Shape shifter
How Makaia Carr learned to love her body
It’s almost half nine when I realise I was meant to call Makaia Carr 20 minutes ago. She answers on the third ring. The 39-year-old Auckland woman was due at the gym at 9.30am. But she has a book about to be released, and, calmly, she agrees to go ahead with the interview.
Calm. It’s a relatively new thing Carr is trying out. For four years from July 2012 to 2016, she was at the helm of Motivate Me, a Facebook-based, members-only health and fitness community, and M Fit, a complementary activewear retailer. She started the community while she was a regional manager for a finance company. Like so many of us, she’d gone on an exercise and ‘‘clean eating’’ bender to obtain a ‘‘bikini body’’ for a friend’s upcoming wedding in Rarotonga. In March 2012, she was posting progress updates on her personal Facebook page – for accountability, she writes in her new book, Keeping it Real.
‘‘What I was doing for myself and the way I was sharing it on my Facebook page was having a positive impact on other people and their levels of motivation.
‘‘This in turn improved my mental health – the adage that helping others makes you feel good is so true.’’
It’s difficult to remember a time when social media influencers weren’t former reality TV contestants who were now paid oodles to spruik some supplement on their Instagram accounts. But Carr, who grew up in Hawera, the eldest of five sisters, did it the old-fashioned way: attracting followers by being genuinely relatable.
In her book, Carr writes of being a caregiver and breadwinner for her siblings after her parents separated when she was a young teenager, and of becoming pregnant with her now husband Jason when she was 17. She discusses her perennially unhealthy relationship with alcohol and food. And she discloses being sexually abused by family ‘‘friends’’ when she was 10 or 11.
After she obtained her bikini body, Carr, who is not a nutritionist or a personal trainer, and left school in sixth form, continued to post updates, tips and encouragement on a new Facebook page, around which she formed a community that members paid to subscribe to.
After two years, she quit her job to focus fulltime on Motivate Me, soon turning over half a million dollars. Within four years, she had more than 150,000 followers across various platforms. Motivate Me had more than 3500 paying members. Carr went on speaking tours with other wellness influencers such as Millie Elder-Holmes and Julia and Libby Matthews. The mother of two was 65 kilograms and 13 per cent body fat.
But in 2016, Carr injured her knee playing netball. She required surgery and couldn’t exercise. She started having nightmares about her childhood abuse. She self-medicated with alcohol, put on weight, and ultimately told her Facebook followers she was taking a break.She stayed in bed after ‘‘big nights out’’.
‘‘I stopped meeting friends for coffee,’’ she writes. ‘‘I was only interested if there was wine involved.’’
Carr was having suicidal thoughts and, for the first time, requested antidepressants from her GP. She sold Motivate Me and M Fit – ‘‘my life for five years’’. She stopped drinking.
The knee injury spelled the end of Carr’s involvement with Motivate Me, but she had known for six to eight months that something had to give, she says now.
Even when she warned her followers she was taking a break from Facebook, she was inundated with messages which, while often well-meaning, were draining. Fourteen-year-old boys and 65-yearold grandmothers struggling with their own mental health were among those asking Carr for help.
‘‘It was so heartbreaking to read these stories, but I couldn’t possibly reply in depth to all of them,
especially in my current mental state,’’ she writes.
‘‘All I could do was refer them to services such as Lifeline in the hope they’d get the help they needed.’’
Carr’s mental health was improving when she started becoming aware of the dangers of social media. First, she discovered her identity had been stolen by a woman who was ‘‘catfishing’’ an online lover. And, after watching Taryn Brumfitt’s film
Embrace, which documents Brumfitt’s journey from self-loathing to self-love, Carr realised her own social media presence – with its photos of her toned ‘‘bikini body’’ and updates on gym visits – might have negatively impacted her own followers.
Says Carr: ‘‘It’s not like you’re intending to hurt people or shame people or make people feel bad for not doing what you’re doing or not looking the way that you look... But upon reflection, I do think, ‘God, I must have been making many women feel s... about themselves, and that sucks.’’
She adds that while followers have a responsibility to accept themselves and not be upset by how someone else looks, ‘‘people with a platform who have an ability to share a message or impact or influence, we do have a responsibility to be mindful, maybe, of how our message is going to impact people’’.
There are some details in the book, which is half memoir, half self-help manual, which Carr’s followers will be surprised, maybe even distressed, to learn. But she has always been open about her struggles with depression. Today, Carr maintains her follower base, but her message is slightly different – one of calm, rather than craziness.
She’s no longer training for (and winning) corporate boxing matches. She’s walking her dog. She’s limiting green smoothies to once a week, eating ‘‘clean whole foods’’ 80 per cent of the time and ‘‘whatever the soul wants’’ 20 per cent of the time. She’s still supporting people, but with their mental health, rather than their bod goals.
Two months ago, Carr gave a talk at a gym on the topic. A woman she didn’t recognise approached Carr in tears, telling her she’d saved her life. Carr was gently sceptical, but the woman told her she’d sent her a Facebook message saying she needed help. Carr had replied, and the reply had made all the difference.
‘‘Social media is a double-edged sword,’’ Carr says. ‘‘Some days I hate it and I do want to walk away from it. But then there’s other days where, actually, it is an amazing tool, if used properly to connect with people who struggle to communicate, who struggle to leave their house, who struggle to be in front of people.
Keeping it Real by Makaia Carr (Penguin Random House, $38) is out now.
‘‘Social media is a double-edged sword. Some days I hate it and I do want to walk away from it. But then there’s other days where, actually, it is an amazing tool.’’ Makaia Carr