Do you remember Alice?

Of course you do, how could you forget.

The real Alice

What I didn’t tell you about Alice in my previous blog post is the reaction I got from her after I revealed the photos. Also, if you haven’t seen them yet, please click on the link above to see them. She’s gorgeous and the photos turned out gorgeous. However, at the time, Alice didn’t see it quite like that. In fact, as I turned to look at her, she had tears in her eyes..

Alarmed, I asked her what’s wrong.

Then she told me something so meaningful and personal to her..

She said, for the better part of her life, she’d struggled with the size of her body. And all she could see when she looked at the photos were her flaws. But the worst of it was, she’d never told anyone about it because she was afraid they wouldn’t understand.

And when I say anyone, I mean any. one. No body knew. Not her mom, not her sister, not even her fiancé.

That just didn’t seem right so I encouraged her to talk to them about it because I was sure that they would be more understanding than she would think. I also encouraged her to show them the photos as their reactions just might surprise her.

Body image and a big step forward

A couple of days later I saw this on Facebook (originally written in Finnish):

“A lucky chance drove us together. Erika was looking for models for her photographs and I decided to spontaneously sign up for it. Because I wanted to go outside of my comfort zone and being photographed would be that at its best. I’ve more or less hated my body for the past fifteen years. Always some part of my body has been too fat or loose. And because of the current beauty ideals, fat equals ugly, I haven’t thought of myself as particularly attractive. I’ve been ashamed of myself and thought that people wouldn’t see anything else in me except my size.

I was still secretly hoping that Erika would manage to make beautiful photographs of me because on the day of the photo shoot we had a super fun time and I felt surprisingly confident. However, later on as I saw the photographs, I yet again felt a knot in my stomach – there they were again, my strong thighs and a million other flaws. I had yet again failed and damn it felt bad. Erika noticed my disappointment and we spoke about the photographs for a long time. She encouraged me to show the photographs to those close to me and watch their reactions: I might even be surprised. Yesterday some of you found these photographs from the Studio Metsä page. I was astounded by the positive comments, thank you for those. After having read them, I looked at the photographs again and hey, they weren’t so bad anymore. Actually they were quite amazing!

This morning I decided to stop talking bad about myself. The first step was to show these photographs to you and at the same time let go of the shame that’s been living inside of me for years. It won’t be easy, but this is the start.

This is me, from head to toe.

{here was the link to my blog post}

P.S. Go ahead and ‘like’ the Studio Metsä page and admire Erika’s ravishing photos! Thank you Erika, this wouldn’t have been possible without you.”

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Everything’s not always as it seems on the outside

Seriously.

She got nearly 70 comments. All from people in pure disbelief. Because they all viewed her completely differently.

But clearly this girl is a rock star.

How many people are able to fully realize something they need to do and then go ahead and do it right away?! Not many.

This was a huge step to take and only a couple of days after the blog post was released. Alice is such a brave soul and I admire her so much for taking this step into changing her view on herself, and through that, the rest of her life.

It is the start of a whole new life for her. And I really couldn’t be more proud.

Thank you so much, Alice, for trusting me and allowing me to see the real you. She’s absolutely breathtaking.

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If Alice’s story touched you, please share it so that more girls will hear this story. We need to talk about these topics more in order to help others and change the commonly accepted unattainable beauty ideals.

Until next time lovelies,
xoxo Erika