None of this made sense before I had children, daughters in particular

My daughter Annabelle. Sometimes she can say something and it hurts. 

Something silly like, 'please put your phone down'... and it hurts. 

I know I've been on my phone and not giving her attention. She's right, and it hurts a little bit, I guess it makes me feel guilty. 

It hurts that she has seen my selfishness. 

It makes me resolve to do better, to organise my time better. 

This pain is useful though, it gives me a barometer by which to measure the things I don't want her to live with.

I think about my beautiful daughter looking down at the scales beneath her some time in the future. 

She is deciding how much she is worth based on what it says. She is deciding how happy she will be today based on the numbers.

That really hurts, it makes me want to cry just thinking about it.

There is no denying that as a blunt instrument it provides a source of feedback. That's useful, but when emotion is attached to it it has too much power. 

I see some great success stories from calorie counting but I also see the prison they create as the numbers take on meaning.

I imagine my daughters in that prison and it scares me. I think about it too long and if makes me panic, my hands start to sweat. 

I think about my daughters banning themselves from foods, willing themselves to not eat them, desperate to to avoid them and hating themselves when they give in. 

I imagine them attaching self worth to food. 

Comparing themselves to airbrushed magazines or people with different frames. Or to anyone at all. 

It's heart breaking.

I want them to always know that they are amazing. That their beauty is beyond measure. That they are unique. 

This means one of a kind. It doesn't means that they should try to be as close to what the media has decided is perfect as they can. It means they are already perfect. You are already perfect.

If they reach the stage one day where the scales make them sad. If they find themselves in a restaurant ordering what they believe they should have rather than what they would like. 

If they look at themselves in the mirror and it upsets them. Then they feel something different to what they feel today. 

Today, they don't care. Annabelle is 6 and at present she doesn't care. For now I am winning. 

Hopefully at 6 all parents are winning. So I know it's not at 6 that this happens. But at some point a lot of people start losing. 

At some point they start caring and it takes up more of their day than it should. 

I work with those who care about those numbers, those that if they were my daughters I would want to cry at the things they think and feel about themselves. 

These thoughts aren't generated from nowhere they are bread into us by society by the medias portrayal of beauty. 

A society that thinks that masculine means physically strong and feminine means physically weak. 

A media that congratulates stars when they lose weight and berates them when they gain it, then victimises them based on their method. 

A media that told us the we must move more and eat less in order to be worthy. And it's not even true. It's not even a sound weight loss principle. Of rather it is but not for anyone who is experiencing any of the above and already eating to little and moving too much.

This doesn't start with healthy diet and exercise and it won't end with it. 

They are just side effects. 

It ends when we begin to love ourselves for who we are, radical self-acceptance as they all it. 

It ends when we turn from the nonsense of celebrity, it ends when we fall in love with ourselves and become the role models for the next generation. 

It ends when we resolve to be the inspiration ourselves. 

Stop teaching the change we wish to see 

Start being it. 

Ed Ley