It was July 2014, Nashville Tennessee. I was walking into a gas station for a bottle of water when the man behind me stepped up to open the door for me. With that act of kindness, something inside me snapped and I flew into a blind rage. I began screaming at him at the top of my lungs.

“No, you can not open this door for me! You wouldn’t have opened it two years ago, so you damn sure can’t open it now!” I scowled and stormed away, completely enraged.

It was the third time that week that a man had done something polite for me. First a man had bought me a drink at a concert, and then there was the nice man who had helped me scoop up my groceries after I dropped my bag, and now this man with the door.

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I know all this might leave you wondering if I had had a rough week, or a fight with my boyfriend or was in a terrible mood that had prompted me to lose my temper like that. The truth is more complicated.

Two years before this, in July 2012, I weighed 365lb, which roughly translates into 26 stone. I was enormous, and had been my entire life. I grew up an obese kid, was an obese teenager, an obese young adult, and by my mid-40s I had ballooned into a hugely obese adult.

But that summer I started a massive journey to lose 220lb, or almost 16 stone, over the course of four and a half years. As I sit here today, I’m literally a third of the body mass I used to be. I am an average-sized woman who wears a size medium pretty much across the board. And, I am happy to report, I am also a fairly happy, confident person.

But that day I had just begun experimenting with regular-sized clothes, and I was not confident. I was uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable with the attention my new body was receiving, I was uncomfortable about new social circles, and I was uncomfortable with the unexpected boost to my career.

I was uncomfortable but I didn’t know why. Everything seemed to be going so well. I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. And it wasn’t until I saw that man’s hand reach for the handle of that door that I knew why – and it pissed me off.

The idea that the size of my trousers had had anything to do with simple politeness was heartbreaking to me

I had been disregarded, overlooked and ignored because of my size for so long that I didn’t even realise it until people started being nice to me – until, in other words, I was “normal sized”. No one had ever done those things for me before.

He opened that door for me because I wasn’t physically offensive to him, and I knew. And it was in that moment that I realised how terrible we are as a society to people, based solely on their appearance. This realisation broke me. It broke me in a way that I’ve never been broken before. He certainly didn’t deserve my outburst, but in that moment I couldn’t help myself.

The idea that the size of my trousers had had anything to do with simple politeness was heartbreaking to me. Never mind men actually asking me on dates, career advances, better opportunities and much cheaper clothes (big girls get done over by the fashion world).

In every pair of trousers I have ever owned, I have been the exact same person; with the same thoughts, abilities, talents, intellect and heart. I didn’t just magically become smart, funny, talented and pretty when I could buy smaller jeans. I’ve been in here the whole time. But very few took the time to see me.

And when that realisation came, I grieved for the child, teenager and woman I had been and all she had been deprived of. I grieved for what experiencing that would do to my current self. And I grieved for all of the people who may have missed her along the way because they were too blind to see her. In that moment of grief, I lashed out at a perfectly polite stranger.

That moment changed every single thing about me. It has now become my life’s mission to help people realise their true beauty and strength; right now, in the body they occupy, this second. I’m a photographer and video producer, and it completely changed the way I shoot my clients, as well as prompting me to launch a second career, writing and speaking publicly, so that hopefully I can change the way we all perceive beauty.

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I love my ass the size it is now. I love the way I look and feel, and the freedom it gives me. I can breathe. I actually love taking exercise. I love that my feet don’t ache and my back doesn’t crack. My boobs look like two baseballs in sacks but, whatever – they look great in lingerie and I can actually buy it now.

But the thing is, I was amazing before I lost the weight too. That girl had the strength to become this woman. That girl had the courage to leave home at 16 years old in search of a new life. She had the passion to pursue a career in the arts and actually succeed. And she had a big enough heart to not notice that people were mean to her along the way.

People are my business, and I’ve learned a lot about them over the years. I’ve learned that I’ve never met one that wasn’t stunning. No matter what they looked like or what they weighed. I’ve never seen a face or body that I couldn’t find beauty in or a person who didn’t possess compassion, humour and love.

Honestly, people are amazing. You just have to really see them.