“I thought I should be ashamed”: Riot Women's Tamsin Greig on how she learned to love her biggest body hang-up

Most of us have at least one body hang-up, often more. For Good Housekeeping’s November cover star, Tamsin Greig, it was her calves – but, in an exclusive interview, she opened up about how she’s learned to love the parts of herself she was once ashamed of - and how we’re conditioned to see the part of ourselves “that are not okay”.

When she was asked in an interview for The Guardian’s Saturday questionnaire in May this year: "What do you most dislike about your appearance?", Tamsin replied: "To quote a Mavis Staples line from one of her songs, ‘I like the things about me that I once despised.’” Revisiting the point with GH, she shared what she meant by it.

“When I was very young, one of the boys who lived in the Kilburn flats said, ‘F**king hell, Tammy, you have f**king massive calves,’ she explained. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I should be ashamed of these.’

“They are big, because I’m muscular, but I’d also done a lot of ballet. For a long time, I thought my calves weren’t right. Now I think they’re really great! It’s taken me a long time.”

That Mavis Staples song, she added, is an important reminder to us all. “We’re conditioned to see the parts of ourselves that are not okay. The Mavis Staples song reminds us that it’s a choice to come home to yourself, to choose to respect yourself,” she said.

Tamsin is soon to return to our screens in the BBC’s brand-new - and eagerly awaited - Sally Wainwright drama, Riot Women. The drama tells the story of five women in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, who are each going through the menopause and form a punk band. It deals with everything from raging hormones to wild sex and HRT.

So has menopause made Tamsin rethink everything herself? “Sally has shown us how the individual menopause journey is utterly unique for each woman,” she told GH. “There are so many elements of grief wound into the menopause journey. Yes, my parents died, my male best friend died, but there’s something other in the menopause, where you’re grieving the old self. It’s the concrete and the ineffable.”

What’s helped Tamsin through it, she added, is a hack that she’s been doing since she was very young. While she admitted that HRT wasn’t a lifesaver for her, she shared that it did help with sleep. Napping, she revealed, is essential to her.

“Without sleep, I do go a little bit woozy and overwhelmed and frightened,” she revealed. “It helped me find my afternoon snooze.

“I learned [napping] as a child. I found things too much,” she added. “It’s like unplugging an electronic device from the wall, plugging it in again and it resets. Sometimes, as a child, I used to go to sleep, then surface, but not want to come back into the room, so I’d just keep my eyes closed. I was present but absent.”

Riot Women airs on BBC One and BBC iPlayer this October. Read the full interview in Good Housekeeping UK’s November issue, on sale now.