This is something that has really caught my attention over the past few days for a few reasons. It’s an advert from Always called #LikeAGirl exploring why ‘like a girl’ becomes a negative phrase as girls grow up.

As a girl who was a serious football-playing, anti-dresses, action man tomboy, being told that I couldn’t do anything as well as the boys because I was a girl was like a kick in the stomach. Just because I was the only girl at football training it didn’t give anyone the right to say that I was good ‘for a girl’. No. Get it right. I was good. The fact that I was a girl was irrelevant.

As I got older I was discouraged from playing mixed sports because no one ever included ‘the girl’ because what’s the point? She can’t kick the ball, she can’t hit the ball and she DEFINITELY can’t throw the ball. Bullshit.

I fully appreciate that men and women are physically very different, for example women hold onto body fat more than men (and for good reason, you need to be a certain weight and body fat percentage for everything to keep working properly and enable you to have babies). But stop comparing my achievements to those of my male counterparts.

When I run, I run for me. When I work out, I work out to improve myself. When I eat healthily that’s because I’m listening to my body and giving it what it needs.

As one of the women in the film says, I run, workout and eat like a girl. Because I am a girl. A girl who’s damn proud of who she is and what she’s achieved over the last year.

So I think I’ll carry on acting like a girl thank you very much.