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Blogger celebrates 'flaws': 'We have no idea what real bodies look like anymore'

Megan Jayne Crabbe, a 23-year-old from Essex, England, just shook up the body-positive movement with a statement that she hopes will make people stop and think.
/ Source: TODAY

Megan Jayne Crabbe, a 23-year-old care assistant from Essex, England, just shook up the body-positive movement with a statement that she hopes will make people stop and think: that we've lost touch with what "real bodies" look like.

Crabbe started her Instagram account, @bodyposipanda, about 18 months ago along with a complementary blog, Bodyposipanda.com.

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She's not posting doctored-up images on those outlets; but she's also not guilty of some of the tropes used by body-positive bloggers, who often post sayings like "Real women have curves."

That's because she takes issue with not one, but both of these things.

Instead, she's after "the real." And that's precisely why her take on self-acceptance is so powerful.

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"Whenever I post anything celebrating my belly rolls there's an army of body shamers ready to tell me that I'm hideous, unhealthy, unworthy. But guess what? MOST WOMEN HAVE BELLY ROLLS WHEN THEY SIT DOWN," she wrote in a Facebook post earlier this week, accompanied by a flattering photo of herself with a flat-looking midsection alongside a less conventionally flattering image in which her pose reveals cellulite and stomach rolls.

That's not where her inspiring words ended. She went on to note that, just like her, most women also have "cellulite on their thighs, bags under their eyes, scars and blemishes and a million other 'imperfections' we've learned to see as problems. Our ideas about bodies are so warped that most people would praise the girl on the left and condemn the girl on the right, without realizing that we're one and the same.

"Well, I've worked damn hard to love the body in both these pictures," she continued. "And I won't let the world paint my unique features as flaws to be fixed."

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In a message to TODAY, Crabbe explained why this idea of total self-acceptance matters so much to her: "Lots of people see body positivity as bashing one body type in order to raise (up) another. Phrases like 'real women have curves' do nothing except shame people who aren't curvy," she wrote. "Being thin doesn't make someone immune to body image issues, and creating a new curvy 'ideal' doesn't solve the problem. There should be no 'ideal.'

"We are all uniquely beautiful, and we are all valuable beyond our bodies ... True body positivity celebrates all sizes, it doesn't put them in competition with each other."