BODY ARMOUR
Taryn Brumfitt found international fame through a naked Facebook post that celebrated her relaxed confidence in her body. The Body Image Movement was born and, nine years later, children are the focus
Her moment of clarity came onstage during a bodybuilding competition – with her father, embarrassingly, in the audience. Enough, Adelaide’s Taryn Brumfitt told herself. No more dieting, no more counting calories, no more punishing workouts designed to sculpt and shape her body in some pre-ordained way.
“I was in the body that I thought would make me happy and I was really unhappy,” Brumfitt says. “I realised my body isn’t just an ornament in life, it’s a vehicle; and health isn’t just physical, it’s emotional, mental and spiritual.”
It wasn’t quite an epiphany but the extreme circumstance of inviting body judgment before an audience was the start of Brumfitt’s reappraisal of her size and shape, and the way she thought about herself. Instead of looking at her legs and seeing stretch marks or cellulite, she began to appreciate them for the two marathons they had carried her through. She started to celebrate changes that accompanied motherhood and was grateful for her body’s power to produce three children.
She decided a life without cake and chocolate while punishing her body at the gym was too high a price to pay to chase some externalised ideal. Without knowing it, Brumfitt was rewriting the rule book back at a time when body image was barely a conversation and not the buzzword it is now.
“You stop and have a moment to think, ‘I wasn’t born into the world hating my body so what are the messages I am buying into that aren’t serving me? Who is saying to me I should be thinner?’,” she says. “It’s the lens through which we see our bodies.”
All of which led to the post that changed everything. This was the “before and after” Facebook pictures Brumfitt, a professional photographer, posted of her body-building self as the “before” and the tastefully depicted but naked body she had come to love as “after”.
It didn’t just go viral, it brought direct international attention and has been seen by 100 million people, most of whom admired her bravery.
But not all.
“Fatso, put your clothes back on,” said one. “This is just enabling fat people to stay fat and lazy. You want to truly love your body??” said another.
Her personal favourite was this one. “I’d bang her sober in the before pic. I’d need a few stiff drinks for the after.”
None of it fazed her. Realising she was on to something, Brumfitt in late 2013 started the Body Image Campaign which took on more permanent form in the Body Image Movement. Then she wrote a book, Embrace, with a foreword from US TV host Ricki Lake.
Then came the Embrace film, made with funds on Kickstarter and with the support of people such as actor Ashton Kutcher who wrote about her work. She took the message of hope – that when you embrace your body you’ll do things you never thought possible – to Google headquarters in Silicon Valley where her talk was streamed to Google offices around the world.
Once on that path she has never come off it and her conviction has only deepened. Nine years later it is her full-time job; she has a studio and office space in Glenside Studios, staff, and a collaboration with honorary Associate Professor of Victoria University Dr Zali Yager who lives on the NSW mid-north coast and heads her own Body Confident Collective.
Yager contacted Brumfitt after seeing Embrace because she was so impressed with the power of film in getting the body image message across.
“I looked around and realised I had been trying to make people feel better about their bodies for a long time but I couldn’t have that impact without that emotional engagement,” Yager says. She did an evaluation of the film to gather evidence about its effectiveness, and coauthored a paper on the results, which was published in BMC Women’s Health.
While Embrace was aimed at fostering acceptance and self-love in adults, the focus now is on children and what they and their parents can do to help them grow up without pitting their sense of worth against the impossible standards set by largely photoshopped images in beauty magazines and on social media.
There is a new book, Embrace Kids, coauthored by Brumfitt and Yager, and a documentary of the same name whose executive producers are Adelaide actor Teresa Palmer, advocate for women and children Natasha Stott Despoja and comedian Celeste Barber.
The book is an eye-opener for parents. Before understanding the issue better, in Yager’s household the word “fat” had been banned altogether, which did nothing really to help. Another mother writes in the book about saying to her kids during Covid lockdown that she had “a mummy tummy”. She repeated it a week or so later without paying much attention, only to have one of her daughters pass the observation on to a stranger. She could also see her child internalising some of the guilt and shame she was feeling about her post-baby body.
So, what should you do if a child comes to you asking, “Am I fat?” Of course, they are hoping to be told something magical that will take their own self-judgment away. Most parents, in a well-meaning way, respond by proclaiming “You’re not fat! You’re beautiful.”
Wrong. The book explains that this reinforces the power of the fat word and strengthens the hold it already has. Brumfitt advises instead to keep things neutral, to tell a child their body is useful and wonderful and can do many things, that all bodies are good bodies and that worth has nothing to do with weight.
“We don’t want to demonise fat – saying ‘you’re not fat, you’re beautiful’ makes fat bad, and when people feel shame or are teased about their body, they are more likely to make poor choices in terms of health outcomes,” Brumfitt says. “You can’t be fat! Fat is part of your body; fat keeps us alive and if we didn’t have fat we wouldn’t be here. It’s like saying ‘I am fingernails’; it’s fat and we need it and some people have more and some people have less.”
I was in the body that I thought would make me happy and I was really unhappy
Clearly this is not an overnight process but the more parents reinforce the message by living every day in a way that says bodies are wonderful, useful things, and not a source of torment, the more resilient kids will be.
“If you isolate one conversation about fat (it won’t work), but if it’s an ongoing conversation we have with kids from a very young age – that what they look like is the least important thing about them – they will have better mental and physical health,” Brumfitt says.
The same careful response is needed when a child announces they want to go on a diet. Brumfitt’s view is that diets don’t work and they can lead to disordered eating. As well, to agree to the diet is to reinforce there is something wrong. One child in the book traced her disordered eating back to her parents taking her to see a nutritionist. It was well intentioned but to the child it proved she really was fat.
“People in a psychologist’s office talking about eating disorders can trace it back to this moment where they thought there was something wrong with their bodies,” Yager says.
“Affirming they should go on a diet is one of those moments that could potentially be a trigger for those pathways.”
Restricting calories and food categories destroys freedom around food and does nothing to help a child find a place of natural balance. So don’t take things out of their diet, instead add more fruit and vegetables in for the whole family, and generally consumption of chocolate will go down, Yager says.
All this is a minefield with many traps and Brumfitt’s book reminds us how easy it is to be swept along in random ways.
Advertising has at least made some headways since the Special K breakfast cereal “pinch test”
TV campaign in the 1980s that advised women who could pinch more than an inch to do something about it, while the husband looks on in judgment.
But just who was it that decided the hourglass curves of Marilyn Monroe, who died in 1962, would be replaced just four years later by the androgynous flatness of British supermodel Twiggy, influencing countless women along the way?
Better still, how did we segue from the fashion trend of heroin chic, exemplified by UK bad girl model Kate Moss, to today’s pneumatic spectacle of Kim Kardashian, a body so extreme it inspired surgical butt lifts?
Interestingly, Kardashian is not singled out by name in Embrace Kids. There is a sense that, like the fat word, it is best not to make her the target.
“I just refuse to believe that one person on the planet can wield so much power!” Brumfitt says of Kardashian. “In the film, we don’t want to tell people it’s not good to do this, don’t do this. We just want to widen their view about social media and how they interact with it.”
Brumfitt wants to encourage children to ask themselves how an image or influencer makes them feel, to ask, “Are the people I am following going to make me feel better about who I am and do they make me a better person in the world? Or are they making me feel bad?” If they are not making you feel better then get them out of your life, she says.
In the documentary, Brumfitt wanted to learn directly from kids. Over an intense Saturday, she auditioned about 100 South Australian children and chose 18 who she thought would respond well to talking about issues on camera. They weren’t vetted for their body image views, more their openness to ideas.
“We wanted to be a bit careful because it wasn’t really about their own body image,” she says. “We were more looking to kids who were curious about body image and wanted to know more.”
The group came together for a three-day workshop at Port Adelaide and were shown footage of role models and encouraged to talk to each other while they were filmed. They returned later for an event at the Regal Theatre where they came on stage and, in front of their parents, shared what they had learned.
The documentary has cast its net wider than body image as it relates to shape, size and weight and includes a multicultural mix with role models including a paralysed athlete, the neurodiverse (autism) and the differently abled. Brumfitt says this is not a change of focus and that celebrating diversity was always part of the plan.
“Embrace Kids has given it a platform to talk more deeply about the issues that I care about,” she says.
She welcomes the deeper engagement with diversity and hints there was some frustration with keeping the conversation too stuck on weight. “Before, it was just, ‘Let’s wheel out the bubbly blonde to talk about body image, love your body’ – I think it’s really shifted gears now,” Brumfitt says. “Only time will allow a subject and depth to a mission to grow. I think it was always there.”
One of the positive things to come out of the documentary is the children’s commitment to valuing themselves in all their colours, shapes and diversities and they responded well to listening to older peers talking about their experience. Just telling kids that body image doesn’t matter, and to “mute, block, unfollow” celebrities and influencers on social media was never the best way forward.
“It is definitely the case that when grown-ups start going to schools and wagging their fingers saying, ‘Just don’t use social media’, that didn’t work very well and they hated us for it,” Yager says.
Appealing to their sense of social justice also helps. Yager says that once kids realised they were being peddled images so companies could make money, their sense of justice was inflamed.
“Young people, particularly in adolescence, are very quick to stand up for things that aren’t fair,” she says. “When we start to ask who is winning from these things, and usually it is very large corporations making even more money, they go ‘wait a minute!’ and they really do get on board.”
The other winning tool is comedy, which is
where Celeste Barber fits in.
Brumfitt says she personally followed Barber, who made her name parodying celebrities doing something supposedly glamorous, and her children loved her and found her very funny. But the message also sank in.
Brumfitt was shopping at Marion with her daughter, Mikaela, who pointed out an advertisement showing a man surfing and a woman, pouting and idle, looking on.
“Mikaela said, ‘We should ask Celeste to do her!’,” says Brumfitt. “I loved that moment because Mikaela saw it for how ridiculous it was. “Those moments give me great hope.” It seems incredible that it took a woman in Adelaide who was comfortable in a softer body to start a movement that has had impacts around the world. What she did was both remarkable and also unremarkable and Brumfitt is not sure if she would do it again if she knew the stir it would cause.
“I didn’t have a clue about what would happen, that was the beauty of it, right?” she says. She did it out of innocence, hoping it might help some people.
Maybe it was in the timing, but it seemed to be what the world needed to listen to right then. A decade on and she might be sick of that photo, but she is fired up by the creativity of the work that is not just about embracing your body but also embracing your life.
Men will be the next body image battleground and the research and development for that phase is only just in its infancy. Brumfitt says she is struck by how much needs to be done.
“It feels like the men and what’s to come there is where we were 10 years ago,” she says.