I’ve always had this complicated relationship with the mirror. Some days, I gaze at my reflection and think, “Yeah, not bad!” Other days—which, let’s be honest, happen more frequently—I stand there cataloging every perceived flaw like I’m taking inventory at a shop of insecurities.
For as long as I can remember, my stomach has been the main character in this little drama. Too round, too soft, too… present. It’s been the target of my harshest criticism since secondary school when a boy—let’s call him Daniel because that was actually his name and he was truly a little shit—poked me in the belly during PE and made a “boing” sound. I was 14. Nearly two decades later, and somehow Daniel’s finger is still metaphorically poking me every time I try on clothes.
I’ve been on the body positivity journey, really I have. I’ve read the books, followed the Instagram accounts, nodded along to podcasts where women much braver than me declare that they’ve made peace with their bodies. I’ve tried affirmations in the mirror (felt like a right plonker talking to myself about how “worthy” my thighs are). I’ve attempted to “thank” my body for all it does rather than criticize how it looks (lasted approximately three days before I was back to scowling at my reflection).
But something happened last month that forced me to confront this whole mess. My cousin announced she was getting married, and the dress code was “cocktail attire.” Those two words sent me into an immediate panic spiral. Cocktail attire meant form-fitting. It meant no hiding under my collection of strategically oversized jumpers. It meant—and this was the true horror—shopping.
“It’s just a dress,” my best friend Lisa said when I called her hyperventilating. “You’ll find something nice, wear it for six hours, and then go back to your comfy clothes. What’s the big deal?”
The big deal, which Lisa with her effortlessly slim figure couldn’t possibly understand, was that finding a dress that didn’t make me feel like a sentient potato sack was about as likely as me winning the lottery without buying a ticket.
Nevertheless, I spent a Saturday traipsing through shops, a special kind of self-inflicted torture that involved fluorescent lighting, unflattering mirrors, and the soul-crushing experience of trying to squeeze into dresses clearly designed for people whose internal organs take up less space than mine.
After the fifth shop and approximately the fifteenth dress that either wouldn’t zip up or did zip up but made me look like I was smuggling a beach ball under the fabric, I sat down on a bench in the shopping center and did something I hadn’t done since receiving a parking ticket on my birthday three years ago—I cried in public.
Not pretty crying either. The proper ugly sobbing that makes strangers deliberately avoid eye contact while simultaneously trying to determine if you’re a potential threat to society.
It was at this precise moment of public humiliation that I remembered something a colleague had mentioned casually at work during a conversation about swimwear shopping (another circle of hell): shapewear.
Now, I’d always had mixed feelings about shapewear. On the one hand, it seemed like admitting defeat in the body acceptance battle—like saying, “Fine, I give up trying to love my actual body, just give me the modern-day corset already.” On the other hand… well, at that particular moment of desperation, there wasn’t really another hand. Just the desperate hope that perhaps lycra and nylon could accomplish what years of attempting self-love had not.
I wiped my tears, regained a modicum of dignity, and headed to the department store that I knew had an entire section dedicated to what they euphemistically called “solution wear.” As if my body was a problem that needed solving. (Which, in my darker moments, is exactly how I felt about it.)
The shapewear section was like entering a strange land where everything was beige or black and promised impossible things. “Tummy Tamer!” “Miracle Slimmer!” “Instant Transformation!” The packaging featured women pinching large amounts of invisible excess skin, their “before” outlines suggesting they’d somehow lost three stone by putting on what looked like industrial-strength knickers.
I approached tentatively, feeling like I was betraying some feminist principle just by being there. A saleswoman materialized beside me with the stealth of a ninja.
“First time?” she asked, with the knowing smile of someone who’d seen many women like me—women caught in the crossfire between wanting to love themselves as they are and desperately wanting to look different.
I nodded, embarrassed but also too tired to pretend.
“Don’t worry, love, you’re in good company,” she said, gesturing vaguely around the store where other women were furtively examining various contraptions designed to squeeze, smooth, and reshape. “What’s the occasion?”
“Wedding,” I muttered. “Need a dress that doesn’t make me look like I’m six months gone.”
She didn’t bat an eyelid, just nodded and started pulling various items from the racks with the efficiency of someone who’d done this a thousand times before.
I ended up in a changing room with what seemed like half the stock—bodysuits, high-waisted briefs, slip dresses with built-in compression, and one item that looked alarmingly like something you’d use to restrain a particularly dangerous criminal.
The next thirty minutes were a blur of struggling, sweating, and occasionally getting stuck in positions that would challenge a yoga instructor. At one point, I was trapped with one arm through a leg hole, breathing heavily and wondering if I’d have to call for help.
But then—oh then—I tried on a high-waisted thing that extended from just under my bra to mid-thigh. Getting into it was like trying to stuff a duvet into a pillowcase, but once I’d managed it and stood upright, adjusting everything into place… I looked in the mirror and barely recognized myself.
Not because I suddenly had the figure of a supermodel—I didn’t. I still had curves and bumps and all the things that make a human body interesting. But everything just looked… smoother. More contained. Like an edited version of myself.
I bought three different pieces, spending more money than I’d care to admit on what essentially amounted to very tight underwear. But walking out of that store, I felt a strange mix of emotions: relief, excitement, and also a niggling sense of shame. Like I’d cheated somehow on the exam of self-acceptance.
The next week, armed with my new “secret weapons,” I went dress shopping again. And it was… different. Dresses that had previously clung to every lump and bump now skimmed over my compressed silhouette. I could focus on the color, the neckline, the length, rather than just desperately hunting for anything that wouldn’t emphasize my stomach.
I found a dress—a proper, grown-up, actually quite lovely dress that made me feel like someone who belonged at a cocktail event rather than someone who’d wandered in from a pajama party. When I tried it on in the shop, with my industrial-strength knickers holding everything in place, I actually gasped. Not because I looked “thin” (I didn’t), but because I looked like… me. Just a slightly more polished version of me.
I bought the dress and went home feeling triumphant. But as the initial rush faded, I found myself sitting on my bed, staring at the shapewear and the new dress laid out side by side, and feeling deeply conflicted.
Had I actually made any progress? Or had I just found a more sophisticated way to hide from myself?
The wedding was still two weeks away, and during that time, I wore my new shapewear around the house, testing how it felt to live in it for more than the few minutes I’d tried it on in the store. The answer was: complicated.
On the one hand, I liked how I looked in my clothes. Liked catching glimpses of myself and not immediately focusing on my stomach. Liked the way my clothes fit, the way fabric draped more smoothly.
On the other hand, the physical sensation was, at times, like being slowly compressed by a very determined python. By the end of the day, the indent where the waistband had been cutting into me looked like I’d been sliced in half by an overzealous magician. And going to the loo was an Olympic event requiring planning, strategy, and core strength I didn’t know I possessed.
But the most complicated part wasn’t the physical discomfort—it was the mental gymnastics. Because while wearing the shapewear, I felt more confident. And that confidence made me more likely to put myself forward, to join conversations, to dance, to laugh without that reflexive arm-across-the-stomach defense mechanism I’d perfected over the years.
Was that a bad thing? If an elastic garment gave me the confidence to live more fully, wasn’t that actually a form of progress? Or was I just reinforcing the idea that my natural body wasn’t good enough to be seen?
The night before the wedding, I found myself standing in front of the mirror in just my underwear, no shapewear, no carefully chosen outfits to distract from what I’d always considered my flaws. I looked at myself—really looked—at the softness around my middle, the fullness of my thighs, the roundness of my arms.
And for perhaps the first time, I didn’t immediately start cataloging all the things I wanted to change. Instead, I just looked. This body had carried me through 32 years of life. It had danced and swum and hiked and hugged and made love and sometimes eaten too much cake and sometimes run too many miles and always, always kept going.
The next day, I put on the shapewear, then the dress, did my makeup and hair, and went to the wedding. I felt good—really good. I danced without thinking about my stomach. I let people take photos of me without angling myself to minimize certain parts. I ate cake without mentally calculating how many sit-ups it would take to burn it off.
And here’s the strange thing—the contradictory, messy truth of it all: the shapewear helped me do that. This thing that I’d bought specifically because I wasn’t at peace with my body somehow helped me make a kind of peace with it.
Not because it changed my body, but because it changed the way I felt in it. It gave me a break from the constant self-consciousness that had become so normal I hardly recognized it as something separate from myself.
Is it a perfect solution? God, no. It’s a band-aid on a deeper wound that needs proper healing. Real body acceptance doesn’t come packaged in beige lycra with “Tummy Control” written on the label.
But I’m starting to think that maybe the journey isn’t as straightforward as I’d thought. Maybe making peace with my body isn’t a linear path from hatred to acceptance, but a winding road with detours and shortcuts and the occasional bizarre rest stop where you find yourself sweating in a department store changing room, trying to untwist what is essentially an adult-sized baby grow.
For now, I’ve made an uneasy truce with my shapewear. I don’t wear it every day—most days, actually, I go without. But knowing it’s there, an option for when I need that extra boost of confidence, has somehow made me more accepting of my body even when I’m not wearing it.
It’s a contradiction, I know. Making peace with my body by buying something specifically designed to change its appearance. But maybe that’s okay. Maybe all of us are just doing the best we can with the bodies we have and the world we live in, finding our own complicated paths toward self-acceptance.
And if my path happens to involve extremely tight underwear… well, at least it’s making me stronger. Have you ever tried to use the loo while wearing a bodysuit? Trust me, it builds character.
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