Growing up, how my body looked just wasn’t something I worried about in any way. As a family, we ate healthy food, but I never thought about what I was eating. I’d eat what I wanted. I think mums always get concerned food will be an issue for their daughters, especially when growing up. Mine was always asking, ‘What are you eating today?’ to check I was getting all the nutrition I needed as such an active kid. But, for me, it really was never an issue.
Only when I got a little bit older did I become more aware of that type of stuff. It’s sad that when you hit 14 or 15, a lot of girls start to think, Oh, maybe I shouldn’t have all that chocolate, maybe I shouldn’t have all those sweets. That was when I started to become more aware of my body and to think of how it maybe ‘should’ be looking. That’s also when I was heavily into Instagram and really finding my feet on there. And obviously, I’d be looking at these huge influencers, like Kylie Jenner, and all these girls with these incredible bodies. Still – and maybe it’s because I was so active – my body image wasn’t really a problem for me.
That did change, sadly. When I came out of Love Island, I really lost my love for fitness over the following year, and I gained a bit of weight. As a result, in the last few years, my face isn’t the only way my looks have been criticised. My body has come under fire, too, and I have definitely battled with my body image.
For a long time, as life got busy, I didn’t have time to think about anything other than just work and setting myself up. So, for a while, I just put healthy eating and exercise to the back of my mind, and I really did lose my way around that for the first year after the show. The gym, exercising and being active, and doing things other than just working and relaxing, or going on date nights with Tommy and stuff, became such a non-priority to me. I had PAs every single night for a few months, and photo shoots around the world, which meant jet lag (so I wasn’t full of energy for exercise). When you’re travelling, it’s also a case of grabbing what food you can, when you can. I was literally having WHSmith meal deals from a service station at three in the morning because that’s just what fitted in with my schedule.
I really didn’t realise that my body actually wasn’t going to deal with that very well. Looking back, I was sort of in denial, thinking, Oh, I’ll be fine if I have spag bol every single meal for a whole week. I was getting spag bol for my dinner and putting chips in it, and just having whatever I could! But the reality is, I’m not that person. I have to keep on top of exercise and my diet to stay in a shape that I’m happy with and I feel confident in. I think I gained about two stone during that period, from when I went on Love Island to after the first year out. So, I had definitely prioritised different things.
For a while I did try to find a way of balancing socialising and going out for work events and dinners with keeping on top of my health. I’d find myself in these weird periods of crash dieting, going to these mad, really hard gym classes I just couldn’t do, and just trying everything I could to feel more confident within myself. I wanted to feel like the old me but live this new lifestyle … and I couldn’t really find that balance.
I come from such a sporty background as well, which is why I think everyone was quite worried about me. My parents have raised me to be very aware of how to look after your body – you’re only given one body and you have to take care of it. And for that first year, I definitely didn’t. My family, especially my sister, told me, ‘You really need to get back into it.’ Just because my family is so, so sporty, and they knew that fitness had been such a huge part of my life.
But they were talking to me about it because they were concerned about my well-being. Meanwhile, other people were about to notice too – and they didn’t really care how I felt at all.
Towards the end of 2019, I’d gone to Barbados with my team on a trip for my new tan brand, Filter by Molly-Mae. It was a huge campaign shoot, because I was going to be launching the brand with the images we took, so I was really focused on that. Barbados is a tiny island, and everywhere we went was lovely quiet beaches with no one there, let alone any paparazzi around – or so we thought. I think that’s why we were surprised by what happened.
We were outside, shooting photos of me in a white bikini, when I remember seeing a man taking pictures of the building behind me. What I would realise later is that he was pretending: he was actually taking pictures of me. Soon, they were all over the Daily Mail website … and I felt like they were just the most horrendous images of me.
At the time that set of photos came out, I definitely had changed physically. I wouldn’t say I’d ‘let myself go’ (which was what some people said, and much worse). But I think the petite size 6 Molly everyone saw on Love Island had morphed into more like a size 10 Molly-Mae – which was still perfectly fine! And, oh my God, it’s crazy that I have to say that – but it wasn’t what people were used to seeing me looking like in a bikini.
The headline they used was ‘Molly-Mae Hague displays her curves in a TINY white bikini.’ With pieces like that, the papers almost use a bit of sarcasm – so they write a headline that almost reads like you think that of yourself. It will say something like, ‘Molly-Mae flaunts toned stomach’, and then below that will be a picture of you looking completely bloated with not one bit of ab definition on you! I just couldn’t believe it, and of course the photos went viral.
Some people might justify photos like that by saying that they are ‘real’ – but actually, they are not necessarily any more real than a picture you might see on Instagram. I’ve got pictures of me in my bikini from that day, completely raw, unfiltered, unedited, and I don’t look anything like the pictures that they published of me. Even if you scrolled down to read the rest of the article, there were better pictures included that I was fine with. But of course, they didn’t use one of those as the main image. Because that’s not what sells the article and makes people want to click on it. A picture of me looking like I’ve got rolls and belly fat is what sells – and they’ll stick in a picture from my Instagram, so it looks like I’ve photoshopped that.
And at the end of the day, I know the paparazzi are just trying to earn a living. The problem is they don’t have to deal with how that feels; they’re just the ones taking the pictures. They’re not that girl that has to face the fallout. I look back now at that poor 20-year-old girl, reading vile comments about her being fat and how she needed to lose weight, and comments about 50-year-old women looking better than she did at 20 (and I’m not saying that women can’t look great at 50, of course not! But that’s not what the commenters were suggesting). People just don’t understand how that can affect someone. Luckily for me, I am fairly strong – but it did really upset me at the time.
We had just flown back to London when the pictures came out, and I remember ringing Fran, crying and saying, ‘I’m gonna ring the Daily Mail myself!’ I had this idea that I could ask them to take the photos down. Of course, she was telling me it wasn’t a good idea, but I told her, ‘I’m doing it now!’ And I did. I just rang a customer service number at the Daily Mail and got through to a receptionist or someone like that. I was sobbing my eyes out, saying, ‘This is Molly-Mae Hague and I’m ringing to say you need to take those pictures down!’ I’d lost my mind over this. For me, it was genuinely a nightmare come to life. So, that was not a good day!
Needless to say, the pictures stayed up online. I can actually laugh about that dramatic phone call now, but I really was teary for days afterwards and just wanted to hide myself away.
I did turn the tables on the paparazzi, in the end. Not long ago, we were shooting a campaign in Ibiza, again for my tanning brand, Filter by Molly-Mae, and of course the last campaign that we shot in Barbados had been leaked to the press because of the paps. With this trip, we wanted to keep the campaign extremely under wraps and not have anyone know we were shooting before it went live.
Around midday, we stopped for some lunch at Formentera, an island just near Ibiza. The paparazzi spotted us and I decided we couldn’t let them follow us, ruining our exclusive campaign. So instead, when we realised the paparazzi were following our boat, we went down into the hold with one of the models, Emily, who had blonde hair like me.
The paps had seen me in a restaurant earlier that day, so we put her in the same dress I’d been wearing, did her hair the same as mine, put my sunglasses on her, and even my bag. Then she sailed away on a smaller dingy so that the paparazzi followed, taking photos of her instead. So the switch worked – it was really funny. It was all over the press that I’d swapped boats and so on – little did they know that this wasn’t actually me!
Mainly, when I think of the trolling I get, even now, it relates to my pictures – especially bikini photos – and the comments on articles like the one about the pap shots in Barbados. For any girl, any woman – any human, really – to be torn apart for how you look is something that is so, so hard to come to terms with. It’s so difficult to sit there and say to yourself, Just ignore it. Because when someone’s saying they don’t like the way you look, it’s so hard not to look in the mirror and think, Are they right? Am I ugly? Am I fat? Should I lose weight?
There were a lot of things that played a part in me changing my appearance since then – and a bit of me doesn’t want to admit that the criticism affected me – but, honestly, I think the comments calling me overweight did have an impact. I realised I hadn’t been taking care of myself and, afterwards, I did start prioritising my health again. But no one should ever have to face that kind of criticism, that damage to their self-confidence, just because their body has changed. It’s so concerning how when I was a bit bigger, I was called ‘fat’ and ‘obese’. The fact that a size 10 is deemed ‘lardy’ and ‘overweight’ is just petrifying. And that’s not even the point: all sizes should be accepted in exactly the same way. No one deserves to be called nasty names for how their body looks. All bodies are beautiful.
Reading the comments under articles like that actually makes me more fearful for other girls my age who might see the comments written about me and think, I’m actually bigger than Molly-Mae in those pictures … So, if she’s been called lardy there, well, what am I then? Not only does that nastiness affect me, but it’s also going to affect thousands of other girls, because it’s almost been made OK to say things like that about me at that size. It makes me scared for other girls because if I’m not being accepted as a size 10, then maybe they’re not feeling accepted as a size 10 either – or whatever size they may be.
The words that get thrown around now about girls’ bodies are just not right. It’s actually dangerous.
Nowadays, I wouldn’t react to photos I didn’t like in the same way I did to those ones from Barbados – but I’m not going to pretend they don’t bother me at all. If I see a bad photo of myself, straight away, I start to wonder what other people might think of me when they see it. And my initial thought of what they might write is sometimes ‘Molly-Mae looks fat’, just because of the bad experiences I’ve had in the past with the articles and comments.
Of course, the reality is that when you’re standing up, posing for an Instagram photo, with your make-up on and your hair done and wearing a flattering outfit, you’re not going to look the same as you would when caught completely off guard, sat at the swimming pool with your belly rolls on show – because, let’s be real, every single person’s got those! Still, not everybody is caught on camera that way and then has the pictures splashed all over the place. But when you’re feeling vulnerable, you might think, Oh God, am I the only person that looks like that in a bikini?
Maybe it’s not an entirely positive thing to do – maybe the best thing would be to totally ignore them! – but if I see photos taken of me that I don’t like, I’ll just scroll through my Instagram feed. Because I think it’s very easy to look at a bad picture of yourself and think, God, is that actually what I look like? Obviously, it’s a photo of you and that’s what you look like in that moment. But angles, lighting, everything can make such a huge difference – and that goes for any photos you don’t like of yourself, too! Just remember that that’s just one picture. That’s just one angle. That’s just one type of lighting. It’s not any more ‘real’ than all the lovely photos of you.