"Just you stood there only in your underwear"

My finger hovered over the Publish button. To press or not to press? I went back and deleted the photo. Then added it again. Finally, I published the post and shut my laptop quickly, before I could change my mind.

So if I was so unsure about it, why did I post a picture of myself in my underwear?

There were clearly risks involved in publishing the photograph. I work in an industry where a career can be destroyed quite easily by incautious actions (not for nothing are both my face and my tattoo out of shot in the image). I could have got away with just using the product photos I'd taken, perhaps combining them with the stock photo from Bravissimo's website. But as uneasy as I felt about using the photograph of myself, I felt more uneasy about not using it.

The biggest and most important step in my journey to becoming body positive was seeing bloggers who reflected my own body shape and size. The first fatshion bloggers I happened across, Lilli, Bethany, Kirsty and Claire, were women who experimented with fashion in different ways but never apologised for their size or talked about weight loss. I found - I still do find - that seeing images of women of all sizes is the single most essential element in feeling confident about how I look.

That's why posting outfit photos was an important step to take for me. If I can inspire just one woman to feel a little bit better about herself, then it's worth it. And that's also why I thought it important that I used an honest (albeit slightly blurred-out) image of myself in the underwear. I still remember the visceral thrill of seeing Bethany post a photograph of herself in underwear; how wonderful and rare and special it felt to see a real*, un-photoshopped, flawed body in all its glory. Or the moment I first saw Lena Dunham strip off on Girls and wanted to cheer out loud, or perhaps weep, so impossible did that simple action seem.

I talk a good game about being body positive and confident but actions speak louder than words. And the truth is, although I am pretty body confident, I am far more so in clothes than out of them. I actually think my body looks pretty great when dressed and I find it easy to be positive about it. Undressed... not so much. Suddenly there's no hiding the fat stomach or the flabby, pasty thighs. Sad, really, that even someone who's a pretty far way down the road of body acceptance still has so much internalised fatphobia.

But the truth is, my pasty thighs and less-than-toned tummy are simply a reflection of what some women look like. We just don't see that truth very often. A lack of diverse bodies in both traditional media and online media perpetuates the idea that there's only one way women should look. It's what can make seeing ourselves in the mirror so dispiriting: our real bodies, whether slim, muscled, fat, or a combination of all of the above, can never measure up to the idealised, heavily photoshopped bodies we see beaming from our screens and magazine pages every day.

If I want to be one of the voices demanding to see more diverse bodies, then it wouldn't be honest to censor my own body. I want to hold myself to the very highest standards. I want to, and excuse the cheese, be the change I want to see in the world. And so that's why I posted a photograph of myself in my pants.

* Please note than when I write about 'real' bodies, I am emphatically not supporting that 'real women have curves' bullshit, which is divisive and damaging. As I commented on Suzy's recent (brilliant) piece about the song All About That Bass, any liberation that relies on the oppression of others is not true liberation. Rather I simply mean bodies which have not been subject to heavy photoshopping.