Everyone champions self-love, but how easy is it to love yourself and accept all your flaws? In this TED talk, model and motivational speaker Caitlyn Roux talks about her own struggles growing up, how she harboured unhealthy ideas of beauty, and how she only ever wanted to be liked and validated by everyone.

“From the age of 16, I started to obsess over my weight. So I wanted to look like the cover girl in Cosmo magazine… My diet consisted of just salads, and I used to count every single calorie that my body was consuming. I even went to the extreme of harming my body for many years, trying to get rid of the food that I’d eaten because I needed the thigh gap and I needed the thin waist,” she shares.

Talking about her relationship next, Roux says she had put a lot of pressure on someone else to be everything to her and to make her feel worthy and enough. “When the relationship ended, I was completely broken. I didn’t know how I was going to stand on my own and I felt like I lost a little sense of identity that I had, and I was terrified,” she says.

Roux admits that for the longest time, she did not know herself. She went through a lot of pain, until one day when she called him and found out he was doing okay and was happy. “And it was from that moment that I decided that I was going to be happy,” she remarks.

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Later in the speech, she says we cannot give love when we cannot love ourselves first. “The people you surround yourself with in life have a very big impact and influence on you and your growth. But you have the biggest impact and influence on you… Know your worth. Start focusing on yourself, developing yourself, improving yourself; good things will come, and know that the space between where you are now currently, and where you want to be, is growth. And the thing called life that happens in between is hard, but it is really, really beautiful,” she concludes.