Elizabeth Anne Holland, 21, from Hull in the UK has been working as a model since she was 16 and has been constantly told to lose weight, despite being a svelte size eight.
She says this pressure to be unhealthily thin has destroyed her body image and mental health and has hit out at the fashion industry for transforming her from a “normal girl” to a suicidal mess.
“I really want to learn to love myself for who I am, not just for me but for every other girl who feels the same way, not just through modelling either,” she said in a Facebook post that has since gone viral. “These expectations they have for girls to be a bag of bones and impossible, they’re doing it to naive young girls chasing this dream, they don’t care about your how it makes you feel up in your head, as long as you look ill and skinny enough behind the camera.
“They’ve got a huge queue of girls lining up chasing the same dream anyway so what’s it to them if a couple of girls drop dead? It’s literally soul destroying. I never used to have a problem with my confidence and appearance. Now I couldn’t dislike myself more. I see the fat, because of them. I see how gross my face is because of them.
“Those girls you see on social media, with their perfectly toned tummy, round hips, skinny thighs, pearly white teeth, long glossy hair, holding a burger captioned with #carbsfordays, yeah it’s not real. I’ve seem too many stories about how these girls are actually so unhappy with their lives, it’s heartbreaking. We have to stop comparing ourselves to this pretend world, but how can we where we are completely surrounded by it?”
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