One of the positive things to come out of lockdown last year was that I started exercising more by walking in the park for about an hour before I started my work from home routine. I enjoyed it for many reasons, not least because it became one of the only reasons that I would leave my house.

As life returned back to ‘normal’ and I became busier, I found that I was walking less and less until finally, I just wasn’t walking at all. Wanting to revive this healthy habit and develop some others, I decided that I would incorporate ‘become more healthy’ into my plans for 2022.

But by the following month, I had succumbed to the statistic about people tending to give up on their resolutions by February. It started out well enough, drinking water and moving around more, but I found that this quickly escalated into feeling guilty about eating certain foods or beating myself up when I didn’t sweat that day.

I also found myself becoming more critical of my body, frustrated that after all of my sacrifice and effort, I couldn’t see any ‘positive results’ to make it all worth it. “You didn’t even start this journey to lose weight, though,” I remember saying to myself out loud in response to my negative self-talk. “You just wanted to be healthier.”

It was then that I realised that I had internalised diet culture’s message that healthier means thinner and that certain foods were inherently good or bad. I couldn’t help but feel disappointed in myself. These were thoughts that I had not had since I was a teenager who loathed her plus sized body because the world told her to. It had taken me a long time to shed those beliefs and truly love myself, only to find that I had never really formed new ideas of health that included me.

In order to rectify this mistake, I interviewed experts like:

• Monique Melton, anti-racism educator, author, international speaker and founder of Shine Brighter Together

• Chrissy King, writer, speaker, fitness and strength coach, and creator of The Body Liberation Project

• Trina Nicole, body confidence advocate, dancer and founder of The Curve Catwalk

and collated their expert advise into an article on How To Become Healthier Without Succumbing To Diet Culture for Black Ballad.

Continuing in this spirit of rectifying mistakes, today I'll be switching gears from talking about my recent blip with diet culture to talking about the ones that I had with HARO initially and what I now do to avoid them (so that you can too!) For example: