‘I’M a feminist but…I fat-shamed myself in the lift on my way here today,” she said.

She can easily articulate why she believes fat is a feminist issue and why it’s important to see through the social conditioning that tells us our bodies can only be valued if they fit the current aesthetic.

But there’s clearly a part of her that’s internalised the narrative, a small voice that will occasionally turn loud, that will turn against her when she’s vulnerable and tell her she’s worthless because she’s not like them, because size six should never be followed by “teen”.

She’s the product of a culture that encourages the distortion of our minds and our bodies, a culture where gyms thrive on twisting us into shapes we’ve been fed from above, from the TV and glossy magazine pages, where the salons create clones with lip-fillers and fat freezing, HD brows and tans that were never earned in the sun.

She’s the product of a culture in which you can never win, in which the goalposts forever shift and the ideals remain forever just out of reach, where the beauty myth drives consumerism while remaining defiantly, purposefully unattainable. She’s angry, with herself and with a society that prizes the aesthetic above all. She wants to rise against it, become forever comfortable in her own skin and silence that hateful inner monologue. And so she turns to the body positivity movement, one grown rapidly in number with the ascension of social media, with its unerring ability to bring together those with a common cause.

But she doesn’t fit there, either. Because the protest against dominant beauty ideals has in turn created its own.

Founded in resistance to the bodily obsession that drives a culture in which fat people are outrageously and always less-than, the movement is still fundamentally, detrimentally, obsessed with the body.

It may be academically underpinned and built on good intention but it is now most often represented in a constant stream of carefully curated photographs, images promoting an alternative brand of perfection, a deviance from the norm that never quite becomes deviant, that never truly rebels.

Stretchmarks, cellulite and stomach rolls are acceptable here but they’re still accompanied by the markers of aesthetic social acceptance, her thick thighs complemented by the glossy hair, white teeth and perfect make-up that help to construct our generation’s beauty ideal. The value society places upon our body and its appearance is intrinsically linked with the endless distraction that stems from costly and time-consuming pursuits of elusive perfection.

To be comfortable in your own skin is the pinnacle of body positivity but confidence that stems from bodily comparison, competition, compliments and conformation is a confidence constructed on the shallow and unstable concept of the body as our defining attribute.

This movement may have broken down barriers but it has a long way to go before it breaks through the bars of the gilded cage, where those inside remain defined by their appearance and those outside are excluded by virtue of a normality all too rarely celebrated.

Freedom will only come when we reject our bodies entirely in our evaluation of ourselves and each other.