Swimwear season is almost upon us – and by us we mean everyone.

In the age of body positivity no-one gets left behind.

What matters is not how a person looks but how they feel – or rather how they feel about how they look.

Myriad groups, businesses, influencers and individuals have added their voices to the body positivity movement, which goes back as far back as 1960s.

In 1969 in the US, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance was established with the aim of ending the culture of “fat-shaming” and discrimination against people based upon their size or body weight.

They have not been alone in the effort to get people, especially women and girls, to feel good about their bodies, regardless of size, shape, age, appearance or ability.

The term itself was coined in 1996 when non-profit organisation The Body Positive was set up by Connie Sobczak, who had struggled with an eating disorder in her teens, and psychotherapist Elizabeth Scott.

Connie said that the death of her sister inspired her “to help people live with more appreciation and love for their precious bodies” and ensure that her own daughter and other children “would grow up in a new world – one where people are free to focus on the things in life that really matter”.

Thanks to the turbocharged power of social media in the past decade, that new world is now within reach.

At last count, there were over 4.3 million hashtags of #bodypositive on Instagram and the airbrushed “Barbie-style” models of fashion pages gone-by are increasingly being replaced by something much more representative. Anyone fancy a dip?

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