'Wanna know the truth about gaining weight?' Anorexia survivor...

A brave anorexia survivor has posted a powerful photo on her Instagram page of how she looks now, and how she looked when she was in the throes of the illness.

And her message is as simple as it is important: what you weigh does not have the power to define you, only you can do that.

23-year old Megan Jayne Crabbe, from the UK, posts about all things body positive on her Instagram page @bodyposipanda, and while many of her posts are empowering and inspiring, this photo has affected us particularly deeply.

A photo posted by Megan Jayne Crabbe (@bodyposipanda) on Oct 25, 2016 at 10:04am PDT

In the photo on the left she’s thin due to the illness, and looks miserable – while in the image on the right she looks happy and content with herself and her body.

“Do you wanna know the truth about gaining weight?” Megan Jayne captioned the image. “Because I've done a whole lot of it. I used to believe that my life would end over a couple of extra pounds on the scale. I used to believe that losing weight was the most important thing in the world. I used to believe that there was no such thing as going too far, getting too thin, losing too much.”

However this dissatisfaction with her body almost killed her. For many years she went from thin, to overweight, and back again – but one thing was consistent: she was never happy with her appearance.

I think that one of these pictures is more beautiful than the other. But it's not the one you think. One would be called curvy, the other fat. One looks like a 'before', the other looks like an 'after'. One will inspire people to tell me that I'm unhealthy, unworthy, unlovable. The other will be praised, admired, desired. And even though I've spent my life believing that the version of me on the left is more valuable than the version on the right, I've changed my mind now. I think it's more beautiful just to be yourself. Because the picture on the left was taken with all the pressures of what a 'perfect' body should look like in mind. The body is posed. The face is polished. The angle is unnatural. And while both these pictures are me, I don't see myself in the picture on the left. I see everything our culture wants me to be. And I still don't quite measure up. In the picture on the right, I am relaxed. I am content. I am celebrating all the parts of myself I've been taught to be ashamed of for my whole life. The rolls on my stomach, the cellulite dotting my thighs, my face bare and my mind free from what anybody else wants me to be. And that freedom is beautiful. More beautiful than a perfect pose or a flattering angle could ever be. It's the kind of beauty that's in us all, exactly as we are. If only we could learn how to see ourselves clearly.

A photo posted by Megan Jayne Crabbe (@bodyposipanda) on Nov 2, 2016 at 1:43pm PDT

“Anorexia morphed into binge eating disorder and within a year I'd gone from 65lbs lying on my death bed to 180lbs, right back to self-loathing and wanting to lose weight more than anything in the world. I lost and gained hundreds of pounds over the years,” she wrote. “I'd clawed my way back from the edge and still I believed that happiness could be found in the dropping numbers on a bathroom scale.”

And this went on until Megan Jayne realised that no weight loss had ever actually made her happy – so why was she punishing herself like this?
“No amount of disappeared pounds had made me stop hating my body,” she says, “And chasing thinness had made me lose much more than weight – I'd lost myself. Now I know that no matter how much extra jiggle might come along, nothing important about me will have changed.”

“I'll still have the same heart, the same mind, the same passion, the same love. The scale will never be able to tell me anything about myself that truly matters. It doesn't have the power to define me - only I do.”

Wise words lady.