Growing up in Brisbane, Bryony Walters asked her mum if she could do ballet. “She just straight up said, ‘You’re too fat for a leotard’,” she recalls. “I know that’s a reflection of her relationship with her own body, but that kind of thing had me pretty fucked up for a pretty long time around body and food.”
It also affected her relationship with exercise, and movement in general. “It always seemed like a punishment that I was inflicting upon myself,” Walters, now in her late 30s, tells the Guardian. “It wasn’t a thing you were engaging with to have fun or to feel good.”
