I was a child star and landed my first TV role at age 11, which led to a life of body dysmorphia that I still suffer from at age 39.

Walking onto a TV set on the first day was an overwhelming experience. I was just 11 years old and had recently been cast in Byker Grove, a popular UK children’s drama.

As a pre-teen in the 90s, I had no idea how to do my hair or makeup and had very little knowledge of the fashion of the time (other than what I saw my friends at school wearing).

I remember walking into the bright makeup room and feeling very small next to the older (more experienced) girls in the cast. They were only a few years older than me, but they seemed so sophisticated and self-assured, while I was holding back, not knowing what to do.

The makeup artist showered them with compliments: “Your hair looks amazing!”, “Wow, you look so beautiful!” and then turned to me and said, “Oh, you have really bad skin, we’ll have to cover it up.” I felt my face turning red.

Unfortunately, that moment would have a profound impact on the next ten years of my life.

Growing up watching TV meant that for six months of the year (the amount of time it took to film a series) I had someone “correcting” my face and the other six months I was watching my face on TV and being very aware of people watching me.

Nowadays, we are used to seeing people on screens and we have all become accustomed to staring at each other’s faces, but social media wasn’t even an idea back then and being on TV meant people were staring at us, and it was unusual.

So, from a very early age, I started seeing my body through other people’s eyes. Would it look good in costume? Would it look good on screen? Would the producers allow it?

And I almost saw myself and my body as a product, a character that needed to be painted and cut and adapted to fit the version that the world needed me to be. Now I understand that this is called “self-objectification.”

Self-objectification is when a person sees themselves first as a physical object and then as a human being, an object that can be observed and evaluated based on their appearance. As a result, they may be hypercritical of their body.

During my teenage years, I could have told you a long list of “plastic surgeries” and “treatments” I needed; a list that included breast implants and “ankle implants” (I’m not entirely sure “ankle implants” ever existed).

The problem with this type of hypercritical negative thinking is that our brains are wired for something called “confirmation bias,” so when I started thinking negatively about my physical appearance, I started seeing “confirmation” of this everywhere I went.

A blonde glamour model with big breasts? Well, that was proof of how ugly I was. A comment about my resemblance to my father would mean I looked like a boy and wasn’t feminine.

Matthews began her career in the BBC children’s drama Byker Grove, playing the role of Emma Miller from 1995 to 2003. In 2003, she left the series to pursue music after signing with Sony UK and released a single, ‘Little Miss Perfect’.

Holly, 39, runs the award-winning The Happy Me project, which helps women build their confidence.

Holly was cast in popular UK children’s drama Byker Grove (pictured with co-star Andrew Hayden Smith)

I once heard a relative say that she thought my sister was more “naturally pretty” than me, and to me that translated to “you’ll always have to TRY to look pretty.”

For years I was obsessed with my appearance: fake tan, waxing, shaving, waxing, eyelashes, acrylic nails, straightening my naturally wavy hair, makeup… and any idea of ​​leaving the house without fulfilling all these requirements was abhorrent to me.

Boys started to notice, and by my late teens I had perfected my confident outward image, and was far more likely to slap the “she loves herself” label on me than the confusion I felt internally.

Every day I was filled with self-criticism and scrutiny. I looked at myself in the mirror constantly and always looked for the “flaw” that would give me away or show people that I wasn’t “naturally pretty.”

In my late teens and early twenties, I started to feel consumed by this body dysmorphia. I couldn’t see what other people saw in me and every time I looked in the mirror, all I saw was something to change, fix and correct.

It was completely exhausting and meant I had to get up at unbearable hours during the day to make sure I had executed my meticulous ritual of getting ready and leaving the house.

Holly said that as a teenager she was filled with ‘Every day was filled with self-criticism and scrutiny.’

Holly came up with the concept of The Happy Me Project to help people struggling with grief after losing her husband, Ross.

Fortunately, during those years I also recognized that what I was feeling was neither healthy nor productive, and I started going to therapy and reading personal development books to change. I wanted to find ways to dispel the internal noise.

This job started to have an impact, and I became more confident in my appearance, even going without makeup or a tan some days, but just when I thought I had reached a place where I could like myself and my body, I became pregnant with my first daughter, Brooke, who is now 13.

Pregnancy body was fun, I didn’t mind being pregnant and it was almost a novelty to have a larger body (having been a smaller person my whole life), the challenge for me mentally came once my daughter arrived and my body “deflated” into its new normal.

I had followed all the beauty “tricks” I had been taught to avoid stretch marks and sagging skin, I had been the “good girl” and believed on some level that I deserved to have my body back exactly as it was before pregnancy.

But as I looked at my postpartum belly in the mirror, with red, raw scratches crawling up my stomach, I cried. I felt like a failure.

The next day, I turned up at Harley Street for a consultation. I was a size 6 and fit back into my pre-pregnancy jeans almost immediately, but my dysmorphic research had led me to the conclusion that what I needed was a “mini tummy tuck.”

Just sharing this makes me feel so sad and ashamed. I can feel the collective judgment of people reading this and there is so much shame associated with this moment.

Find Your Confidence: The No-Nonsense Guide to Self-Belief by Holly Matthews is out September 16th from Bloomsbury Publishing

Holly has built a new life with her adorable daughters Texas (left) and Brooke (right)

The mother of two believes in the power of positive thinking, even when facing extremely dark times.

I sat down nervously at Harley Street for my consultation. I explained my concerns and desire to remove my stretch marks and lose the weight I had gained during pregnancy to a compassionate woman.

I felt like she understood my situation, listened to me, and then politely told me she was declining my surgery because I didn’t need a “tummy tuck” and told me to give myself time to process my new body.

This was the kindest thing this woman could have done for me, and it was my wake-up call as I realized that I had once again fallen into that hypercritical stance that didn’t match what the world saw.

Does that mean I’m done loving my stretch marks and never having a day where I criticize my body again?

Of course not, but over the years since that day I have worked on my mind far more than any external changes and the impact on my well-being has been phenomenal.

So much so that I am now sharing my own lessons and my own journey into complacency, and it is an entire chapter in my new book (possibly the hardest to write). Let me share the key things I did initially that started to change my mindset:

Holly said she began to focus on what her body could do and was compassionate about her journey.

STOP, DELETE, and EDIT. Listen to what your inner critic is saying: “You’re so ugly you can’t wear that.” STOP, DELETE the critical statement, and REPLACE it with something BETTER: “I look good,” “The color yellow looks good on me,” and work from there.

I accepted the compliments with a THANK YOU and without going into a bunch of reasons why I am the opposite of what they had just said.

She stopped reading beauty and gossip magazines (as director Baz Luhrmann read in Everybody’s Free: ‘They’ll only make you feel ugly!’)

But most importantly, I focused on what my body could do and was compassionate with its journey.

Holly Matthews, 39, runs the award-winning The Happy Me project, which helps women build their confidence.

Find Your Confidence: The No-Nonsense Guide to Self-Belief by Holly Matthews is out September 16th from Bloomsbury Publishing