dangerously low, but my mind never truly recovered," she wrote.
She said her life changed when she discovered a body-positive hashtag filled with people promoting self-acceptance and body love. Inspired by them, she said that she began looking at her body differently.
"I stopped grabbing and poking the parts of my body I didn’t like, and started touching them with kindness instead," she wrote on her site. "I stopped tearing my body apart for its physical appearance, and started appreciating everything that it let me do."
Jayne now spreads her body-positive message on her site and on Instagram. She posts photos of herself along with inspiring messages for more than 100,000 followers. She also encourages her followers to embrace their beauty, especially in the face of society's damaging beauty standards.
"We can't keep believing that our purpose in life is to emulate some impossible beauty standard, one that doesn't even exist without the editor's wand anyway," she wrote on Instagram. "We're taught to aspire to a perfection that isn't real."
Need help? Call the National Eating Disorder Association hotline at 1-800-931-2237.
H/T Cosmopolitan
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