Body Image and Business
Episode 10 of the Self-Made Mamas Podcast
Content Warning: Profanity, body dysmorphia, disordered eating
Today on the podcast I’m tackling an issue that has been coming up a lot for my clients lately and one that has also felt very present for me in the last year or so: body image as a business owner.
This may seem like a disjointed topic, but I believe that self-worth and success are inextricably linked. For women and femmes building personal brands, body image often presents a huge challenge when it comes to owning our worth and acting accordingly.
Welcome back to another episode of the Self-Made Mamas podcast. I want to talk about something a little bit unconventional. I don’t know I’ve actually heard another entrepreneur really talk about this, but today I want to talk about body image and how that affects business. This is a conversation that has been coming up a lot for me lately. In my personal conversations, it’s been something I’ve been thinking about and chewing on a lot. It’s also something that has come up with my clients, oddly enough, at the same time. I thought that was a little bit of collective consciousness/divine timing type stuff there. I know from experience at this point that if it’s on my mind, and if it’s on the minds of my clients, that is probably on your mind as well, so I hope this meets you where you are and that you get some value out of it. This is a totally unscripted episode. I don’t even have notes. This is really just a chat I wanted to have with you, and I think it’s a really important discussion.
When you first start out in business, you’re just kind of going for it, trying to make sales, doing all of the technical stuff and business tasks that come with starting and growing a business. Then as you evolve as an entrepreneur, you settle into yourself as a business owner and start to find your rhythm. Things start to get a little bit less hectic and a bit more automatic, a bit more comfortable. You’re starting to reach new levels and address new problems. As that happens, I find you really start to come up against issues that are peripheral to business. What I mean by that is, problems with your mindset and with yourself that don’t seem like they are directly related to business, but they actually have a huge impact on your success and your confidence. All of those softer things that are less tangible, less in your face and less obvious, that really impact the way that you show up in the world and for your business, and ultimately the results you get in your business.
I think as female entrepreneurs, body image is one of the biggest things that comes up. There are a lot of different things that you wouldn’t think affect your business and the way you show up as an entrepreneur, who you are as an entrepreneur and person, that actually do. So many different things. We have sexual repression. That is something that affects the way you show up as a woman, the way you show up as an entrepreneur. Even just sexism in general and the patriarchy. I’m a feminist, I’m also very logical and grounded, and it’s absolutely apparent to me as a business coach the ways in which sexism and misogyny affect female entrepreneurs, particularly in the online tech space. There are all these different things at play, and body image is one of the most obvious manifestations of all of these structural and systemic issues. It’s one that so many people come up against, and don’t consider a factor in their business success. I really, really feel that it is.
The way you feel about yourself obviously affects the way you show up in the world. It affects the way you let other people treat you and what you feel, deep down inside, you deserve. I don’t think you need me to tell you that it’s going to affect your business, but let’s rewind a little bit.
This is a very raw topic for me. I’m 31 now, but as I’ve entered my 30s I have felt a huge increase in my overall confidence and self-assurance, and I think that’s pretty normal. Over the last five to six years, I’ve been through a lot of trauma and stress. It’s led me down this painful but overall worth it path of re-parenting myself and relearning how to be a person, how to be an adult, so I can be a really good mother to my kids and a better partner to my husband. Also so that I can just be a happy and content person. For the most part, I feel like I’ve done a lot of that work very successfully, and I feel really good about that. I’ve transformed the way that I parent in the last few years, the way that I navigate friendships, the way that I show up in my marriage. I’ve been able to let go of a lot of the pain and fear-based thinking that really got me in my early 20s, and caused me a lot of unnecessary issues.
Inherited Body Image Issues
Something I’ve really struggled to let go of is my body image issues. As I said, I’m 31. I’ve had two kids now, and as of the time of recording this, I weigh about 30 pounds more than my ideal happy weight, as I call it. A year and a half ago I had a nine-pound baby, and my body has changed so much more from this last pregnancy than it did with my first son. I would love to tell you that I don’t care about that, and the way my body looks doesn’t affect me, but the reality is that it’s been really, really hard. For the last year or so, since about six months postpartum, I’ve been having a really hard time with it.
I’ve had body issues for as long as I can remember. I have memories from when I was five or six years old, being told the food I liked to eat was going to make me fat. The only reason I know I was that young is because I remember being told this when I still lived in England as a child, and we immigrated to Canada in September of the year I turned six. At the absolute oldest, I was being told this at age six, which is just insane. My family’s British, and everyone was fairly slim when we immigrated to Canada and for some reason, being absolutely vicious about fat people was like a family sport. I have memories of my grandfather literally taking food out of my hands and poking me in the stomach. I have memories of my mom, commenting on people as soon as they were out of earshot, or seeing people or characters on TV and making comments about them. There was this very big focus on the way people looked and being really, really mean if they did not look in an acceptable way, whatever that was.
I grew up in a very strict environment, not allowed to wear a lot of what my friends wore. Very often I was told things like, “You can’t get away with that skirt, or “You can’t get away with those jeans,” or “You can’t wear the things that your friends wear, because your body is different.” Things like that. Then on different occasions, I was pushed to wear, for example, weather-appropriate clothing in the summer. This caused me so much distress because, at this point, I just wanted to hide my body as much as possible. This was probably around age 10 or 11. Again, very young. I actually have this memory of sitting on my bed sobbing before school one year. It must have been grade eight or nine because I was being made to wear shorts that day. It was supposed to be a really hot day, 35 degrees celsius, or something, and I wasn’t allowed to wear a skirt to school. My mom had bought me the shorts and they were just normal inoffensive denim shorts. They weren’t super tiny or anything. I think they had that embroidered flower thing that was in for a while at the end of the 90s and beginning of the 2000s. For some reason, having to wear them and have my thighs on display had me basically hysterical with anxiety. To be honest, I don’t know that any single person at my school would have noticed anything about my legs or my body except for how pale I was because I’m very fair. In my head though, I was basically a leper.
Throughout history, women’s bodies have been dictated to us. Every era, every decade there’s a new body, a new look. There’s a new thing, a way that we’re supposed to be. I honestly think there’s a special kind of hell that women who came up in the 90s and 2000s experienced. For whatever reason, that 20-year period was all about being emaciated and all of fashion was about basically showing off how little body fat you had. If you didn’t match a certain body type, which was unattainable for 99% of us, then you looked like crap in the styles of the day. At least, you would have been perceived to look like crap, and you wouldn’t wear them because of that.
It’s 2021 now. As many of you know, my brother lives with us and he’s 16. I’ll drop him off or pick him up from school and I’ll see these girls of all shapes and sizes, wearing all of these trends. It’s so funny to me because a lot of the trends from the 90s and 2000s are back now. I will see these size 16 or 18 girls rocking little shorts and crop tops, just walking down the street looking so confident and I don’t know what’s going on in their heads. I’m not going to pretend to assume that they don’t have their own issues. I can tell you right now, though, that when I was at school, if a bigger or even mid-size girl like myself had worn those outfits, someone would have overtly made fun of them, because that was acceptable back then.
For those of us that grew up in the 90s and 2000s, which I’m assuming is most of you, things were pretty vicious when it came to bodies. I think a lot of us have carried that with us, and a lot of our moms and the female role models we had in our lives, also carried this from their childhoods and reinforced it for us as well. A small minority of women my age in my life had parents who were really body positive and didn’t prescribe to the fat-phobic, anti-fat narrative that was very prevalent in the 2000s. Again, the majority of them carry their own issues from their childhoods, upbringings and cultures, and bring them onto us.
I have another memory. I was in high school, or maybe just out of high school. My mom, who at this point was actually overweight herself, took us both to this weight loss clinic. They put something like ultrasound gel on your body, then wrapped you in these pads and you stood on this machine. It basically vibrated your whole body and was supposed to help melt the fat off your body. I think I had blocked it out, but I just remembered this a few weeks ago while lying in bed with my husband. I just randomly remembered standing on this machine with it jiggling my body fat and I was laughing as I remembered it. As I relayed this message to him, he asked “Why were you there? Why were you in a random store, standing on a platform having your body fat jiggled? That’s so strange.” I said, “Oh, my mom took me to get rid of our body fat.” He literally rolled over and just stared at me because it’s so messed up.
I think tons of us have these horrible experiences, maybe not that particular one, that told us having body fat and being of a certain size was a negative thing. That it was something we had to get rid of and something to be ashamed of. Up to this point, at the age of 30 and 31, I have spent nearly my entire life dressing to make myself look smaller and dressing in a way that would be “flattering”. Dressing in a way so that people wouldn’t know how much body fat I have. I’m five foot nine, so I weigh quite a lot. I’ve always weighed a lot. When I tell people how much I weigh, the first thing they say is, “Oh my God, I would never have guessed that!” That’s wired into us—the more you weigh, the worse it is.
We do now have this amazing movement and some social change when it comes to diverse body shapes in advertising and social media where we can see people that look like us and people in all different bodies rocking all different styles loving themselves. Still, for a lot of us, myself included, a lot of that childhood stuff was frankly, slightly traumatizing, and is still ingrained. For me, I know these body image issues are very deeply rooted. It’s probably one of the biggest personal hurdles I have to overcome as an adult woman, and I’m making progress at it but I am so far from being over it. I would prefer to come on this podcast and create content when I’ve already overcome a hurdle. Then I can walk you through how I did it and share my insights. This is not something I’ve overcome. This is something I’m actively still working on, every single day.
I’m working on it in how I make fashion choices. For the first time in my life, I own crop tops now. You would have had to put a gun to my head to get me to wear a crop top in middle school or high school because I thought I was hideous. There’s no way I would have been caught dead in one, just in case somebody made fun of me. I weigh significantly more now, too, and I have a nice little kangaroo pouch courtesy of my second baby. I’m starting to not care and am wearing things anyway. That’s not to say I don’t catch sight of myself sometimes and have those negative thoughts, but I’m starting to become more capable of saying, “Whatever, I don’t care. I’m going to wear it because I think it’s cute.” I’m starting to be able to make choices in my fashion that are less about whether or not it’s flattering on me, and more about whether or not I actually like the clothing item, the colour, the cut, and decorating myself with my clothing as opposed to using my clothing to pretend that I don’t look the way I look or feel the way I feel.
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Body Image and Video Marketing
It’s important, first and foremost, just to acknowledge that this is a real struggle for so many of us. When different clients have brought up body image issues with me and we start to dive into mindset work and why people are experiencing blocks, it can take a while to scrape back the first few layers. With my WhatsApp coaching clients, for example, they’ll present an issue to me and we’ll start talking about it. Typically, when we’re just starting to dig into an issue, I just fire some questions at them to start things going and they’ll begin to disclose more and more information as they start to think deeper on the issue.
A lot of the time lately when we’re talking about blocks, we’re talking about how to show up in our business. I think the rise of vertical video has made this a very present issue for a lot of female entrepreneurs. We are now in a place where, in order to grow on Instagram or to utilize TikTok, we need to get in front of our phones and be on camera. We need to show ourselves, and the nicer we look, the better things seem to do. While that’s not necessarily true across the board, I think that’s a feeling a lot of us, especially those who grew up in the 90s and 2000s, carry. This kind of societal body trauma. The thought of showing our whole body in a vertical video for an Instagram reel or the thought of dancing or somebody seeing the parts of our body we usually try to hide or try to dress in the most flattering way is very nerve-wracking and very vulnerable. I’ve noticed that Gen Z doesn’t seem to really care as much about this. It’s not that they don’t have their own toxic beauty ideals, because I have no doubt they do. They have grown up with a lot more access to body-positive content, seeing normal people of all shapes, sizes, backgrounds, races, and abilities. All of these people have their own mini platforms, whereas we grew up only seeing celebrities with platforms. You look at magazines from the early 2000s and back then celebrities were almost forced into having eating disorders to be thin.
Younger girls and younger generations using these vertical video mediums don’t seem to have the same hang-ups. They just show up with no makeup, hair messy, looking like they just got dragged through a hedge backwards. I sound like my grandmother when I say that, but you know what I mean. They don’t really seem to care. Whereas for women that are 26, 27 and older, we put a bit more pressure on ourselves. Most of us prefer not to show up on the videos we create for our businesses looking like crap, or feeling like it. That’s something coming up a lot for clients. “I understand that I need to do video, I don’t want to be left behind on social media, but I don’t want to be on video.” This has really brought this body image issue to the forefront, and for me as well.
I have never preferred video as a medium for marketing, but it’s no longer optional. Unfortunately, if you’re going to have a personal brand, if you’re going to be putting yourself out there and wanting to grow, video is kind of a must. Especially if you are newer to the business scene, there’s very little chance of growing organically on social media without harnessing the power of video on TikTok and Instagram. Facebook is rolling out reels, pulling them over from Instagram, and possibly allowing you to create them right on Facebook. It is essentially the future of mobile-first marketing. Then, of course, Google owns YouTube. I find YouTube to be not as relevant for my demographic. Millennial women are less into YouTube than perhaps other demographics, but it’s going to become increasingly important. Different video platforms are going to be coming up, it’s just where things are going. If you’re a personal brand, an online business owner and entrepreneur, and you’re looking to market organically, there is very little you can do if you are unwilling to tap into video.
While you don’t have to be putting yourself on camera every single time, you are going to need to at some point. On the accounts where people have used vertical video to blow up their online businesses, they are very, very present in their videos. This puts a lot of pressure on us. It really brings these body image and self-esteem issues to the forefront. When you’re hiding behind a computer screen writing captions, or posting perfectly styled and posed pictures, you don’t have to worry about this stuff as much. I know that I prefer to talk and write. I like doing podcasts and I like writing blog posts or Instagram captions, whatever it is. When it comes to reels and TikTok, it’s a video and that’s it. While there are ways to get creative, I’m relying on you seeing a video of me and liking what you see enough in the first 1.2 seconds to keep watching it. Then trying to get you to engage with it in order for my organic marketing to be effective. That is very vulnerable, very scary, and very hard when you have self-esteem issues in this way.
A Realization
I could talk about why this is a problem for hours on end, but I’d really like to bring you something helpful out of this little rant. The first thing is, if you are stressing about video, feeling upset and vulnerable because video is the new expectation, I just want you to know that I see you and that you’re not alone. There are so many of us feeling the same way, myself included. That’s not going to stop me from doing it because I am driven to grow this brand and make this business as successful as it can be, but I’m with you. I don’t like it either. If you’ve been feeling self-conscious and vulnerable, resentful that this is even a thing you need to do to grow your business, I see you and those are valid feelings and I understand why you have them.
The second thing I want to share with you is this realization. This thought I’ve been having over the last few weeks has actually really started to move the needle for me. As I mentioned, since I had my second son I’ve really been struggling with my body. I feel like I’m just lugging this extra weight around. I could be exercising more, but I do exercise regularly and I eat very well. Up to this point in my life, that has always been enough to maintain my happy weight. Since having my second son, that is not the case. I’ve been struggling with that because I’m just not in a place in my life right now where super drastic lifestyle changes are feasible. Maybe in a year or so, but right now there’s too much else going on. I just need to be able to live my life and do things in moderation. There isn’t a lot of room for drastic and severe changes or restrictions for me at the moment. I have had to be realistic with myself about that, and the fact that this is what I’m going to look like for the foreseeable future, so how do I feel about that? For the last year or so, I’ve been feeling pretty shitty about it. My old clothes don’t fit the way that I want them to. Some things I can’t get into, and that’s not a nice feeling. One of the things I’ve done to address that is buying new clothes. I’ve folded up and packed away the stuff that fit before my pregnancy and just set them aside because I do think it’s reasonable to expect that I’ll be able to wear them again. If another year goes by and that’s not the case, then I’ll just get rid of them. I have bought myself new clothes that actually fit so I can feel confident in the body I’m in now. That has done some good for sure, but the real change for me in the last few weeks has been this shift in perspective.
Side note, I’m not going to share my weight with you. Not because I care if you know, but because I don’t want this to be another subconscious milestone type thing. It doesn’t matter what you weigh, how much fat is on your body, what size of clothes you wear. It matters how you feel and where you feel good. I don’t think we should shame people for wanting to or trying to lose weight any more than we should shame people for carrying extra weight, for being bigger or being a larger size. We should just let people do what makes them feel good and offer them support and help if there’s something disordered or dangerous going on. That is not what’s happening here.
I want to share this little shift with you. For basically my entire life up to this point, I have dealt with my body image issues by telling myself over and over again, “You’re not fat, you’re not big, you’re not this, you’re not that,” which doesn’t make any sense because I have dozens of close friends who are fat and gorgeous and big and beautiful. The size they are has never for me correlated with how amazing I think they are and how amazing I think they look and how beautiful they are. For some reason, I couldn’t apply that to myself. In the last few weeks, I have been looking at my body in the mirror a lot, because this is the one that I have right now. I’ve been thinking, “So what if I’m fat? So what if I do have fat? If I’m big? So what if I weigh this much?”
That might sound really stupid to some of you. I think those of us who grew up in that era where any body fat at all was considered a negative and the more body fat you had, the more negative it was, I think we all adopted this sort of denial about it. The way to feel better about yourself was to just deny if you were fat or if you were a bigger size or anything like that. I remember reading once that Mariah Carey would have the labels cut out of her jeans on photoshoots and smaller labels sewn in because she didn’t want to see the size that she was, which is just heartbreaking. I think we have all kind of done that subconsciously and I know that my go-to coping mechanism for my body image issues has always been to deny and console myself by saying, “No, you’re not big, you’re not fat,” the whole time, feeding into this idea that being bigger, being fatter, having excess weight was bad. I was feeding into that idea and so I continued to give it power over me. It was totally nonsensical because again, some of my best friends are stunning plus-sized women and they’re confident, they’re beautiful, I love the way they dress. I love the way that they look and present themselves. It would never occur to me to think less of them because they have more fat on their bodies, but for some reason, I could not extend the same courtesy to myself.
The other day, I was pulling my jeans on. American Eagle skinny jeans, fresh out of the dryer. I’m like pulling them on and kind of fighting them up over my little mom pouch that I have on my belly, and I thought, “I can’t get away from this. There’s a lot of fat here. What am I going to do?” Then literally the next second, this next thought, “So what if there’s fat?” I just had this weird moment where all of a sudden noticed that yes, there’s fat on my body. There’s fat on my thighs, fat on my stomach, my waist isn’t as small as it was before this baby, there’s a little extra fat on my arms, and my boobs are bigger than they were before. I’ve had to size up my clothes, and so what? I cannot tell you how freeing that is.
Some people might hear this and wonder what the big deal is, but I know some of you feel and have felt the same way that I do. That’s why I’m recording this very long, overly wordy podcast. I wanted to share the, “So what if I’m fat or bigger? So what if I’m bigger? So what if I look a certain way?” mindset shift with you because that has opened up new freedom for me where, instead of trying to pretend to be smaller, I have stopped doing that. I’m just showing up in my slightly bigger body and not really caring. That is pretty groundbreaking for me, as someone who obviously has very deep-seated body image issues, to just not care and to show up and wear a pair of skinny jeans with a crop top, with my little FUPA poking out of the jeans. You can very clearly tell that I’m not a size six when I’m wearing this outfit. For me to not care is groundbreaking.
Carving a New Path
I’m not going to lie, it got me really excited to start creating video content again. It sounds so ridiculous, but the idea that I don’t need to look a certain way to show up on video to market my business should have been second nature but it wasn’t. This kind of idea of freedom came from acknowledging both that I’m going to be successful and I’m going to be chunky, and I’m okay with it. That is hugely freeing and hugely empowering.
I think that is a path we have to carve for ourselves because we haven’t seen that many examples of it. In our society, we equate success with a certain look. When I was growing up, I idolized the Legally Blonde and Devil Wears Prada type of career. I thought I was going to wear super fashionable work outfits, nice heels, be thinner, and work in a city and everything was going to be awesome. All of this BS you come up with when you’re a kid. The reality is, this is the picture of female success we are presented with even now. Even though in 2021 we have so many other examples to look at on social media and in advertising, the narrative of successful females rarely includes fat females or people of differing abilities unless they’re almost being tokenized in a very gross way. It’s not intersectional at all. It is not diverse. We have a very homogenous view of what a successful woman looks like.
As the first generation of women able to be entirely self-made with nothing more than an internet connection, I think it’s actually up to us to change that. That idea has really sparked a fire in me, and I hope it sparks a fire in you, too. Thinking that we can piggyback on to the body positivity movement but offering a different visual representation of what a successful woman looks like is really cool. It’s really energizing and really empowering. I don’t know about you, but I want all the little girls growing up right now to be able to see examples of women who look all different ways, all different races, abilities, body shapes and sizes and aesthetics, just killing it and being super successful. I don’t want them to associate a certain aesthetic with a certain degree of success because I think that’s what a lot of us have done over the years, and it’s now holding us back from really shining in the new era of video-focused digital marketing.
I’m going to leave it there for today. I would love to hear your thoughts on this, so drop into my Instagram DMs, send me an email, whatever you want to do. If you’re listening to this episode and it resonated with you, share it in your stories and tell me what you think. I would love to hear from you and create a conversation around this. Those last few thoughts I just shared with you have been really groundbreaking for me in the last few weeks and I really hope that they have the same effect on you.
Action Items
A. Many millennial women and femmes who grew up in the 90s and 2000s have inherited body image issues made worse by influences and role models (including family) who subscribe to diet culture beliefs and fatphobia.
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- It’s difficult but necessary to critically analyze these unhealthy belief systems and separate them from how you view your own body, your worth, and your ability to succeed.
B. Video marketing is here to stay, and if you want to grow your brand and business online, it’s no longer optional to use it. Online businesses that get personal and show their people in their videos do better than those who do not.
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- First, if you’re feeling stressed and vulnerable with the rise of video marketing and the idea of putting yourself front and center on camera, know that you’re not alone. Many women feel the same.
- Second, start to actively work on and address the mindset and body image issues that are blocking you from getting in front of the camera. This may be as simple as acknowledging that yes, you do indeed have body fat. Yes, you do have round hips. Yes, you do have a squishy postpartum tummy. So what? Show up in the body you have and stop denying that it is the way it is.
C. A successful woman doesn’t look one single way. By showing up as your true self, you can contribute to showing a new generation of girls that success looks like all body shapes and sizes, all races, all abilities, all aesthetics.
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Self-Made Mamas Podcast. You can find more information about working with us at theselfmademama.com or connect with us on Instagram at @selfmademama_. I can’t wait to chat.
