Alex Light - You Are Not a Before Picture: How to finally make peace with your body, for good

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First published in Great Britain by HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2022

Text Copyright Alex Light 2022

Alex Light asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 9780008507565

eBook ISBN: 9780008507589

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

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After struggling with various eating disorders, ALEX LIGHT transformed her beauty and fashion blog into a digital safe space to help others. In doing so, she has opened up urgently needed conversations about eating disorders, weight stigma and diet culture, and she is passionate about using her platform to encourage change. Alex has a background in fashion and beauty journalism.

This book contains descriptions of eating disorder thoughts and behaviours. If you are struggling with any of these issues you can contact the eating disorder charity BEAT in the UK (www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk). In the US, you can contact NEDA (www.nationaleatingdisorders.org) and in Australia, the Butterfly Foundation (butterfly.org.au). If you have concerns about your health, please consult a medical professional.

You know the one: the person with the slumped posture and sad demeanour in the infamous side-by-side shot waiting for the glow-up (read: weight loss) thats guaranteed to make them happy, successful, admired and desired.

Growing up, I was bigger than my friends. Not fat, but chubby, and I was hyper-aware of it. I very strongly believed that there was something wrong with the way I looked, that it was holding me back, and this belief pushed me to start dieting around the age of 11. I dedicated the majority of my life from that point on to trying to achieve my glow-up, reducing my body this powerful vessel that allows me to navigate the world to a series of problem areas waiting to be fixed and shrunk.

I resent the amount of invaluable time, energy and money I spent doing countless diets over the years Atkins, Dukan, South Beach, Mediterranean, Weight Watchers, Slimming World, Keto, Blood Type, Beyoncs Lemonade diet (dont ask), Paleo I could discuss them further but Im reluctant to give them airtime because, quite frankly, they dont deserve the ink and paper. But you get the point: you name it, Ive tried it. Pretty much every damn diet that existed before I broke free of dieting. As youre here, reading this, I imagine you might have a few to add to that list, given the amount of fads that have since emerged.

After some initial success with a few (because diets do often offer very short-term success, which is why they can feel so irresistible) in my teens and early twenties, every single one of these diets ultimately inevitably left me miserable, despondent and utterly frustrated at myself for what I perceived to be my own failure. I wanted thinness more than anything, so why didnt I have the willpower to make it happen? It wasnt until years later that I would learn that it was never my fault, but well get on to that.

Growing up in a world dominated by diet culture, I was convinced that I needed to be thin to be liked, successful and worthy. All of the beautiful people that existed in my world brought to me courtesy of magazines, TV, film and pop music were thin. I very strongly believed that I needed that too, not because I wanted to be on TV or be a popstar but because I thought thats how you gained approval and validation, and I was desperate for both.

Dieting became my personality, my entire sense of self, and my life revolved around it. I was a true chronic dieter, riding the fleeting highs and persistent lows and living off the hope I felt buoyed by when I discovered a new diet. My life was deeply impacted by this diet cycling: I avoided social situations that involved food for fear of slipping up and ruining the diet I was currently on, meaning that many of my relationships suffered, my work was average at best because I had finite headspace after dedicating so much precious time to staying on track with what I ate, and I had limited energy because I was often depriving my body and brain of what it needed to function well.

Through sheer desperation, I began to make the diets more and more restrictive and ended up trying a juice diet. I was supposed to drink five juices a day as a replacement for food which was incredibly painful; I distinctly remember desperately trying to go to sleep at 7pm to avoid the all-consuming hunger pains and sheer desperation to have food in my tummy but I slowly found myself cutting this down to four glasses of liquid vegetables a day, then three, then two, then one Until I decided that even that was too many calories and I settled on sucking boiled sweets to sustain me. I seemed to be unlocking a mental state even darker than my perpetual dieting and I was inching closer and closer to an eating disorder. I ended up needing treatment for anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa.

At the time, I was a fashion and beauty editor at a magazine. It was the job Id always dreamt of and Id worked hard to get there I had interned for years in three different cities and sent out more CVs than you could shake a stick at but I wasnt able to appreciate it: I was so desperately unhappy, because of my eating disorder, that I found very little pleasure in anything at that time. I also had an Instagram account with around 40,000 followers, all of whom were following me for my aspirational fashion and beauty pictures. My life looked so glamorous but things really werent what they seemed. I vividly remember a trip to Dubai in 2015 to interview Jessica Alba for a cover story. I was flown business class, put up in a five-star hotel, and wined and dined at some seriously swanky restaurants my family, friends and followers couldnt believe it. I was the luckiest girl in the world! Nobody had any idea that I spent the entire trip going back and forth to bathrooms, desperately battling bulimia. On the flight home, having purged made myself sick for the fifth time and pulled a rib muscle in the process, I wondered if I was going to feel physically strong enough to lift my case off the baggage conveyor belt and get myself home from Heathrow.

Struck by my increasingly frail appearance not long after, in 2015, my poor, deeply concerned mum gently but firmly demanded I see a doctor. She referred me to a psychiatrist and that marked the beginning but certainly not the end of my damaging relationship with food and my body