Why You Cancel Plans, Avoid Photos, and Hide in Black Clothes

Written by Vania Phitidis
Peaceful Eating Coach
Last updated on 6 March 2026

There is a river in Scotland I should have swum in.

I can picture it perfectly. Our daughters were seven and ten. We had stopped along a road – no one around for miles – beside a river that was black and clear and cold and utterly beautiful. My husband and our girls stripped off without hesitation and got in. I can still hear the shrieking, the laughter, the pure animal joy of cold water on skin in the middle of nowhere.

I stood on the bank and took the photos.

I told myself it was too cold. I had reasons. But the truth is I was too ashamed of my body to take my clothes off – even there, even with just my family, even with no one else for miles. A few months earlier I had lost a lot of weight on a very strict diet – and I was now on the other side of that, steadily regaining it. I knew people could see it. And somewhere underneath the shame was something even heavier: a feeling that I didn’t deserve that joy. Not in the body I was in. Not yet.

On that same holiday, there was a hot tub at the place we were staying. My husband and daughters went. I stayed in the caravan and told them to go and enjoy themselves.

I have thought about that river many times since.

The life we live around our bodies

Body shame is rarely dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It works quietly, through a thousand small decisions that each feel entirely reasonable in the moment.

The dark, shapeless clothes chosen not because you love them but because they hide you. The photos deleted or declined. The plans cancelled with a perfectly plausible excuse – a headache, a prior commitment, just not feeling up to it. The spontaneous invitation turned down because you haven’t had time to prepare yourself, to wear the right thing, to feel acceptable enough to be seen.

One client described spending years buying clothes exclusively in black and navy – not out of any aesthetic preference, but because colour felt too visible. Too much. As though a bright top might draw attention to the body she was trying to make disappear.

Another told me she hadn’t been in a swimming costume in over a decade. Not on holiday, not at the leisure centre with her children, not anywhere. She had simply organised her life around never being in that situation.

This is the life half-lived that body shame creates, one small no at a time, until the nos have quietly become the shape of your life.

Waiting for the body that deserves to show up

Underneath so much of this is a story we tell ourselves, usually without realising it: that the life we actually want is available to us on the other side of a smaller body. That we can have the swimsuit, the spontaneous weekend away, the photos with our children, the intimacy we crave – once we’ve earned it. Once we look the way we’re supposed to look.

I lived this for years. My pattern was to lose a significant amount of weight going into summer, feel briefly acceptable, and then spend the following months gaining it back – I had 4 sizes of clothing in my wardrobe. The shame of that was enormous. Not just private shame, but the specific agony of knowing that people who knew me could see it. That my family and friends were watching this very visible yo-yo and drawing their own conclusions.

So I hid. I made excuses. I waited. I told myself that when I got back to where I’d been, I’d rejoin my own life.

The cruel irony is that the waiting never ends – because even when the weight came off, the shame didn’t. Even at my smallest, I didn’t feel like I’d arrived anywhere. The goal post simply moved.

What it does to intimacy

Body shame doesn’t stay at the door when you enter the bedroom. For many women, it follows them into the most vulnerable spaces of their lives.

For a long time, there were parts of my body my husband wasn’t allowed to touch. Not because he had ever said anything unkind – he hadn’t, not once. He only ever told me he found me beautiful, regardless of where I was in my cycle of weight gain or loss. But it didn’t matter. The shame was mine, not his. And it sat between us in ways that were nothing to do with him.

I’ve heard versions of this from so many women. Getting dressed and undressed in the bathroom. Keeping the lights off. Angling away. Being physically present but mentally somewhere else entirely – monitoring, bracing, hoping not to be looked at too closely.

This is one of the least talked-about costs of body shame. Not just the cancelled plans and the hidden photos, but the distance it creates in the relationships and moments that matter most. I know this more than I can say. Looking back, I’d estimate that half of my marriage was coloured by my body shame – not in every way, but in more ways than one. We did have many good years together after my recovery. But I can’t get the earlier ones back. And that is a grief I carry.

The photos you’re not in

Here is something I hear again and again, and it breaks my heart every time: women who have spent years avoiding cameras, only to realise later that they are almost entirely absent from the visual record of their own families’ lives.

Their children’s childhoods, documented. Their own presence in them – barely there. Because they were always the one holding the camera. Always the one who stepped out of the frame. Always the one who deleted the ones that got through.

Your children will not remember what size you were. They will remember whether you were there.

I think about the river in Scotland. My daughters are older now. I can’t go back and swim in that river with them when they were seven and ten. That moment is gone. What I have are the photos – of them, in the water, without me.

I am not sharing this to create guilt. I know exactly what it feels like to make those choices, and I know they come from pain, not selfishness. But I want to name what it costs. Because I think we rarely let ourselves look at it directly.

You are allowed to be here now

The body shame logic says: wait. Get smaller. Then live.

But your life is happening now. The river is now. The spontaneous invitation is now. The photo with your child, the holiday, the hot tub, the moment of joy – now.

The work I do with women isn’t about learning to love every inch of themselves immediately, or pretending the shame isn’t real. It’s about something more modest and more radical than that: starting to make different choices. Not waiting for the body to change before showing up. Wearing the colour. Getting in the water. Being in the photo.

Not because the shame has gone – it may still be there, at least for a while. But because your life, and the people in it, are worth showing up for anyway.

What it looks like on the other side

I want to tell you what’s different now. Not because I arrived at some perfect relationship with my body overnight – I didn’t – but because I think it matters to know that this can change.

I am in the photos now. I’ve learned that I can look completely different in two photos taken in the same minute, without anything about me having changed. The lighting shifted. The angle was different. Once I really understood that, photos became a record of a moment. That’s it.

I no longer overthink what I’m wearing. I put on clothes I like and I go. I no longer hold back from experiences because of how I might look in them. I swim. I show up. I say yes to the spontaneous things.

Those past moments – the river in Scotland, the hot tub, the evenings I made excuses and stayed home – those are gone. I can’t get them back. But I’m still here, now, with millions more moments ahead of me. And though other things might stop me fully embracing life from time to time – grief, exhaustion, family dynamics (!!!!) – it is never, ever my appearance.

That is what peace looks like. Not a perfect body. Not the absence of a bad photo day. Just your life, fully lived, in the body you already have.

How I actually got here – putting down shame that was never mine

I want to be honest about how this shift happened, because it wasn’t simply a matter of deciding to feel better. It took real inner work. And at the centre of that work was a realisation that changed everything:

I had done nothing wrong. My body had never been wrong. The shame I was carrying didn’t belong to me.

What was wrong – what has always been wrong – are the structures in society that tell women and girls when they are acceptable and when they are not. And those goalposts never stop moving. Too big, too small, too old, too much, not enough. The system is designed to keep us striving, spending, shrinking. It profits from our shame.

Once I really understood that – not just intellectually, but in my bones – I made a decision. I refused to carry that shame any more. It wasn’t mine. I wasn’t going to keep paying the price for a culture that had decided my body was a problem to be solved.

I genuinely don’t carry it now. That’s not a performance of positivity. It’s the result of years of doing the work.

Taking the risks – and why internal safety has to come first

But I also want to be honest that letting go of shame required taking risks. Real ones – or at least they felt real.

It can feel risky to wear clothes that show your shape. To go to the gym in a bigger body. To take up space in a swimming costume, at a party, in a photo, in a room. To be visible when the world has spent years telling you that you should make yourself smaller.

There is something almost absurd about having to say that out loud – that simply existing in your body, innocently living your life, can feel risky when you step outside – purely because of how you look. And yet for so many women, that is exactly how it feels. The fear of being seen, judged, commented on, dismissed – it’s not irrational. We live in a world that genuinely does those things.

But here is what I learned: you cannot wait for the world to become safe before you start living in it. What you can do – what the work makes possible – is create internal safety first. A relationship with yourself that is steady enough, compassionate enough, grounded enough, that the outside noise loses some of its power.

The risks don’t disappear. But they stop being the thing that runs the show.

I also want to name something important here: the risks are not equal for everyone. For someone in a body that sits closer to what society deems acceptable, going swimming or wearing a fitted top might draw no reaction at all. For someone in a larger body – particularly at the higher end of the weight spectrum – the fear of being stared at, commented on, or openly mocked is not anxiety distorting reality. It is a reasonable and entirely commensurate response to a world that genuinely does those things. That is real, and I don’t want to gloss over it. The work of building internal safety matters for everyone – but it matters even more when the external world is offering less of it. You deserve support that understands that distinction.

And the more of us who are putting one finger up to the patriarchy – the safer it becomes out there for everyone else.

I work 1:1 with women who are ready to stop waiting. You can book a free discovery call here.