Woman's naked selfie is candid reminder that 'beauty is about what you see'

One woman is taking to Instagram to questions the very nature of beauty — and posted a cleverly captured naked selfie to prove her point.

“What the hell is beauty anyway?” Imogen, known as The_feeding_of_the_fox on Instagram, begins her post, before questioning why we as a society are so desperate to measure beauty since we can’t even define it.

“Because that lamp on your bedside, that you think is so beautiful, I think it’s ugly. And the colour on my living room wall genuinely offends many of my friends, but I adore it,” she continued. “If I say something is beautiful, that makes it so. If I say my lumps and scars and folds are beautiful, that makes it so.”

Imogen ponders who would want to live in a world where we limit what beauty is.

“Where we try and contain beauty in tiny little boxes? Where beauty is the same thing over and over?” she asks.

“The Beauty is undefinable and uncontrollable, it is an experience, not a thing,” she concludes. “Make your own rules, define your own beauty, dismantle the boxes, break out of the mound and start to realize that beauty is about what you see and no one else.”

Imogen spent years battling with her body image — either eating mindlessly or desperately trying to lose weight. It was only after losing more than 100 pounds, she realized she had an eating disorder. Her blog and Instagram accounts now document her journey away from the diet culture and into the world of body positivity and intuitive eating.

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This will be my last ever #transformationtuesday! Why no more photos I hear you ask!? … They're lies. They're selling you something that isn't real. They're harmful for me, and they're even more harmful for you. There is nothing wrong with how I look in either photo, but my mental health in both is severely impaired. Dieting, counting calories, losing weight, it saved my life – I know that. That's amazing, what I achieved is amazing. No surgery, no pills, no quick fixes, just consistency and hard work. Well done me. Except in my bid to 'be beautiful', to 'look better' and to constantly evoke responses from those around me that I suddenly 'fitted in' to some kind of social normalcy, I managed to turn one eating disorder into another. The very thing that saved my life, that gave me some health back, developed into another life threatening, health ruining condition. Suddenly, the numbers that I'd found so rewarding and encouraging had become controlling and depressing. Whatever flashed up on the scales wasn't low enough and everything I ate came with guilt and self loathing. Gaining weight, my shape changing, needing bigger clothes, that's all really hard to deal with, not being the woman in that 'after' photo feels like such a failure – but all the good things about being bigger are far more important. My body, and all it's faults, aesthetically and health wise, is amazing. I need to start treating it with more respect and that includes not posting photos of my self in before and after photos. I am not before, or after, anything. I'm just me. Right now. I'm not doomed to eternal misery because I'm not at some arbitrary 'goal weight', nor do I have to look a specific way in order to be accepted/beautiful/worthy/important. So from now on, all the photos of me will be right in the moment! #intuitiveeating #selflove #selfworth #allbodiesaregoodbodies #bodyimagemovement #positivevibes #youarebeautiful #celebratemysize #bopo #mindfuleating #honormycurves #nowrongwaytohaveabody #loveyourself #bodylove #effyourbeautystandards #eatingdisorderrecovery #orthorexiarecovery #health #bodypositivity #mentalhealthawareness #bodypositive #excessskin #selflovebootcamp

A post shared by Imogen's Body Lovin' ???? (@the_feeding_of_the_fox) on Jan 31, 2017 at 1:24pm PST

Her posts are generally well-received, but her recent post questioning the idea of beauty hit home with her 11,000+ followers, generating thousands of likes and hundreds of comments in a few days. Bloggers praised Imogen for being everything from “confident and beautiful” to “unbelievably strong.”

“That age old ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ but it’s bloody true. If it’s beautiful to you then yes it’s beautiful! We are so much more than the sum of our parts, our beauty comes from the package not the pieces,” one person wrote.

“Perfect ! to see natural beauty. Great change from all these overly made up young ladies with 13″ of slop plastered all over,” another commented.

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For anyone who hurls insults at the blogger, she’s quick with witty responses: “Babe, this makes no sense. Can we think of better insults please, I like laugh, this is just confusing. Do better next time,” she responded to one nasty insult.

“Seriously, is that it?? My wife comes up with better insults than that. Go away and work on something actually funny. I give this an E. MUST TRY HARDER!!” she said to another.

We like Imogen’s style!

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