Entrepreneur and fitness model inspiring people to embrace vitiligo and live life to the fullest

Living with vitiligo, Ninu Galot is a real life superhero and one of the most influential advocates of normalizing vitiligo among the masses.

With her confident and outgoing personality, she inspires the fellow people with vitiligo to embrace their unique appearance and live a more fulfilling life.

Vitiligo is my trademark, says Ninu

As Ninu have learnt to accept vitiligo, she believes that the ‘innocent’ vitiligo patches on her skin makes her unique and noticeable. It’s her fashion statement.

With unconditional self-love, she has turned this ‘flaw’ into a super strength and now, become a role model as she is trying to help other people with vitiligo also realize their true potential.

Born in Reading, the UK, Ninu is an international fitness model, an entrepreneur and a proud body-positivity advocate.

She got her first patch when she was around 11 years of age. It was small coin-sized patch behind her neck. That small patch remained behind the neck throughout the school and college days. But she was not bothered much about it at that time. Also, her bob cut hair style at that time helped her hide the patch very conveniently. So, she just continued to ignore it.

But as soon as she finished her MBA and left university, she had a sudden outburst of spots all over her body which led to panic and chaos. She tried different medications from steroid creams, homeopathy to painful UV ray treatments but nothing helped her.

She ended up spending a lot of time and money to treat vitiligo and even went to Milan to try out an expensive UV and IR light treatment.

“My family stood by me and I tried every possible thing to eliminate vitiligo. Apart from taking all sorts of treatments, I read a lot of books, researched a lot on the internet, followed a restricted diet and what not. But nothing really worked.” 

Finally, she decided to let go of trying to treat her skin and accept it as a part of her life. So, although she could not treat vitiligo, but now the white lesions are not an issue for her anymore.

The habit of reading books helped her a lot in healing inner wounds, shaping a positive mindset and become a stronger person.

Letting go and accepting vitiligo was not easy. For someone like me who always strived for perfection, vitiligo was something that I just could not control. I have always been a go-getter, believing in working hard to achieve anything in life. But with vitiligo, it just didn’t happen. The more I tried to treat, the more frustrating it became. So acceptance was the only thing I was left with to make peace with myself. And now, with personal experience, I can say that self-love is the best possible remedy as it makes vitiligo just a non-issue. 

Getting started with the acceptance journey

In March 2017, vitiligo patches appeared on her hands, which were quite difficult to hide. Before that, she had vitiligo lesions on her unexposed body parts only. By that time, she was already frustrated with numerous treatments she tried. It had been a roller coaster ride as the painful UV light treatment would restore color in some of the patches, but new spots would appear in areas not affected before. On the top of that, the re-pigmented spots would also start turning white again after some time. So, it was almost a useless activity despite of involving so much discomfort, money and time. It was the moment when she realized that she actually needs to change her mindset rather than looking for a new treatment. So she decided not to let vitiligo control or drive her life anymore.

She attended a few personal development seminars and also read the book ‘You can heal your life’ by Louise L Hay. This book, along with other books such as ‘Power of now’ by Eckhart Tolle and ‘Quantum healing’ by Deepak Chopra helped her nurture self-love and acceptance. Also, she learnt to look at the things with a positive perspective.

In October 2017, she travelled solo and realized that no one noticed or questioned about her vitiligo. It was such an eye opener to her that vitiligo is such a small thing and it was only her over-thinking that made a ‘monster’ out of it.

By nature, she loves challenges so when her brother, who is into health and fitness, suggested her to participate in a fitness competition, she took it a challenge to grow. She entered the Europe’s largest fitness competition in ‘International model’ category and proudly flaunted her spots. It made her emotionally and physically stronger so much so that now she is travelling around the world talking about vitiligo and doing her bit shattering the stigma surrounding this skin condition.

I’ve always been very fashion conscious. I just love fashion. But, I started to wear dresses to hide my vitiligo. You know, I would be fully dressed, wearing long sleeves to cover the white spots. Fortunately, I came out of that apologetic mindset and now my whole wardrobe has gone back to normal again. Participating in that fitness competition helped me greatly to accept my body and regain lost confidence.

The moment I stepped on the stage, it set me free from the chain of self-consciousness. I celebrated adoring and admiring my unique and beautiful body and I think that was the best thing that I ever did.

Ninu Galot as a vitiligo advocate

When Ninu was struggling with vitiligo, there were not many people out there talking about vitiligo, or body positivity. Nowadays, people like Winnie Harlow are doing an amazing job. Still, there is a genuine need for more such people to shatter the vitiligo stigma and spread the message that vitiligo is not a big deal.

As a proud vitiligo advocate, she aims to do two things. Firstly, she wants to help people with vitiligo that are struggling at the moment and secondly, creating awareness in the society to eliminate the misconceptions about vitiligo. Unfortunately, in many parts of the world, people still take it a contagious condition and are not ready to treat it as normal.

With the Ninu Galot Foundation, she wants to help create an inclusive world where vitiligo is embraced and accepted in the society. Her foundation aims to improve the overall quality of life for people with vitiligo in UK, India and across the world.

Being a British Indian, she understands that the level of social awareness about vitiligo in India needs serious improvement. So, she has already travelled to India raising awareness about vitiligo by talking in the print media, electronic media and live events.

Her message to the fellow vitiligo community

It happens all the time that after listening to her life story of embracing vitiligo, people would admire her strong character. But they don’t know what she has gone through. This remarkable transformation didn’t happen overnight.

Please don’t be hard on yourself. Don’t look at me today and think ‘wow, she is so confident.’ It has taken some time for me to get here. In fact, I am still a work in progress as life is all about continuously improving yourself and becoming the better version.

So take it as a continuous journey; one step at a time. And most importantly, just be real and love yourself for who you are because you only have one life and you can’t afford to spend it worrying about what others are thinking about you.