I'm continually impressed by the Guides. In declaring itself a feminist organisation, ditching the "love my God" part of the promise and now launching a body confidence badge, Girlguiding UK has rebranded itself in a modern, progressive way. It certainly doesn't resemble the Guides I once knew. As a young woman very much acquainted with the word "woggle", my group's activities were limited to renditions of Ging Gang Goolie interspersed by passive aggressive encounters in leaky tents and bouts of knot-tying. My main concern was escaping the horror of trying out for the homemaking or cow milking badges.

What seems to have changed since my day is that the Guides are taking their pastoral care role in girls' lives much more seriously. Aware that its 400,000 members are under intense scrutiny about the way that they look, Girlguiding has elected to provide courses designed to help them recognise airbrushing and challenge beauty myths. Considering how its latest attitudes survey found that one in five girls of primary school age said they had been on a diet, I don't see any way in which the body confidence badge cannot be a good thing.

In fact I would like to see the Scouts rolling out a similar initiative, because we know from rising rates of male anorexia, as well as from the increasing pressure on boys to work out and get the ripped look, that they share some of the same problems. Whether it's a weight loss pill or a protein shake, the feelings of anxiety are coming from much the same place.

I genuinely wish I'd been given a body confidence course as a young teenager, back when I was freckly and gangly and cripplingly insecure. Particularly relevant is the proposal that the Guides will be taught to challenge "unhealthy body talk". I can't remember when it was that my friendship group started engaging in "fat talk", but we were very young. By the time I was 15 the idea that you relate to other girls in part by telling them how much you too hate your body was fully ingrained.

It may seem like a tiny little thing, but suspecting you might be destined for a lifetime of insecurity, and will in turn spend much of your life discussing that insecurity with other women, can be very dispiriting. That many of your main anxieties, and in turn your worth, will be linked to your body and the way that it looks can also corrode your confidence in other areas, which will consequently appear less important.

It's a feeling that is hard to escape, even in adulthood. In my darker moments, for example, I might think that, although I'm lucky enough to be writing for this newspaper, it means relatively little with a chin like mine. This is despite the fact that I run a blog that mocks sexism in the media, have read Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, and have been in several rooms with several fashion models for long enough to know that their body types are not just atypical of the general female population at large, but practically unknown.

In other words, no one is immune; and while you can equip girls and young women with the tools to recognise that these unrealistic media expectations have a drastic impact on your self-worth, finding that self-worth and keeping it is another matter entirely.

I very much hope that the Guides' courses work, but part of me fears just how ingrained society's body fascism feels. It's important to challenge the current narrative – which is that your value as a woman or a girl is primarily down to how small your waist is, how big your tits are and how wide your thigh gap is capable of being – and provide another.

I pray that the Guides do this in a fun, accessible, non-worthy way. So many body confidence campaigns grate, with their emphasis on "real women" frolicking and gurning or running along beaches because their sanitary towels/wax strips/deodorants have given them the tools to "just be me".

The involvement of Dove worries me. I applaud the Guides' initiative, but for once I would really like to see a body confidence campaign with no brand involvement.