If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body……

……Would you put it in a calendar?

I’m really excited about a project I’ve just backed on Indiegogo, so I decided I would witter on about it to you guys too 😀

I am all about being body positive, and by body positive I mean being positive about ALL bodies. From teeny tiny alleged size “00” bodies up to happy life loving ladies who don’t even know what size they’re wearing.

I’m far happier with my body now that I’ve ever been in my life. I like to think of my body more in terms of what it can do, I want to be stronger, faster, with better endurance. I’d like to lose a few pounds, partly because my clothes will fit better, and partly because I think It would help me be with my goals to be stronger, faster, and lighter on my feet.

Body positivity is something that applies to size 6 athletes with a high muscle mass who get told they’re fat. It applies to size 14 chicks who like to wear a corset everyday and size 20 lovelies who want to wear a crop top. To me Body positivity is about knowing that a range of body sizes and shapes is perfectly normal, about being honest and accepting about your lifestyle and your body, and about taking the focus for women off worrying about how they look all the time, and thinking about what they can do, who they are and what they’ve achieved.

The project I’ve backed on Indiegogo is the Every Body’s beautiful calendar. The calendar will feature 12 photos, one for each month of the year, a selection of group and solo shots, that will feature women of all shapes and sizes, from a variety of professions and backgrounds. So, yeah, it’s going to be a calendar featuring women in swimwear, it’ll pretty much be focused on what they look like, but campaigns like this serve as a counter point to the images with which we are bombarded every day.

Air brushed “perfect”, size 8 women in swimwear are something we see every day, so much that we don’t even think about it or register them as women in swimwear. We might still be surprised if they walked into Starbucks in a bikini, but pouting from the covers of magazines, applying suncream in an ad break during Coronation Street or splashed across a bill board in the town centre, we barely blink. If those ads feature bodies of different shapes and sizes, disabled women, shorter women, women with wider hips than we’re used to, or even a very few dress sizes up, we immediately register it as something out of the “norm”, and we react, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, but we react.

Things like the Every Body’s beautiful calendar give us a chance to counter those images with greater variety, so maybe, one day, we won’t react, and they’ll just be bodies, perfectly normal bodies.

There’s a selection of options available, from a couple of pounds to show your support, right up to a £250 option if you want to be featured in the calendar yourself. You can split this one between a group as well, so if there’s a few of you in a group that fancy being “Ms August” you can club together.

I think this calendar will be an awesome thing, and when it goes to production I’ll let you know where you can get hold of a copy, so even if you can only afford a couple of pounds to show your support right now, hopefully by the end of the year you’ll be able to get a little slice of body positivity to hang on your wall.

Take a peek at the Every Body’s Beautiful Indiegogo campaign, or follow them on Facebook to keep up to date!