Bikini Brain

The Mind Body Complex - Summer Edition

Content: body image, body dysmorphia, diet culture

I have always felt my best in Winter. I like knitwear and tights and proper coats and scarves. God, I love scarves. I don’t experience the ‘summer glow’ that many enjoy. I go pink and blotchy, scabby and itchy. Hayfever is an annual enemy, and mosquitoes find me delicious. I scar and chafe and sweat and burn. I do not tan, I do not glow, and I do not wear bikinis.

I’m not sure when girls stop accepting the Speedo swimming costume from Sports Direct. I wore my school-branded costume for years — probably longer than it was intended to be worn. But there was a shift one year — maybe after Year 8 — when suddenly everyone was in bikinis. Pink ones and tie-dye ones, with tassels and cups and padding and thongs. The range of swimwear available for teenage girls is incredibly limited. It’s either infantilising or sexualising. I somehow always found ones that over-aged me by a few decades. High-waisted, tummy controlled, cupless and shapeless — more suited to grannies doing water aerobics than to a tween on a banana boat. I’m thinking of a specific bikini I bought for a choir trip to Spain. It was a high-waisted black halter neck thing with daisies on it. I thought it was quite a rockabilly vibe, which would help me stand out as interesting and ‘indy’ to the few boys and male grad students on the trip. It had the opposite effect. When the dreaded beach photoshoot arose, I wanted to bury my head in the sand — literally.

I was 13, and I hated how I looked. I felt tubby and fleshy and bulged in all the wrong places. I learned what cellulite was that year, because a boy told me he could see it in my thighs during sports. I wasn’t the biggest girl in the year, but I wasn’t the smallest. As long as I’m not the fattest in the class, that's what I’d tell myself.

What’s devastating is that not much has changed since then.

If anything, it’s gotten worse.

I’m now 25, and I still feel the same every Summer. On the tube, I scan the carriage, looking at all the bodies. The skinny ones, the larger ones, the older ones — the ones that are looked after, the ones that are ignored.

Am I fatter than her? Do my hips look like hers? Are my palms that wide?

I pick at the bites on my legs, buy creams and ointments to fix the ‘chicken skin’ on my arms, and search for the perfect swimming costume that definitely does not exist. I’ve always said that I don’t like swimming, but I’m realising that that isn’t the case. As a child, I’d spend hours in my goggles, diving for those little plastic weights and doing flips until my tummy hurt. Now I don’t really go in the pool. I’ll wear a linen shirt and sit on the side with my Kindle, only dipping my toes in.

And I’m not sure it will get any easier.

In the UK, over 40% of adults are actively trying to lose weight, with over 1.5 million taking weight-loss injections (Source: IQVIA). And from what I can see, this market is mainly driven by the over-40s. Working in retail (did you guys know I used to be a shopgirl?!), the vast majority of conversations I had with customers over the age of 40 were about sizing, weight, or if a dress was ‘flattering’. Sometimes a lady would buy a shirt and gleefully say at the till, ‘This is a size 8! The last time I bought a size 8, Thatcher was in office!’ A grandma, shopping with her teenage granddaughter, put a dress back on the rack because it highlighted her ‘wobbly bits’. I would hear these women, my mother’s age, my grandmother’s age, talking about their bodies in the same way I did at 13; the way I do at 25.

And the whole idea of it, the insecurity and self-disgust, never leaving me, just felt exhausting. I’m never going to be happy in this body, whether I lose 10 pounds or not. There will always be another, unachievable standard that will keep me trapped. Have you heard there’s a new surgery for arm fat? It is fucking relentless.

And I don’t want to sound preachy, and I don’t want to fish for compliments (although a few would be nice). I just think that if I write about it and talk about it, I might just convince myself that it doesn’t fucking matter. One time, the night before home clothes day, I was crying in my room because I didn’t know what to wear. My Dad came in and said,

Nobody is going to be thinking about your outfit. They’re too busy thinking about their own outfits.

I have often returned to this sentiment in many different contexts. I hate my upper arms, but I can guarantee that none of my friends has ever paid them a thought. And they would murder me if I ever got the ‘Barbie Arms’ surgery.

I don’t want to be stuck in this cycle forever. I don’t want to celebrate fitting a size 8 or bemoan wearing a size 14. I don’t want to sit on the side of the pool any more, only dipping a toe. I want to dive in, headfirst, and enjoy the summer for once.

I guess what I’m trying to say, and what I’m trying to convince myself of, is that you don’t need a bikini body, only a bikini brain.

KTF x

My good friend and Substack Sister, Sascha LO, wrote about bodies and bikinis in a brilliant recent post - check it out. Thank you, Sascha, for inspiring this essay.

If you’re struggling with Insta algorithms showing you body propaganda, I highly recommend filtering your following to include some of these accounts:

jesschamilton

kirahollie_

yasmine_amour

ordinaryemm

lovewithlibbyy

Also, whilst the perfect swimwear doesn’t exist, You Swim has gotten pretty close. Check them out. AND GET IN THE POOL!