BoPo Warrior Hits Back At Body-Shamers By Taking Instagram By Storm With Lingerie Selfies
BoPo Warrior Fran Hayden is taking Instagram by storm with her lingerie selfies [Photo: Instagram/franhayden]
Body-positive activists don’t come much more badass than Fran Hayden. The 24-year-old from Essex is on a mission to ‘reclaim the word fat’ and prove that bodies of all shapes and sizes are beautiful. How? By refusing to hide her size 18-20 body and instead celebrate her curves in all their glory by sharing lingerie and swimwear selfies to her 33,000 followers on Instagram. Go girl!
Fran credits the social media site with helping spark her body positivity. Having experienced bullying about her weight from a young age, and taking every nasty comment to heart, her confidence about the way she looked was at an all time low. But after following body-positive accounts on Instagram and chatting to other ‘BoPo’ advocates she decided to try and boost her body confidence by posting her first revealing photo.
“Because I’d seen others do it with such pride and love, I wanted to see if I could do the same,” she told Mail Online.
“I remember when I first uploaded a full-length photo and, shock horror, you could see my belly! I was nervous and scared, but most of all I felt empowered.”
The BoPo movement just found itself a new leader! [Photo: Instagram/franhayden]
And though she did receive a comments from body-shamers, for every negative comment, there were five positive and encouraging ones.
“Since then, my confidence has snowballed - not to the point of vanity, but to a point of self-acceptance,” she explains.
Encouraged by the response Fran went on to set up a blog in which she regularly writes about her experiences of bullying and struggling with body image. And the young activist describes her determination to challenge and ultimately change beauty ideals.
“I now find that young people across the globe look to me for support and I am so incredibly humbled by this,” she explains. “I don’t want another generation to have to go through the same collapse of self-confidence that I went through.”
This is what inspiration looks like! [Photo: Instagram/franhayden]
And now the body positive activist regularly posts pictures of herself in either lingerie or a bikini with an empowering message to her fans. Just last week she posted a picture of herself along with a caption hitting back at recent body shamers.
“Over the last few weeks I’ve encountered a bit of negativity. So whilst looking sassy as hell, I’ll say it once more for the people who didn’t hear it at the back!,” she wrote.
“Sometimes you need to send out a big EFF YOU to the bullies and trolls who try to tear you down. To the ones who call me fat: well done, you have eyes and can see that I am indeed fat - but here’s the thing, I’m okay with that. To the ones who bombard me with their faux health concerns: I eat well, I exercise and I have a positive peace of mind. But I do not do these things to lose weight, I do them for me because they make me happy.”
Fran refuses to let her body shape define her [Photo: Instagram/franhayden]
She went on to call the haters out on criticising her choice of attire.
“To the ones who tell me what I should be wearing: I can wear whatever the hell I want and I’ll be damned if you tell me that I can’t rock it. To the ones who tell me I’m not representative of how a female should look: I have fat, yes, but that doesn’t stop me from qualifying as a woman. And to the ones who will no doubt comment on this to try and barrage me with negativity and reasons why I’m ‘wrong’ - listen up, you can take your ignorance and negativity, your judgement and hateful words and shove them up your backside. I am a strong, fat, beautiful woman and screw you if that’s not good enough for you.”
Last year Fran was responsible for the hugely inspirational ‘I am Here’ project, in which she crowd-sourced Instagram asking women to post selfies of themselves with different words they would use to describe themselves written on their bodies. The idea was to encourage women not to be defined by anyone but themselves, by screaming in defiance of all the things strangers love to call women they don’t know.
Fran set up the ‘I am here’ project to encourage women not to feel defined by what others think [Photo: Instagram/franhayden]
“I think that asking women to define how THEY want to be seen made a lot of ladies stop and question themselves,” she told RunwayRiot at the time. “We’re so used to being defined by others’ standards that we rarely get to define ourselves. A large number of women discovered that they thought themselves strong, resilient and powerful when defined in their own eyes.”
But though she is revelling in her new found body confidence, Fran is the first to admit that she has bad-body days like everyone else.
“I’m not a superwoman and it would be foolish of me to say that I’m always body positive. Even the strongest and boldest of BoPo warriors have their wobbly days.”
What do you think of Fran’s body-positive message? Let us know @YahooStyleUK
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