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Our mission: to love ourselves, every last inch! To support others, help build positive self esteem! This is The Body Peace Revolution!

This is a place of encouragement, a place to talk about body image, a place for feeling beautiful. No matter what you look like, what color, what gender, what size or however many "flaws", healthy, not healthy, working on it, we are all human, we all deserve to be happy, we all deserve to love ourselves. With this blog you will see all kinds of REAL bodies, REAL people, REAL stories.

-PLEASE READ FAQ before messaging

-BE AWARE some posts may be triggering depending on submissions, check for trigger warnings and tags. Also any harassment will be met with blocking and a report to Tumblr Support

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I’m Rina, I’m 19, I’m 5’4 and I weigh 190 pounds. I wish I had the courage to post a picture with my face, but I’m still learning to accept myself, so for now, this will have to suffice.

All my life I’ve struggled with being emotionally bullied. You see, I’m very shy. I’d even go as far as to say that I’ve got a serious case of social anxiety. Being a shy girl in school makes you an easy target of bullying, for me at least. In middle school, I pretty much had no friends. I was a loner, I was awkward, and I didn’t talk that much. People would label me, “quiet girl”, “the mute”, people would say that I was an inanimate object and a waste of space. I also had frizzy hair, crooked teeth, glasses, and no curves - so I guess you could say that I wasn’t “pretty” to all of my fellow classmates. Each day I’d get an insult thrown my way, and each day I’d stay silent, laugh it off, and bottle up all my emotions. Quite often I’d have suicidal thoughts, wondering why I was even put on this Earth, just wondering, if I was gone, would anyone notice? If I killed myself, would everyone that had made fun of me feel guilty?

But then I got to high school. I joined Art Club and was lucky enough to make some great friends, so they helped me break out of my shell quite a bit. I was still shy, but I wasn’t harassed for it anymore. I learned how to use a hair straightener, I got braces, I started wearing contacts, and overnight I seemed to have developed a D-cup. All of a sudden, instead of being constantly made fun of, I was constantly being told compliments. I’d get called ‘beautiful’, ‘gorgeous’, etc, and no one ever insulted me to my face. I won’t lie, being called such nice words made me feel good, heck, it made me feel great! Boys were actually interested in me, people actually looked at me and smiled, people wanted to be friends with me, for the first time in my life, I felt accepted.

But then one day I thought to myself, “Why?” Why are people all of a sudden interested in me? Essentially, I was the exact same girl from middle school. I was still into the same music, books, and weird things. The only difference was that now I had straighter hair, teeth, and bigger breasts. Then it struck me, it was my appearance. The only reason people were so accepting of me, was because they liked the way that I looked. Coming to that realization, I felt terrible. Why should it matter if I have perfect looking hair, why does it matter that I have big boobs? Why does it matter if I no longer have crooked teeth sticking out whenever I smiled? Why does my outward appearance have such an effect as to how people view me?!

As high school went on, I struggled with self-confidence. It didn’t matter anymore if someone called me “pretty”, when someone complimented my appearance, I’d have an instant flashback to middle school of someone calling me “ugly”. For me, it didn’t matter how I looked on the outside, I still had deep emotional scars on the inside of being insulted all the time. When you get called “ugly” so much, there’s a part of you that tends to believe it.

My senior year I started hanging out with the stoners of the school. Despite the fact that they did all sorts of drugs, they were the most open-minded, accepting people that I’d ever met, so I stuck with them. Eventually I started to smoke pot…a lot. Practically everyday. And with smoking pot comes the munchies, so I’d eat anything that I could get my hands on. I was also very inactive, in that I hated and was bad at all sports, so eating a lot plus inactivity equals weight gain. Before I knew it, I had deep red stretch marks all over my sides. My thighs were flabby, my arms jiggled, my boobs got even bigger, and my face was wider. I outgrew my jeans, my bras, and couldn’t fit into some of my favorite shirts. I had started out high school weighing 130 pounds, and now I was almost 200 pounds.

The entire reason that I began and continued to smoke pot was because it made me forget. It made me forget about my days of being bullied and it made me forget about my insecurities and inner demons. I even went to my high school graduation stoned, just so I could ignore the feeling of feeling like I was being judged by the way I look while I walked across the stage to get my diploma.

Also, I’m still a virgin. All my insecurities often made me push guys away, thinking that they were too good for me, that I was too shy and boring for them, and that if they ever saw me with no clothes on, they would be repulsed by my flabby tummy and all the stretch marks I had. Now though? Such thoughts don’t plague me. If a guy truly loves me, he’ll love all of me. Every inch and every single pound of me. He’ll love me for my mind, my heart. Just discovering that I believe in that kind of love and that I deserve to be loved like that is a huge deal for me.

Now, graduated from high school, I’m almost 20, and I still have stretch marks on my sides. I also have some on my stomach, between my thighs, and a few on my legs. I have cellulite, I can almost never find bras in my size, but for the first time in my life - I’m happy. These stretch marks? They’re battle scars. They’re a reminder of a time when I was so down, so low, that I couldn’t even be sober enough to face myself. All the bullying led to me smoking pot, which led to my weight gain, which led to the stretch marks. So, these marks remind me of all the nasty things that were once said about me, and the fact that I had the strength to get through it. It breaks my heart when I read stories about someone my age (or younger than me) committing suicide because of bullies. I cry, thinking to myself, “That could have been me.” Then I look at my stretch marks, knowing that even though I had my fair share of bullies and low points, I’m still here, fighting.

So everyone, be proud of yourself. We are all still here fighting, living, facing the world. Embrace yourselves! Be brave, be bold, dance around in your room in your underwear to awful pop music and love yourself. YOU ARE FABULOUS, YOU ARE LOVED, AND WE ARE ALL BEAUTIFUL NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY.

BE BRAVE! JOIN THE REVOLUTION!