Nude awakening: turns out taking your clothes off might actually fix your body image issues

Here's a sentence you didn't expect to read today: a nudist resort outside the M25 might be doing more for people's self-esteem than a thousand hours of therapy, gym selfies, and carefully curated Instagram feeds combined.

According to a piece over at Dazed Digital, a writer accidentally stumbled into a naturist resort last summer and came out the other side a changed person. The secret? Once you've mastered the very specific social skill of maintaining direct eye contact with someone whose bare everything is catching the afternoon sun, something in your brain just... resets.

Why naturism is having a moment

We are, as a generation, absolutely cooked when it comes to body image. Filters, FaceApp, influencer abs, before-and-after transformation content - the algorithm has been quietly dismantling our ability to look in a mirror without flinching for about fifteen years now. So it's kind of poetic that the answer might be to just... take everything off in a forest with strangers.

Young people are reportedly gravitating toward naturism not because they're secretly very confident, but almost for the opposite reason. When everyone around you is unfiltered, unretouched, and unavoidably human-shaped, the whole performance of having a "good body" collapses. There's no angle. There's no lighting. There's just people, being people, playing volleyball or whatever naturists do.

The uncomfortable truth about comfort

The initial awkwardness is, by all accounts, very real. The eye contact thing alone sounds like a masterclass in social anxiety management. But that's sort of the point - the discomfort is the medicine. Once you get past it, you're left with something increasingly rare: a space where bodies are just bodies, not projects, not brands, not content.

It's a bit ironic that in 2025, one of the more radical acts of self-acceptance involves doing something humans have been doing since long before clothes were invented. Naturism isn't new. But its appeal to a generation drowning in body dysmorphia-by-algorithm? That part is very now.

So if your screen time report is giving you an existential crisis and your relationship with your own reflection has gotten weird, maybe the answer isn't another wellness app. Maybe it's a day pass to a nudist resort outside London. Radical. Uncomfortable. Probably life-changing. Very hard to photograph for your story.