There’s a size that Western society has decided is the right one. You probably already know what it is. It’s the size that fills the most rail space. The size that fashion weeks are built around. The size that gets called “healthy” in headlines that have nothing to do with health. And when it comes to loving your thick body, that narrow standard has made too many women feel as though their natural shape needs to be questioned, hidden, or fixed.
And if your body isn’t that size, you’ve spent a lifetime receiving a very quiet, very consistent message.
Something about you needs fixing.
Here’s what’s worth naming first. The obsession with thinness isn’t natural. It isn’t neutral. It’s cultural, it’s constructed, and it has a history. For decades, one particular body shape has been held up as the standard. Not just in fashion. In medicine. In media. In the language people use when they think they’re paying you a compliment.
You’ve lost weight. You look amazing.
As though the two things are inseparable. As though smaller has always meant better.
Most women have absorbed this, whether they wanted to or not. But for women of colour, and particularly for Black women, the disconnect goes deeper. Because the body that gets scrutinised, commented on and dressed as an afterthought is often a body that is simply built the way it was always going to be built. Wider. Rounder. Fuller. Not a deviation from the norm. Just a different norm entirely, one that the mainstream has been very slow to catch up with.
And still, the messaging gets in. That’s the insidious thing about it. It doesn’t always arrive loudly. It doesn’t always come from strangers.
Sometimes it comes from inside your own home.
You’re getting big.
You want to watch that.
You’d be so pretty if you just lost a little weight.
Said with love, sometimes. Said by people who’d absorbed the same programming and were simply passing it down. That doesn’t make it easier to unhear. It doesn’t stop those words from settling somewhere inside you and becoming the voice you hear when you’re standing in a changing room, or scrolling through images that were never really made with you in mind.
The work of loving a thick body, a body that is Pretty, Hot and Thick, a body that is genuinely, unapologetically PHAT, isn’t just physical. It’s not about finding the right outfit or the right angle. It’s about unpicking years of messaging that told you your body was a problem to be solved. That work is psychological. It takes time. And it’s entirely worth doing.
Because here’s what that messaging never tells you. Your body, as it is right now, is not a before photo. It is not a work in progress. It is not something to be tolerated until it becomes something more acceptable.
It’s just your body. Doing what bodies do. Holding you up. Carrying you through. Deserving of care, comfort and appreciation that doesn’t come with conditions attached.
Self-worth that depends on your size is not self-worth. It’s conditional approval. A healthy body is not about meeting one fixed beauty standard; it is about feeling comfortable in your body and recognising that your self-worth is not measured by appearance. And conditional approval has a way of keeping you in a permanent state of almost, almost there, almost good enough, almost ready to take up space without apology.
You are already there.
The cultural conversation is shifting, slowly. There are more bodies visible now than there were ten years ago. More designers cutting for curves. More women in public life refusing to make their size a punchline or a confession. That matters. Representation does something real to the stories we tell ourselves about what’s possible.
But representation alone doesn’t undo what’s already inside. The images you’ve seen, the comments you’ve stored, the number on a label that somehow became a measure of your worth; those don’t disappear because the cultural wind has changed direction.
That’s internal work. And it starts with something simple, even if it doesn’t feel simple at all.
My body is not the problem.
Not a mantra to repeat until you believe it. Just a fact. One that you’re allowed to return to, quietly, whenever the old voice starts up again.
It also helps to get honest about where the voice is coming from. Is it yours? Is it something you genuinely feel, or is it something you were given? There’s a difference between wanting to feel strong and well in your body and wanting to be smaller because somewhere along the line you were taught that smaller meant loveable. Those are not the same want. And knowing which one is driving you matters.
It also matters who you’re surrounding yourself with, what you’re consuming and whether the spaces you move through reflect your reality back to you. You can’t think your way out of years of narrow imagery. But you can start being deliberate about what you let in.
Part of being deliberate is choosing what you put on your body and what you surround yourself with. The Afro Woman Collection at samanthiaclarke shop, including hoodies, jumpers, t-shirts and an affirmation mug, was designed with that in mind. Pieces that reflect who you are, not who the mainstream decided you should be. Wear the affirmation. Keep it somewhere you’ll see it. Small things have a way of adding up.
Writing has a way of separating your real thoughts from the ones that were handed to you. If any part of this landed, it might be worth putting pen to paper and seeing what comes up. No pressure to arrive anywhere. Just a chance to listen to yourself.
A few prompts to start you off:
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