Like so many women, I struggled with my relationship with my body for decades. I thought dieting was a compulsory part of life for a person like me: "big-boned", genetically gifted wide hips, a curvy frame, not naturally slim. As I had grown up like many of us surrounded by messages, images in magazines and on TV that thin is better, petite is the goal, fat is bad, I believed I had to be slim to be beautiful, and I had to be beautiful to be worthy. So I turned to diets in my teens, slimming clubs in my 20s, weight loss pills and obsessive exercise in my 30s. And when I was 40, I discovered this wasn't compulsory, it was actually a choice. There was an option to live life not permanently trying to shrink myself, and I could accept and maybe even love my body just as it was, at any size. This epiphany was so impactful on my own self identity, self acceptance, mental health and wellbeing that I wanted to share this mindset shift with the world, so that women like me could get out of the diet and body hating trap, and learn to appreciate their bodies in a very different way. I also wanted to have an impact that would trickle down to girls to help them never get into negative thinking about their bodies, to know from a young age that all bodies are good bodies and that your worth is not dependent on how you look: you are worth so much more than that. I qualified as a mindset coach, NLP practitioner, hypnotherapist and blue health coach and a More Than Enough Method (TM) Facilitator and I use all these approaches in my work with women and girls. Blue health coaching means I incorporate the wellbeing benefits of being in or near natural blue spaces (water) into my coaching. I do this through one to one coaching, which if it's in person, I coach at the beach or even in the sea, otherwise I work online. I also run group online coaching courses for women, workshops for Mothers and Daughters, I host retreats, film screenings, inspirational talks and so much more. I help women embrace and accept themselves just as they are, by overcoming years of dieting and feeling not-good-enough, help them learn that all bodies are good bodies and figure out how to zoom out and look at all the great things about themselves and their lives instead of zooming in to all the alleged flaws and things that aren't working. With this I help them step into their power, and into who they were born to be. My approach is personalised, solution focussed and trauma-informed. I’ve often been told my coaching sessions are like a nice warm chat, but when I ask them to consider the challenge they brought to the session, they have established a completely different perspective without realising it. It's about shifting your mindset, reversing those subconscious beliefs that you’ve learned all your life that don’t serve you, that keep you small (literally and metaphorically) and reclaiming yourself and your life. One of my goals is to enable those I work with to free up time and headspace, for more important things in life, as Denise did: "My confidence has rocketed. There’s plenty of other stuff in my life to take up my time and energy, and my appearance is simply not a worry of mine any more". It is stressful, demoralising and all-consuming to be constantly worrying about how you look, what you weigh, what size you are, what you should and shouldn't eat, what and how much exercise you should do, what you should and shouldn't wear, and whether you should be in the photo. To constantly be focussing on your so-called faults and not stepping back to appreciate the bigger picture of your life. Imagine how liberating, empowering and life-affirming it could be to free yourself of all of that. What would you do with all that free time, headspace and confidence?