How I Found Myself Again

Finding my way back to myself, and figuring out a balance that works for me in terms of looking after my body, wasn’t an overnight process. After those pictures from Barbados came out, I started thinking a bit more in terms of I want to exercise, I want to get back to my routine. But it wasn’t that simple. If I thought Barbados was a wake-up call, there were a few more to come. On about four different occasions, in fact – every time pap pictures of me would come out that I didn’t like – I would say, ‘Right! Now’s the time that I’m going to make a change.’ And I’d make a small change and I’d start exercising again, but it wasn’t really working for me.

I was trying loads of different things. I was getting personal trainers on board – I must have tried five different personal trainers – but something wasn’t clicking, and I think it was because mentally I wasn’t ready to go back to the gym yet. Meanwhile, I wasn’t eating healthily at home. So, I was seeing no results and getting pretty disheartened, then I’d give up again. It was a battle, and I wasn’t getting anywhere with it.

I was just really unhappy with how I felt in my body. By then, I had my tanning brand out, Filter by Molly-Mae, and everyone was asking me to show my routine, in terms of how I apply my fake tan. But I was never able to do that for my followers because, at the time, I didn’t feel able to be open and honest about the way my body looked. The last time people had seen me in a bikini, on TV, was very different to how I looked a year on. So, I was kind of hiding myself a little bit.

It got to a point where Tommy and I went on a holiday to the Maldives, in December 2020, and I realised, I’ve actually really messed up here. I’m really, really not prioritising things that should have always been a priority, not just because of the way I look, but more importantly for my health – including my mental health. It was a real turning point for me.

The difference then, though, compared to when I’d seen those Barbados pictures and felt so bad, is that this was a realisation that I’d reached by myself, for myself. There were no paps in the Maldives – we’d gone there for a bit of an escape.

This time, it wasn’t about what other people thought of my body, it was about how I felt.

And I realised a few things about myself that holiday: that I had just lost myself a bit, and I just felt like crap, really. That’s when I had the true wake-up call and came back from holiday wanting to make a real difference. For me, it got to the point where I was like, I need to do something about this now. It was definitely a step that needed to be taken.

A FORMULA THAT WORKS

So, it’s only been since around the start of 2021 that I’ve made the biggest changes and lost the weight that I put on. And now, after getting back on top of my health, as well as after having all the cosmetic work undone, I just feel like a different person.

In the end, what worked for me was really just not putting pressure on myself to exercise every single day. I did it really slowly and built it back up again. Sometimes I’d go to the gym, and I’d stand on the treadmill, do a little walk … and that’d be it. But I used to say to myself, ‘Well, it’s better than nothing – last year you would have done nothing.’ So, for me, the formula that worked was not applying too much pressure and just letting myself gradually fall back in love with exercising.

I didn’t go on a diet – it was just about making healthier choices and getting back to the old me, because I’ve always been a very healthy person; I’ve always liked to make healthy choices when I go out, but I struggled to do that in the first year after the show. My lifestyle had changed completely in that time, and it took me a while to find a way to balance everything properly.

And I didn’t hire a personal trainer. I’ve always had female PTs and I think sometimes I felt … not jealous, but a bit of pressure, because obviously they had their fitness journey together because they were personal trainers, and they were smashing it. And I just felt anxiety going into those training sessions because I had become so afraid of the gym and now had to go exercise with someone that really knew their stuff. So, I simply took that pressure away by doing what I could by myself, with no one shouting at me or telling me what to do. That really changed my perspective on exercise. I would go and do what I could, and then I’d go again and do a little bit more, and then the next time I’d do a little bit more again. That was a much more positive way for me to go about it.

The lockdowns actually helped, too. I know that wasn’t the case for a lot of people, and I can totally understand why. But before the pandemic, Tommy and I had a bad habit of going out for food a lot. (Definitely for the first year we lived together, we ate out pretty much every other day – if not every day. We lived above a restaurant that presented itself as offering healthy food, but it wasn’t really. We’d go down there every single day and order roast dinners, you name it!)

Then, because of lockdown, obviously all the restaurants shut, and we were cooking for ourselves much more regularly, which actually did help. And with everything just calming down and me having more time to focus on the things that make me happy and make me feel good as a person, I could come up with a plan as to how to get myself in better shape.

MY ROUTINE TODAY

At the moment, I go to the gym about four times a week – it’s easy living with Tommy because he trains three times a day, so I just go along with him. We do try to exercise separately once we’re in there – mostly because he gets annoyed by the fact I don’t know what I’m doing! But he does help me out; he’s really good with stuff like that.

I love the stepping machine, so I will spend a bit of time on that, and then I’ll go on the treadmill for an incline walk – so nothing too hard. I love cardio. I can go to the gym and do 30 minutes of cardio and I’ll walk out, thinking, I’m glad I did that – I feel better for it. It’s not loads. I’ve probably not done that much or worked out as hard as I could have, but it’s better than nothing.

And I have tried to introduce weights a little bit recently. But it’s quite daunting, isn’t it, when you go into a gym and you don’t really know what you’re doing? Especially now that some people know who I am. I hate the idea of people telling their friends later, ‘Oh, I saw that Molly-Mae last week. She hadn’t got a clue what she was doing in the weights section.’ I’d be mortified! So, I normally put a YouTube video on my phone, and headphones in, and follow a little ab workout or something like that. The one thing I’m terrible at is home workouts. I cannot do them to save my life – I just get distracted. I switch the TV to something else or get my phone out.

You do feel like a different person when you come out of the gym. After a session, you just feel so proud of yourself and happy that you did that, especially since, for me, it’s been a journey of trying to fall back in love with exercise. Whenever I have a good session now, it gives me a real feeling of accomplishment. Remembering where I was compared to where I am now, I feel like, mentally, exercise has put me in such a better place. You just feel more positive, and things don’t feel like a chore. Even walking to places doesn’t feel like an effort anymore – your health, your fitness, is that much better. Everything just improves.

Really, there’s not one negative thing about exercise. OK, the only negative is that you sometimes can’t be bothered to go, and it can be painful and tiring and you get out of breath! But the feeling you get afterwards just trumps any bad feelings before that, really.

Since I’ve been exercising again, I’m a different person. I feel so much better in every aspect of my life.

THE WAY I EAT

Now, I’m really in a good place with my relationship with food and eating as well as exercise. The one thing I want to say is that this is the way of eating that works for me – what works for you might be totally different, and that’s fine.

The first thing I think about when I wake up is food. I’ve always been such a breakfast person. I normally get up, then make myself a protein shake; that’s something that has really helped me to get on track – finding a breakfast that works for me – because it starts your day right. Before that, if I had an unhealthy breakfast, I’d think, Well, I’ve had that breakfast, I’ll just have whatever else I want for the rest of the day. When I started introducing protein shakes for breakfast, that really helped me make healthier choices. Everyone laughs at me now, because every single place I go – whether it’s for an overnight trip or a one-day shoot – I’ll take my blender with me and everything I need to make my shake. I’m so adamant about having my protein shake for breakfast, just because it always sets me up right for the day.

For the rest of our meals, Tommy and I really don’t do that much cooking just because we don’t have time. Whenever we used to do a big grocery shop, all the food in the fridge ended up going off, which is so bad. Besides, because his diet is so strict before a fight, it’s just not that easy to get all the macros right and get everything measured.

So, we decided to stop doing that and just eat when we needed to eat. He’ll use a meal-prep service when he’s in camp, which is when he’s training ahead of a fight (sometimes boxers do go away for camp, but he’ll usually stay based at home, confusingly). He works with a meal-prep company, so his meals are delivered to him every week to keep in the fridge and microwave when he wants one. Sometimes I’ll have one with him, but a lot of the time I’m out, so I’ll just make healthy choices: I’ll grab a salad or soup for lunch and something a bit more substantial for dinner.

Then, when Tommy’s out of camp, he’ll just eat whatever the hell he wants: curry for breakfast, Chinese for lunch, pizza for dinner – he goes in! I think because he’s so restricted when he’s in camp, he just tries to scoff it all when he’s out. I have had to have a few chats with him to explain, ‘You can just eat what you eat, and I’ll eat what I eat because we’re very different.’ He’s training all the time for his job, and I’m not!

I’ve still got a real sweet tooth, though. I always crave something sweet, so if I’m grabbing a snack, I love a protein bar. It is basically a chocolate bar – it actually probably has more sugar – but I think, Ooh, I’ve had a protein bar! And I’m obsessed with Quavers: my number-one snack is a packet of Quavers, while my treat meal is spag bol. When Tommy’s organised a date night, he’s even had private chefs come round to cook us an unreal spag bol, because he knows that that’s my favourite. So, for me, it’s all about making healthier choices where I can, but still enjoying myself.

WAKE-UP CALLS

Recently, I have had a couple of scares that have really underlined the importance of looking after myself – reminding me that, more than anything, it’s your health that really matters, not what other people think of how you look.

It all started when I noticed a mole on the back of my leg. It came up about two years before I went on Love Island: a really small, bright red mole on the back of my calf. And my mum noticed it too – ‘Oh, that’s weird’ – but it wasn’t growing, and it was just small. It looked a bit like my strawberry birthmark, so I wondered if it might be that. It was harmless, I thought.

Then, when I went on Love Island, my mum actually rang up the show and said, ‘I can see this mole on the back of her leg, and it looks like it’s got so much bigger since she was home.’ She thought maybe being in the sun had caused it to grow, or maybe she’d not noticed that it had changed until she saw it on-screen. As she said, ‘I shouldn’t be able to see it on the TV if it was as small as I remember it.’

So, while I was on the show, they were checking it every four days – they had a medical team who were measuring the mole with a tape measure to make sure it hadn’t grown, and they were really good with that. They’d call me aside, measure it, note it down, check it hadn’t grown. But then, when I came out, I forgot about it for about six months – life got so busy. Again, my mum was worried, saying, ‘Get it checked, get it checked.’ But I’d say, ‘No, that’s just not a priority right now. I know it’s fine.’ But eventually, I thought I should really get it checked again.

Still, when I went to the doctor’s, they said it was nothing to worry about. In fact, I had two or three doctor’s appointments where they said to me it was nothing to worry about. So, I forgot about it again. I said to my mum, ‘It’s nothing to worry about, they said it’s fine.’

Then, in 2020, I happened to go to the doctor’s about something completely different. As I was leaving that appointment, I remembered: ‘Oh, just one more thing: can you just check this mole on the back of my leg? I’ve been told it’s nothing to worry about – I just want to be reassured one more time.’

She took one look and said, ‘That needs to come off right away. I can tell that’s not an innocent little mole, that needs to come off.’ Afterwards, I remember coming back from the doctor’s, sat in the back of an Uber. For a second I had this realisation that this could be life-threatening. Is this going to be serious? I wondered. In that moment I had so many uncertain thoughts and it really put my health into perspective.

Within two days, I was having the mole removed at the Christie Hospital, a specialist cancer hospital in Manchester. What they do is send it for a biopsy – testing. I was on a Beauty Works shoot in Venice when the doctor called me to say, ‘It’s cancerous, a malignant melanoma. So, you’ll need to come back next week and have the skin on your leg around the mole removed and biopsied.’ They explained that I had to have the biopsy to make sure that what they thought was cancer hadn’t spread; while removing the skin around the mole was to create almost a safe margin around it – so they knew they had removed all the cancerous cells. It was a lot.

Ahead of my further surgery, I was isolating, as Covid restrictions required at the time. But then, three days before I was due to go in, they rang me to say, ‘We’re just not sure what this mole is – within the clinic, we just can’t decide. We just really don’t want to remove the skin on your leg unless we have to.’ So instead, they sent the tissue off to New York, where it would be checked by a team of senior expert dermatologists to try to work out what it was. I just had to wait for any news, which was horrible. My mum was so worried, of course: ‘Have you heard anything? OK. Anything else?’ And all I could say was no, no, no.

Finally, after a month of waiting, the surgeon rang me again. ‘We just want to leave it and we don’t think it’s a melanoma.’

I couldn’t believe it! I was saying, ‘You cannot do this – I’ve literally been told I’ve got a melanoma. How am I meant to relax now, knowing that?’

But that was the end of it. The doctors just said it was nothing to worry about. ‘We made a mistake. We thought it was a melanoma, but it isn’t.’ And you have to trust them, I guess.

Now, I’ve just got a small mark on my leg from having the mole removed, whereas if they’d had to operate further it would have left a much bigger scar. But that experience shaped me in ways that are less visible. Hearing someone say the words ‘it’s cancerous’ was such a massive wake-up call for me. I told myself, You really need to start prioritising your health more because if something happened tomorrow, you could get so unwell and everything you’ve worked for could just disappear.

Before that, I was so not focused on anything other than just trying to scrabble my way through my new life and my new relationship. There were so many things going on that I wasn’t even worrying about my health or anything that seemed a bit wrong with my body. But now I’ve got much more focus on that side of things.

I realised that you have to prioritise your health, because if you don’t, what are you actually working for?

That whole experience also made me much more aware of my body. Recently, I found a lump in my left boob; the doctors checked it, and it was benign – not cancerous – but they still wanted to remove it as it was growing. And I feel like if I hadn’t had that mole scare, I wouldn’t be so aware of everything going on with my body. At the same time, I had a lump that was on my finger removed too, just to be safe. (I feel like it’s been one thing after another with my health, but I’m grateful to be happy and well now.) So, now I think that was a bit of a blessing that I had that first scare, because it made me prioritise different things and it made me value the important things so much more.

MY HIDDEN HEALTH CONDITION

I’ve started talking about another of my health issues, too. In October 2021, I had keyhole surgery to treat my endometriosis, a condition where (and I’m going to repeat the NHS definition to be totally clear!) ‘tissue similar to the lining of the womb starts to grow in other places, such as the ovaries and fallopian tubes’. The main symptoms include period pain that keeps you from doing your normal activities, pain during or after sex, and heavy periods.

It was a really long process to get to that point. In my case, I had really painful periods for about five years – so, so long – but other issues related to my endometriosis only developed once I started seeing Tommy. Before I was with him, I wasn’t really having sex, so I didn’t really think there were any problems other than my period pains. But then when I was in a relationship and just became really aware of that side of my body, I thought, There are so many things wrong – something’s not right.

I was suffering horrendous pain – literally feeling like I’d been stabbed in the stomach, just awful – and it was causing me so many issues. Big TMI! But my sex life just became non-existent: it was not a part of our relationship. The pain was affecting my work, too: Fran knew not to book in certain things when I was due my period because the pain was like nothing I’d experienced before – I knew it was just not normal. Sometimes I’ve had to take off a full week of work, it was so extreme.

I can see why so many girls want endometriosis to be talked about more, because it’s just awful.

But it took a long time to find out what was causing all this. Over the years, I had so many check-ups with so many different doctors where I was constantly being told, ‘Oh, it’s this, it’s that, it’s thrush’ – everything under the sun, except what it really was. ‘Try not using shower gel, try different underwear.’ I just thought, No, it’s not that. I know it’s not that. I just knew myself.

Finally, in the summer of 2021, I went to see a specialist at Wilmslow Hospital, who told me, ‘You do have endometriosis and what you’ve been going through isn’t normal. Don’t feel like you’re being dramatic – it’s just not normal.’

I thought, Thank God someone is telling me that. It was such a relief to finally hear, ‘You have endometriosis’, and not to be told that I was having normal period pains or was being dramatic about it or that there was nothing wrong with me. That diagnosis explained everything, and I went in for keyhole surgery to treat it.

Basically, they burned away the endometriosis cells on my cervix, which is at the opening of your womb. (Apparently, the affected cells are really obvious; for instance, when you look at someone’s cervix, they’re like little black cells. I’ve googled it so much now!) As it was keyhole, the surgery wasn’t major – although I did have a general anaesthetic, the one that sends you to sleep – but hopefully it will make a massive difference to me over time.

The surgery itself went well. The doctor actually took loads of pictures showing me the endometriosis cells, which were really interesting to see. But it was harder to recover from than I thought it was going to be – I was in a bit of a mess afterwards. Literally, my stomach was the size of a beach ball and I could barely walk, I could barely stand up, so it was pretty tough, and it took me about a week to recover.

A girl had commented on my Stories about a photo shoot I did a few days after the operation, for Filter by Molly-Mae for Black Friday, saying it was unrealistic for me to set standards like that for other girls suffering from endometriosis; that I shouldn’t be promoting going back to work so soon. I replied to her, saying, ‘Look, everybody’s journey is different and everyone’s individual recovery is also different. I’m not telling anybody that they need to go back to work straight away. I had a photo shoot that week where I wasn’t due to be working but I felt well enough to work so chose to do so. Everyone’s recovery time and circumstances are all different, and for mine I felt comfortable to do my job without feeling like I was pushing myself, so it felt OK to do that.’ Of course, someone else’s experience might be totally different to mine.

If you have endometriosis, I can’t promise surgery will cure everything. I’m going to have more check-ups, because I still have issues related to the condition and my periods are very painful. But, the difference is that I can get on with my day, whereas before if I was out somewhere and got my period I would often have to go straight home, as I wouldn’t be able to stand up. Now, the period pain has subsided to the point where I can finish what I’m doing, then drive home and manage it with the right painkillers. So, overall, the treatment has helped.

Endometriosis can also affect fertility, and Tommy and I want to have a baby soon, so it was really important to me that I get it sorted. I was pleased to hear the operating doctor say that I have a healthy womb and everything’s looking OK in that respect, for when I do try to have children. But if you do have it – or think you might have it – please don’t panic, because there is help out there. As a first step, talk to your GP or visit endometriosis-uk.org.

In the meantime, I want to keep talking about it because it can be a really painful condition to live with and yet it’s not really spoken about very much. Since I’ve started sharing what I’ve been suffering, so many girls have said to me, ‘Thank God, I feel like I can relate to you even more now, because I have suffered this for so long, too.’ They really want me to help educate people on it properly, which is something I want to do, too.

TRUE CONFIDENCE

Where I’m at now is the most confident I’ve felt, 100 per cent – now that I’ve reversed everything I’d had done, got back on top of my fitness, and everything is pretty much back to the way it was before. Which is ironic, really, because you try all these things, as I’ve said, to make yourself look better.

But actually, in the end, all I wanted was just to go back to how I was before I did any of that stuff to myself.

At the same time, I have learned a lot about how important it is to look after your body – that your health is what matters, and anything else is just secondary. It’s been a journey, a process of trial and error, of learning what makes me feel worse and what makes me feel better, and of trying to get my lifestyle right. Now that I’ve got to where I am, I feel like I’ve learned from my mistakes and found out what works for me.

I ended up celebrating this moment in a really special way, too: when Cosmopolitan magazine asked me to be the cover girl and face of their summer 2021 double issue. This wasn’t just a huge career opportunity for me, but a personal milestone: it was the first magazine shoot I’d done after having everything changed – since dissolving all my filler. It felt huge. I barely wore any make-up on that shoot because they wanted the look to feel really fresh. I also didn’t have any control over the image that they chose, which, looking back, was probably a good thing because it makes you try new things and look a bit different.

Of course, me being me, and my worst critic, when I first saw the picture they’d chosen for the cover, I hated it. I told Fran, ‘I will not post that anywhere. No, nobody can see that!’ But when the magazine came out, people really loved it. They were actually telling me, ‘Oh my God, you look incredible, this is the best you’ve ever looked – you look so much better now.’ When I saw everyone’s reaction, that was a real confidence boost. We all need some kind of reassurance every now and then and it feels great when people compliment the way you look. After making changes, it was really good to have people saying to me, ‘You look better for it.’ Now, I look at that cover picture and think, That was different … which is interesting … which is good! In fact, I really love it.

But the changes I’ve made aren’t just about how I look – they’re to do with how I feel on the inside now, too. And the people around me can see a massive difference in me, in my attitude. I even wake up earlier in the mornings now. Tommy and I, when we lived in the centre of Manchester, we’d sometimes be ordering Deliveroo at three in the morning, and going to bed at 4am. We were living that city lifestyle, and everything was accessible at any time of day. Now, we’ve moved out to Cheshire, and we have a really good routine: we’ll be asleep by eleven o’clock. I just don’t even recognise the girl I was compared to the girl I am now. It’s really changed.

Only recently, an article came out with some not great pap pictures taken of me at the hotel I was staying at for a work trip. Fran and I were about to fly home, and I was scrolling on my phone and saw them just before we took off. For a while, I actually sat there thinking that if that had happened to me a year ago, I would probably be crying on the plane. Instead – without even realising it – I have become a lot more tolerant of things like that. I know now that whatever is going to be written in the comments on some article, I’ve actually done really well in getting myself back into exercising and feeling healthy again. That was what I wanted to do – but even if I hadn’t, that would be fine, too. Ultimately, it is just about remembering that as long as I’m happy in my body and feeling confident, why would I care what people say about me?

It sounds really cringey, but I do feel now it’s all about embracing what you have, because you might as well just make the most of it! Just as I always say to myself that you only have one life, you’re only given one shell to live in. So, don’t hate yourself for things that aren’t going to change – you just need to embrace what you have and enjoy it.