Megan Jayne Crabbe's story is a powerful testament to the possibility of recovery and self-acceptance. The 31-year-old writer and activist, now a prominent figure in the body-positive community, has travelled a long road from a life-threatening eating disorder diagnosed in her early teens to a place of strength and self-love.
A Childhood Shaped by Diet Culture
Megan's struggles began before she had even turned ten years old, as she first became aware of diets. The onset of puberty intensified these anxieties, leading her to fixate on magazine articles promising bodily transformation. She began eating very little as a misguided way to cope with the pressures of school and growing up.
By the age of 14, she received formal diagnoses of anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphia. "I was convinced I was fat and disgusting and needed to lose more weight," she recalls. For years, she managed to hide the severity of her condition, but eventually, her body could no longer conceal the truth. It began to shut down, manifesting severe fatigue, critically low blood pressure, hearing loss, and dizziness. "There's hair that grows all over your body, because it's trying to keep itself warm," she explains of her body's desperate survival response.
Her health crisis led to several months spent between mental health facilities and hospital. At her most critical point, after doctors warned her parents her body could fail at any moment, she was hospitalised and fed through a tube. "In that time where your eating disorder is saying to you, 'You have to stay in control', having that taken away is torturous," Megan says.
The Turning Points Towards Healing
The first significant shift in her mindset came when she witnessed her typically stoic father break down in tears. "Seeing the pain my eating disorder had caused him was a massive jolt for me," she admits. She approached recovery with the same intense, "all or nothing" determination that had once fuelled her illness. Practical steps included covering all mirrors at home to avoid seeing her body change and initially eating meals alone.
By 17, she was medically declared recovered, but this was misleading. "Not the case," she clarifies. "I was sent back into the world in this newly soft, larger body, and I didn't know what to do with that. I fell straight back into the diet culture trap."
The true, lasting turning point arrived when she was 21. After a summer of crash dieting, she finally reached her elusive "goal weight" only to find she still hated her appearance. "Something started to click in my brain of, 'Wait, this isn't working,'" she remembers. It was at this moment she discovered the online body-positive community, where people of all shapes and sizes were rejecting diet culture, embracing their bodies, and living life on their own terms.
Becoming a Voice for Change
A decade later, Megan is now one of the movement's leading voices. She has appeared grinning in a swimming costume in Little Mix's Strip music video, celebrates her body's softness with her large Instagram following, and has authored books on self-empowerment. Her journey required actively reshaping her environment: setting boundaries with friends obsessed with weight loss, unfollowing triggering influencers, and educating herself with books like The Beauty Myth and Health at Every Size.
"I started realising the problem was not me," she states powerfully. "The problem was how we are taught to see ourselves." Central to her healing has been reconnecting with her body's natural signals—relearning hunger and fullness cues and moving for joy rather than punishment. "My eating disorder years were trying to detach from my body and feel nothing. And now the goal is to be with my body and listen to her."
She now views her body with pride and historical context. "If I look back at my ancestors, this is the body they had. I'm strong. I'm fit. I can do everything I want to, and I can also enjoy food as a nice part of my life that I don't obsess over." Megan Jayne Crabbe's latest book, We Don't Make Ourselves Smaller Here, is out now.
