Diets are a decoy. Career-women, you’re torching valuable time by obsessing over cellulite. Adelaide author of Embrace: My Story from Body Loather to Body Lover Taryn Brumfitt became a global body image warrior when she posted an image of her naked post baby body online, racked up more than 100 million views and got blogged by online cause-crusader Ashton Kutcher. Now leader of the Body Image Movement, she’s talking tough love and how we all need to step up.
By Tracey Withers
First, she’s calling out healthy-size body heroes for recent Photoshop fails. When she talks about a digitally-fiddled Armytage on the cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly’s ‘Body Issue’ cover or a skinnied down swimsuit shot on Beyonce’s Instagram, Brumfitt’s voice gets hot. Not cranky, exactly, but pointed.
“I always like to keep things I say positive and I don’t like to be judgemental, but I do think that celebrities need to have an understanding of the power they wield when they do things like let their photos be Photoshopped.” Bey, vocal self-proclaimed feminist, Brumfitt’s cross hairs zero in on you, especially. “What message is that [digitally-slimmed photo] sending? I think we need to be careful about how we normalise some of this [celebrity] behaviour. It’s like when Naomi Watts came out at the Oscars and she said she’d starved herself [to get into her dress] – it can be quite damaging for young people to hear those words.”
Brumfitt draws no line between the thin-filters on Instagram, where snaps are supposed to be spontaneous legit life, and an obviously hyper-styled glossy fashion mags. “[Photoshopping] is still saying ‘I’m not comfortable in my own skin so I’m going to crop, highlight, render’,” she says. Glossy bulls!t is still bull.
Un-famous serial selfie-takers, Bumfitt has a pointy question for us, too: are we like-baiting? “Social media is about sharing pictures and experiences and I don’t see a problem with that if you’ve got the right intention.
“But if [women are] posting pictures looking for likes and their value system is based on how many comments [they] get, it sets up the constant need for validation.” Brumfitt wants young girls in particular to stand confident on their own two feet. “We need that foundation of values so that [we] feel good about ourselves and don’t look outside of ourselves to be validated.”
If Brumfitt sounds a little ballsy, she’s probably earned it. The 38-year-old ex-photographer hit pretty much every news channel on the planet back in 2012 when, deep in self body-hate, contemplating plastic surgery on her post-baby shape, she had a lightbulb moment. “I thought, ‘How can I tell my daughter to value herself if I’m going to cut up my body to correct its natural shape?’,” she says. But she still wondered if the “perfect bikini body would make me happy”. When a trainer friend suggested she join a body-building competition to radically drop fat, she did. In 15 weeks she was 15 kilos lighter, had zero body fat. “But I wasn’t happy. I was at the gym for hours every day and there was no balance in my life.” Social experiment over, she went back to ‘normal’ and posted a split-screen – bikini shot versus ‘normal’ nudie pic – on social media.
She got hashtag love. She got A-list support. And she got trolled. “People called me a fat pig, disgusting, a bad role model for my children,” Brumfitt says. But she’ll stick a middle finger up at the belly-shamers. “I’m fit, I’m healthy. I’ll eat a burger every now and again but I could run 10 kms right this second. There’s nothing lazy about me.”
Brumfitt reckons our diet culture, elimination and quitting sugar is a waste of time. “We have more diet books and blogs on the market than we’ve ever seen – and we’ve got more people feeling ashamed and depressed about their looks. We’ve got eating disorders going off the charts, anxiety…
Unrealistic, over-complex diets are pretty much edible Photoshop. “I think we should never trust a four-letter word when the first three letters are DIE. People have been bamboozled by all of this information – eat this, don’t eat this, food-combine this and that…
“I never label food ‘good’ or ‘bad’. You never want to have an emotional attachment to food. When someone on a diet slips up and have something ‘bad’, they don’t eat the donut and say, ‘I’m feeling great and I’m going to go run up a mountain’.” We get the shame a guilt spiral. “That self-loathing doesn’t help anything.” Her own positive self image started, she says, with eating intuitively (blessed by the sun and in a natural state… the no-brainers) and repeating positive affirmations. No “sugar fails” make it into her vocab.
She knows it might ruffle feathers but hear ye Brumfitt’s feminist mission to ban fat and ageist talk. “There’s a real issue [around] women and leadership and I wouldn’t be surprised if part of that is because instead of standing around the water cooler talking about world issues, [women] are getting distracted by talking about cellulite and stretch marks. That might sound a little harsh but I really think that’s reality.”
Ladies, we’ve got bigger fights and injustices to defy than wrinkles. “We really, really need move beyond the ‘anti-ageing’ and diet conversations we’re having. We know the problems with the gender pay gap and the lack of women on boards. We know real issues. Let’s fight and defy that.” It’s not that tough to swallow.