When did you feel really good about your body?

I felt really attractive when pregnant

Now, I have hardly any hang ups about my body which is surprising as I'm 40.

I just don't weigh myself. If my jeans get a bit tighter, I try to skip treats and wine for a bit. I also don't look in the mirror much, I don't like people (including self) who have to check their appearance all the time. Also, no fashion mags, as they EXIST solely to make you feel inadequate and then sell you the solution . Now read books, or the National geographic. The other one is to not join in when a group of women starts bashing their bodies ("look at me, i am soooo fat!", "Oh, I HATE my thighs" blabla. change the topic)

Doing SPORT is the main thing. I like feeling I have strong legs, and am building up stamina. I do sports I enjoy (not "punishment" like going to a gym or running would be for me). For me that's riding (friend's horse), swimming and squash. I try to go even if I am busy or don't feel like it, or it's raining.

I think the key is in keeping active, finding a sport you love, it's good for body AND mind.

I was already 4st overweight when I became pregnant. One day, towards the end of my pregnancy, I came out of the bathroom naked and had an unexpected full-frontal reflection in a mirror opposite. It struck me forcefully that I looked exactly like the statuettes of Ashtoreth/Astarte, an ancient fertility goddess. An image that men and women had venerated for thousands of years, an ancient image of beauty and femininity.

Suddenly my huge and waggly thighs, bum, belly, breasts, my fat, round shoulders and neck, were beautiful and feminine.

It felt good .

I have basically been the same size my whole life, but my attitude has changed so much. For me, sport (as opposed to exercise for the purposes of weight control) has been a really positive influence.

I am definitely happier in my thirties than in my twenties, and the less said about my teens and early twenties (16-21) the better, as it was then that I fully subscribed to the "Losing weight will solve all your problems instantly." Before that I was pretty unselfconscious, loved sport, didn't think about food much etc. My mother has a very sensible attitude to her body, and certainly never projected. around 15, I started to be influenced by magazines and images in the media, and by other girls in my year basically developing eating disorders (diet coke all day, packed lunch in the bin and then just eat dinner so your mum doesn't find out). Weirdly, at this time, I pretty much stopped playing competitive sport/athletics and started doing "weight loss" orientated exercise- mindless cardio/step classes etc. I got slightly better at Uni when I was a rower, but I still had major food issues.

Then I moved to London, dropped the competitive sport again, and went back to gyming/ body shape obsession.

As I got older, I realised that media images were basically bollocks, and my attitude to my own body improved gradually. I also did well in my career and that gave me a lot of overall confidence. I realised that I have a naturally athletic body that will never be skinny, but looks great toned and strong (my party trick is a one armed press up )

In 2006 i got into endurance racing. When my focus switched from exercising for weight loss to exercising for performance/racing, that "flicked the switch" back for me I think and made me so much more positive. I now play a lot of tennis, do loads of hiking and sea kayaking. When I go to the gym, it's with those things in mind, rather than just counting how many calories I've burned.

So I'd say now I'm the happiest I've been. I've also learned to moderate my weight so I eat pretty sensibly all the time, rather than crash and binge.

I've always been happy with my body, except perhaps when I lost a lot of weight breastfeeding and felt a bit gaunt round the face and upper arms. But I don't really feel that's my own positive thinking, more that I'm not particularly thin or particularly fat, a bit curvy in the right places, hardly any stretchmarks even, and have a DH who thinks I'm sexy - what's not to be happy about?

I have always felt as though my body has let me down, gawky as a child, hospitalised with asthma, overweight at a teen, covered in acne, and eczema, overwrought with hormonal changes and polycystic ovaries. Struggles with fertility, miscarriages, a molar pregnancy which became cancerous and led to a year of chemotherapy. Finally manage to get and keep a pregnancy, but have terrible birth, with 3rd degree tearing (with ongoing consequences) raynauds syndrome means breastfeeding is a bloody nightmare. My body feels even more wrecked by birth of ds (csection) my stomach doesn't feel like it belongs to me anymore, I have put on loads of weight, my back aches all the time from carrying ds around (he is a big 14 months, but has developmental delays and needs carrying a lot), i have varicose veins and a tendency to get phlebitis in one leg.

Ok that is the moaning bit!

I am also amazed by my wreck of a body, it has got me through cancer. Despite 7 years of struggles it has carried and given birth to 3 babies, it managed a few weeks of breastfeeding each baby. It runs (sometimes) and walks miles everyday. It provides a magnificent climbing frame for my dds. I have always been a bit bad about the fuel i put in it, too many drugs and too much alcohol in my youth, too much cake and chocolate now, but god i enjoy food. Dh says I am amazing(), and I don't know about that, but maybe my body is more amazing than I give it credit for.

I have become "happier" with my body as I get older, but I am not truely happy.

I always compare myself to others , thus when I was in my teens and twenties I was fairly average, physically very little has changed from my teens through to my thirties so now as a 30 something mother of four I am probably faring a lot better than most.

The only exception was that in all of my pregnancies I felt truely beautiful.

I have mostly always liked my body, give or take a few niggles, except in my teens, when I found being tall and somewhat gawky difficult. But I think that was more about not being comfortable about who I was really.

The time I liked the way my body looked best was during a fairly short bout of keeping fit and eating healthily a couple of years after my children were born. I cycled to work and did weight training and really liked both the aesthetic results and the feeling of being fit. Then I broke my arm and couldn't cycle for six months and basically lost all the muscle, strength and fitness and never really could be arsed to put in the work again. Which is daft because I really did feel good.

Today I went clothes shopping with dd and felt a bit sad that so many things looked fantastic on her and so few on me. But I know that's because she is at a very beautiful time in her life whilst I have more fat than I should (and still want to wear the same clothes!). However generally I don't think about my appearance much, and follow the philosophy that if you catch sight of yourself in a mirror you should smile, think how nice you are and move on :)

I like my body more now -30s, post DS, two stone overweight - than I think I did when I dieted and ran my way down to my thinnest ever, three years ago, before my wedding. Bloody DM pulled me aside and gave me a talking-to that included the phrase 'I hope you're not going to be a Big Bride.' I got myself really worried about it and did WW and an hour's exercise a day and it was the most bored, food-obsessed and anxious that I have ever been. Totally not worth it- I just liiked like me, but a bit thinner!

I plan to get fitter and will probably lose some weight, but I really like my body now. It has grown me DS, fed him, and survived on very little sleep while working and running around. It has done me proud! I.would feel ungrateful not to love it now. It does help that DH says and demonstrates that he is very keen, and I don't watch telly or read mags. I am also very lucky to be relatively healthy. I have a friend who lives with a chronic illness and it is so hard.

I agree, working. I've been thinking about this, on and off, all day but am too drunk tired to encapsulate it now. Something to do with a difference between working with your body - within it, as part of it, as part of you - and working to control it. As if your own body ... your self! ... were some grossly unwieldy, badly-made thing that must be honed and tempered into acceptability.

The language used by gyms, diet vendors and such has become so sophisticated. It's easy to reject ads from the 1950s, with their brash "Too fat! Too smelly!" messages, so now they're using terms that imply we should be happy being ourselves, and can't be, until we buy their classes and their equipment and their book and their products. It's the same mechanism used to sell skincare, but so much more insidious because it masquerades as health & sanity.

Annie, have you read Orbach's book? I can't remember.

AnnieLobeseder, I think that you put the weight back on because that's just the way the cookie crumbles. I think the idea its about willpower and the like is just a media construction too... no evidence dieting works or even, crucially, that being in a certain weight bracket will reduce health risks. The figures only say that people of a certain weight have less risk, not that if you were a higher weight and you lose weight that you lose the risk.

I looked fantastic before my wedding. Slim, fit, healthy. Was doing lots of walking, generally happy with life. That has become my internal image now and I get a shock sometimes when I see a photo and realise how much has changed! In my favourite pictures of myself, I am 10 st (wedding dress), 12st 4 (sister's wedding), 12st 10 (on holiday with my husband, a snapshot in Central Park in the snow) and 14st 7 (holding my newborn baby boy).

Mostly, weight is an irrelevance, body shape is an irrelevance.. yes, if you are grossly obese.. but mostly I end up tipping the BMI scale at 25 or 25.5 and I eat a good diet and am reasonably active. These things matter. Shapes don't.

When I was in my late 20s and very, very fit. It was the first and only time in my life I was lean and toned and I was proud of my body, because I worked hard to get it in shape.

Even now, I don't admire thin people particularly - they may be lucky or they may eat very unhealthily. But I admire fit people with obvious muscle tone - they look after themselves and their health.

I'm ashamed that I've put all my weight back on, but not because I feel like I look bad to everyone else, but because I find it rediculous that I lack the ability to stop stuffing 2-3 boxes of biscuits into my mouth in one sitting. It's stupid behaviour and not healthy. So why do I do it? I wish I could find out how to stop, not to look better, but to be in control of this idiotic behaviour and be healthy.

I still run, cycle and do karate, so I'm fit enough, but the extra weight makes it more difficult than it should be.

So, I wish I were thinner, but not necessarily for aesthetic reasons.

That being said, I looked back this very evening on old photos from when I was ripped and gorgeous, I remembered how even then I felt like I was far from perfection and had various lumps and bumps that shouldn't have been there.

BOF, I had psoriasis too. It arrived out of nowhere, at the worst imaginable time, and was utterly debilitating. It was part of my breakdown; I got the message. I'm now very sympathetic to people who have it long-term; it's just so weird and makes you so very, very tired :(

All I can say is what you must be tired of hearing: rest more than you think you can, because you need it - and it's true, it does liberate one's creativity. A strange compensation for a weeping skin, to be sure.

Do take care. x

I second what sunshine said BOF

and I am glad you said "but what about if your body isn't healthy"

mine is at the moment, but I realise I may be on borrowed time

I have done, and still do, some things to abuse it, and at 45, time isn't on my side

I don't take my health for granted, that is for sure and try to love my body (warts'n'all) while it still does everything I want it to do

My body felt OK when I was six or seven. I was really good at cartwheels, backflips and doing stuff on a bar/trapeze. But my mum put me on my first diet at three and then, at 8yo, my ballet teacher told me I couldn't enter the test as I was a fairy elephant. Or, at least that's what my mum relayed :(

At 14-15 I was in a pre-olympic diving team (flipping again!) but didn't associate what I did with my own body - I still thought of myself as fat. I had a diving accident, then developed anorexia. I still didn't feel good about my body; by then, I'd also acquired a fear of body hair that was to last until my fifties.

In my twenties - having sent genuine model scouts away with a barrage of abuse, assuming they were taking the piss! - my lovely boss, Jan, gave me a copy of Susie Orbach's "Fat Is A Feminist Issue". I recognised what Orbach was saying, did what the book recommended, and fixed my eating disorders.

Through my thirties, not longer disordered in that respect, I got on with my brilliant career and my not-so-brilliant personal life, never thinking about my body as anything other than a superbly useful part of me. When Marriage #1 broke up, my best friend said "Well, you have gained a lot of weight." I pointed out that I'd previously been underweight. But what she said sank in anyway, but I wouldn't diet any more ... so I developed an exercise addiction instead.

Late thirties to late forties, Marriage #2 came and went traumatically, but the gym remained my friend. I worked out at least six times a week, often ten or twelve. I was very happy with my body! But this wasn't about feeling comfortable with my own skin (and muscle, ligament, fat, etc) - it was about controlling it, just like the anorexia. I said all the right things, but really I wasn't happy being my self; I was matching my body to a series of targets, ticking off boxes that meant "one less point of inadequacy". Gyms encourage this.

Eventually I broke. All that performance, all that control, couldn't hold in the turmoil inside of me and, sufficiently triggered, it all gave way. I became so ill that I couldn't walk to the street corner without holding on to garden walls & fences. I lost control of my bodily functions - it rebelled completely. I don't blame it.

I'm still recovering. I got the message. I work at loving my body: all its squishy curves, wrinkles and sags, and calluses and hairs; all its softness, resilience, sheen, healing powers, and what it actually does. It's fucking amazing! And so is yours.

I'm nearly as comfortable in my self as I was at six or seven - not quite, because I still can't cartwheel or handstand. But I'm no longer 6 years old: I'm looking towards the end of life, not the beginning; I'm experienced, have seen wonders and felt despair; I'm becoming comfortable with ME and my body is neither "me" nor "not-me". It's not a shell, it's who I am and there's much more to me besides :)

Fat Is A Feminist Issue still reads a little old-fashioned, although it's been updated. Even so - the more threads I read on forums, the more convinced I become that women really need to read it!

Oh, don't, Sunshine- you'll make me cry!

Oh BoF. I'm really sorry.

I had no idea you'd had to suffer all that. Psoriasis is horrible. One of my friends had it and I remember how one particular outbreak pretty much led to her refusing to go out for a while.

I don't know what to say that doesn't sound like a completely meaningless platitude TBH, but I think it's pretty amazing that you continue to post with such humour and lightness, yet also with depth, without betraying any of that discomfort in your posts. That's probably part of the reason why your DP loves you so much.

I remember laying in bed in the Christmas of '95, and feeling really proud of my body. I don't think I had ever felt that way before or since.
I have never been that concerned about my body and how it looks, because, to be frank, its my body, and how it looks is for my pleasure.

OK I've been thinking a bit more about this. I've always held on to the healthy body/healthy mind thing (within reason though, I like curry, crisps, chocolate and far too much to be holier-than-thou about it ).

However, what if you don't have a healthy body? How can you manage to feel good about your body even if it doesn't do what it needs to? I feel it's important that you do. Why should anyone feel less good about themselves because of something they probably have no control over.

I am probably over-thinking this aren't I.

How do we separate the physical from everything else? Do we actually need to? Or is the answer to find greater acceptance of the human body in all its forms and 'limitations'?

I felt really really good about my body today.
I went to an Ashtanga yoga class (was a bit worried thought I wouldn't keep up) I just loved the flow, the feeling of strength, the feeling of lightness, and I kept up easily with all the yougsters ( I am almost 45)
When I was in my 20's and 30's I was so skinny(on purpose) but felt weak in body (I was) and I wasn't that strong mentally either. Now I am fit, have muscle, weigh ten pounds more, and have 4 fab kids as well. I think yoga, diet, friends and getting older and not worrying so much about what others think has made me appreciate that this is as good as it gets.

Ellie that's a good point about peer pressure/society.

I think one thing we could do is really limit our exposure to the type of media that makes women feel inadequate, especially female/celebrity magazines and TV advertising. You can't escape all of it because this stuff is literally everywhere, but limiting exposure helps. It's surprising how even the most body-confident woman can feel insecure when she's constantly bombarded with messages about the importance of youthful skin and a bikini body. Most of us look pretty damn attractive just as our ordinary selves. If we didn't the human race would have died out long ago.

With my DC I like to challenge what I consider bad advertising. So my poor 4-year-old DTs have already been subjected to a discussion about that sodding Lelli Kellie advert with the makeup thingy.

I'd be hopelessly naive if I think my indoctrination will override all of it of course, but I hope it will sink in enough for them to apply some critical thinking skills and allow them to have a healthy attitude to their bodies and life once they get past the dreadful angst of puberty where pretty much everyone hates how they look.

Those of you who do feel comfortable now, what would you say to your younger self to help her avoid all of the body angst?
I wish someone had told me that in the greater scheme it just doesn't matter. People wouldn't like me more for being thin or looking "perfect". I wasted loads of my teenage years staying out of the sun light because I hated my freckles. How I wish I could have those summers back now!

That's what I try to do but society still gets them in the end. DD1 is 12 and when got to secondary school started saying she was fat

I make a massive effort with DD2 (3) and talks about how strong she is and how her legs are so good for running and how she has such a lovely tummy. I hope that continues.

Grumpla that's lovely.

mamaloves I have a really inspiring friend who had a lot of body issues (eating disorders etc) when younger and one of the things I really noticed spending time with her and her daughter recently was that she referred to her own body really positively. For example when toddler pulled her t-shirt up in cafe se said "No, love, we don't need to show people mummy's lovely tummy" (but NOT in a sarky way) and when getting changed for baths etc she described her daughter's body to her really Positively as well "let's take your trousers off, here are your lovely strong legs" etc. She was working really hard at it and her five year old daughter I thought had already absorbed a lot of confidence from it - she was happy to talk about how fast she could run, how nice it was to be tall etc. I really admired my friend for it and thought it might help you to know that even if you have felt ambiguous or negative about your own body you CAN avoid passing these feelings on.