Episode 222: Real Health Radio is back with another guest interview and Chris chats with Lindsay Kite this week. They cover self-objectification, the problems that arise from learning about 'health and fitness' from mainstream media, research on how children model their parents behaviour relating to body image and much more!
Lindsay Kite, Ph.D. and Lexie Kite Ph.D are co-founders of the non-profit Beauty Redefined and More Than a Body, LLC, and experts in the work of body image resilience. They reach millions worldwide via research-backed online education available on their website, social media, and through speaking events to tens of thousands across the US. Their forthcoming book, More Than a Body, is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and hits shelves December 29, 2020.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 222 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at seven-health.com/222.
Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. Today on the show it is a guest interview. My guest today is Lindsay Kite.
Lindsay Kite, PhD, along with her identical twin sister, Lexie Kite, PhD, are co-founders of the non-profit Beauty Redefined and experts in the work of body image resilience. They reach millions worldwide via research-backed online education available on their website, social media, and through speaking events to tens of thousands across the U.S. Their forthcoming book, More Than a Body, is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
While many well-intentioned people promote positive body image from the basis of helping women realise and embrace their beauty, Beauty Redefined changes the conversation about body image by telling girls and women they are more than beautiful. Lexie and Lindsay assert positive body image is about feeling positively towards your body overall, not just what it looks like. The Beauty Redefined mantra is ‘Women are more than just bodies. See more, be more’. This expanded definition of positive body image provides the foundation for their overall mission to promote body image resilience or the ability to become stronger because of the difficulties and shame women experience in their bodies, not in spite of these things.
Through both research and personal experience, Beauty Redefined works to arm girls and women with the tools to become resilient in the face of objectification and unreal ideals about female bodies.
I’ve been aware of Lindsay and Beauty Redefined for many years now. As Lindsay mentions in the interview, they’re going through a bit of a rebranding phase at the moment, and Beauty Redefined is being changed over to More Than a Body, so the same as the title of their book. Their website has already changed over, but their social media handles haven’t yet. So we’re using Beauty Redefined and More Than a Body somewhat interchangeably here.
For a long time, I’ve really enjoyed the content that they put out. More recently, I watched Lindsay’s TED talk and I really loved what she had to say. Then I saw that they had a book coming out, so it seemed like the perfect time to have Lindsay on the show and have a chat. I’m recording this intro in early December, and the book comes out in late December, I think around the time that this will go live. The publishers actually sent me an advance copy of the book in advance of the interview, and I think it is awesome. I will definitely be recommending it to clients when it becomes available.
Each year, I do an end-of-year episode where I go through my favourite books and favourite documentaries and favourite podcasts of the year, and More Than a Body is going to be on my list of favourite books. I do recommend you check it out, because this interview is just the tiniest fraction of what is covered in the book.
For the interview, because Lindsay is in the middle of book promotion mode, we only had a hour, so less than the usual podcasts I do. It did feel like the time flew by. It meant that I really didn’t want to spend much time on Lindsay’s background at the start the way that I normally do, just so we could have the time to then spend on the content of the book.
We talk about self-objectification and what this term means and how it’s experienced. We look at the ways health and fitness are taught to us through mainstream media and the problems this causes. We chat about the belief that we’ll be happier when we’re thinner and the process by which this belief can be changed. We discuss the research about the ways that we, as children, model parents’ behaviour connected to body image. We talk about body image resilience and how to foster this. And we chat about comparison and the trap that it creates.
I loved this conversation, and I would’ve loved to have more time, but if you do like what Lindsay had to say, then please do check out her book, More Than a Body. That is it for the intro. Let’s get on with the conversation. Here is my conversation with Lindsay Kite.
Hey, Lindsay. Thanks so much for joining me on the show today. I’m really excited to be chatting with you.
Lindsay Kite: Yeah, I’m happy to be chatting with you too. Thank you for having me.
Chris Sandel: You have written a book called More Than a Body, which you sent me an advance copy of. Congratulations on what you’ve created. It’s really wonderful. I loved getting to go through it. I think for today, we’re going to spend most of our time just chatting about the book and its contents.
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But as a starter, do you want to give people a bit of information on yourself, like a bio of sorts? Who you are, what you do, what training you’ve done, that kind of thing.
Lindsay Kite: Yeah, totally. Thank you so much. I’m really, really excited about the book. It’s the most exciting professional thing that has happened for me, so I appreciate that.
A little bit about my background – my name’s Lindsay Kite. I have a PhD in communication. I started in this by finding women’s studies early on in college and just really resonating with all aspects of feminist theory and especially the really practical stuff about how the manipulation of women’s bodies and narratives about women and our worth and value in particular, the way those things influenced the way I felt about myself and my value, my health, my everything, and the way it affected how I thought about other women as well.
That led me, and my identical twin sister Lexie, who also took this same journey, both educational and personal, toward finding basically media studies. Being able to really critically look at the way media engineers our perceptions of women’s bodies and self-worth in particular, and how that not only affects us in really negative ways, but also how we can get out of it – how we can recognise the ways cultural and media messages have affected our perceptions, and then build the resilience that is required in order to turn that around for ourselves.
That led both of us, Lexie and I, into Master’s degrees and PhDs where we focused on media studies, media literacy for people to recognise the ways bodies have been used against us in so much of media, but also health promotion and a real deep dive into body image in particular – the way women and girls feel about their bodies.
That took us through PhDs. That was 10 years straight of school, and then we started our non-profit, which was called Beauty Redefined. We’re going through a bit of a rebrand, and now our organisation is called More Than a Body. We started that in 2009, so it’s been 11 years now we’ve been doing this through social media, online education – we’ve got an online course, we do speaking engagements all over the U.S., and now virtually everywhere. It’s been a long process of building this message of teaching people that they are more than just bodies, and when we can see more in ourselves and in other people, it opens up our world to be able to be more.
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Chris Sandel: You’ve been on this joint path with your sister, Lexie, and you talked about it there from when you started your studies. But before that, when did you guys start opening up or talking to one another about your own struggles around body image or however you want to define it?
Lindsay Kite: I don’t think we ever critically looked at it until we really started in college classes that taught us how to critically look at the ways we were thinking about food and bodies. Before that – we’re identical twins. We have been ruthlessly compared to each other from the time we could remember, and that includes body size. People will make comments on like, “Lindsay’s face is a little rounder and Lexie’s a little taller.”
Our weight fluctuated, and it was always this hierarchy of who could be the smaller one, who had more discipline. We were super competitive about it as well. It wasn’t like we felt any compassion for each other. We were our own biggest competitors to see who could be the most beautiful and the thinnest and the most popular and whatever. It was really immature stuff, but it’s really understandable to me looking back on it now. Lexie and I used to have competitions to see who could exercise the greatest number of hours in a week and who could eat the least number of carbs and calories. This was back during the height of the Atkins diet. All that was coming out while we were in middle school.
So we developed a really unhealthy relationship with food, with our bodies, and with each other because we egged each other on. We bonded over that. I remember begin in college and we would both go through extreme phases of restriction, freshman year. We lived together, and so often we were alone, and we would both just feel such drive around losing weight before school started in the fall. We would egg each other on.
We never looked critically at it. We would make fun of each other sometimes, like in the worst moments of an argument, we’d call each other fat and that was always a negative thing for us – until a couple years into studying all of this stuff and recognising that the ways we felt how we felt so abnormal and embarrassing and out of control, it turns out we were meant to feel that way. It’s not a natural thing. We were preyed upon by industries that wanted us to feel that way so we’d spend the rest of our lives trying to lose weight in this endless battle that was never going to really improve our health or our confidence, but would take our money for sure.
Chris Sandel: It’s interesting, thinking of people who constantly body check and are finding a mirror or any sort of reflective surface. I guess in some sense, you’ve had that in Lexie your whole life. Were you incessantly body checking by looking at Lexie and trying to think ,”Is that how I look?”
Lindsay Kite: Yeah, absolutely. We go into that a little bit in the introduction to our book because I think it sets up an interesting personal perspective that we both have on the ways we think about bodies.
Like you said, a lot of people, the only way they’re able to really see how they look from different angles is to take selfies, look in reflections. A lot of people are thinking, “I wonder how I look from this angle or from this person’s perspective.” And that is a natural part of growing up, but it’s especially natural growing up in an environment where women’s bodies and faces are objectified and evaluated according to how they look, and especially according to some really strict ideals.
So a lot of people are monitoring their bodies, but with identical twins, Lexie and I looked almost exactly the same. People had a really difficult time telling us apart for the most part. I distinctly remember watching Lexie doing things when maybe she wasn’t really monitoring her body at the moment and thinking, “Okay, so that’s how I look from behind while I’m walking” or “That’s how I look at swim team practice when I’m sitting on deck with friends.” I would use that information to try to change and monitor and evaluate the way I held my body and my face.
It added this other level of teaching us to self-objectify by having this visual representation of how you might look from every angle that a regular person without a twin doesn’t really get to see. So that is a double-edged sword for sure.
Chris Sandel: You talked about that being part of the intro of the book. One of the other parts in the intro that you talk about is when you’d ask someone who they felt about their body, their response was about how it looked. Can you talk about this?
Lindsay Kite: Yeah, exactly. That became a really important part of our research. One of the ways that our body image research and our perspective differs from a lot of other people and campaigns in this field is that our focus is not on beauty; it’s on the way women feel about their bodies overall.
Unfortunately, most women, when asked about their bodies, “How do you feel about your body?”, their minds go to how their bodies look. This is a real limitation in people’s minds. When you’re evaluating this really dynamic, incredible body that you were born in, that you have lived every second of your life in, and you’re evaluating it strictly on how it appears to you or to other people, we’re doing ourselves a huge disservice.
When we asked people that – this was during our PhD dissertation research – we asked women, the very first question, “How do you feel about your body?” Overwhelmingly, about 80% of them described their bodies mostly or exclusively in terms of appearance. They would say things like, “Oh, I hate how it looks. I have such excess hangover when I put on my jeans and I’ve gained some weight in recent years.” Even on the positive end, they would say things like, “I look really good in a swimsuit. I have a flat stomach. So for the most part I feel pretty good about it. There are some wibbly-wobbly parts that I would like to fix, but overall I feel pretty good about how my body looks.”
What they didn’t realise is that what they’re doing is self-objectifying. They are looking at their bodies through someone else’s eyes, like they are outsiders to their own bodies. And when you help people to recognise the way self-objectification affects their lives and teaches them to be outsiders to themselves and evaluate themselves in such really ruthless and impersonal ways, it helps them to see the ways they’ve maybe held themselves back in their lives because of that perception that how they look is the most valuable thing about them.
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Chris Sandel: The self-objectification piece is really at the core of everything that you guys talk about, but there’s a couple of quotes I want to read out because they really do illustrate what this is about.
“Self-objectification takes a human being and convinces her that she’s a human being looked at.” Or “Self-objectification is the invisible prison of picturing yourself being looked at instead of just fully being.” Or “It’s bodies first, people second.” I really like how that captures all of this. But talk a little more about the self-objectification piece, because I think this is really crucial.
Lindsay Kite: Absolutely. Those quotes I think are really powerful for people who haven’t thought in those terms before because self-objectification is an absolutely new concept for most people. When they hear that term, their minds might instantly go to the idea that someone is intentionally objectifying herself by presenting herself as an object. This is not what we mean by self-objectification.
This is a psychological term. It goes back in psychology theory, and it means that you are viewing yourself as an object inside your own mind. It doesn’t matter how you are supposedly presenting yourself or how other people interpret you. This is entirely about how you are interpreting your own body.
Self-objectification doubles your identity. You become this person who’s living and doing and being – you’re sitting in class, you’re walking down the street, you’re raising your hand in a board meeting – and part of your mind, this other part of your identity, is dedicated to monitoring the way you look, making sure your thighs don’t look too big in this chair and that your chin is up so that you’re not showing your double chins to the people who are around you. It’s this constant mental task list of keeping your body in check so that it will fit according to these aesthetic ideals that we’ve been taught are most important and will lead to the greatest happiness and worthiness to be loved and all of that stuff.
That’s something that so many people don’t take into account when they’re thinking about body image because they think that the problem with people’s body image is that we don’t feel beautiful enough. And to some extent that’s true because we have been taught to compare ourselves to ideals that are not only extremely narrow and strict and hyper-engineered and edited, but they’re also really unrealistic for almost all bodies. We grow up thinking that we need to look this one way, and of course we don’t feel beautiful.
But the real root of this problem, these body image issues that so many of us face – and increasingly more boys and men; it doesn’t matter how you identify – people are experiencing self-objectification, and they’re limiting their mental and physical energy, their time, their money, all of their resources because of this constant dedication to our appearance and thinking about it.
And it’s not a matter of just “I don’t feel beautiful”; it’s a matter of “I am defined by how I look.” Even if you feel positively about how you look, you may still be self-objectifying if you are constantly monitoring and trying to upkeep your appearance as you go throughout your day, thinking, “Oh wow, I look good. I bet he or she thinks that I look good right now as I’m walking in front of them or as I’m dancing at the club.” I mean, that’s not really an option right now, but these are ideas and messages that we’ve all had.
This holds us back. It limits our relationship with ourselves, with our own bodies, and with the rest of the world.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. It’s the cognitive load that this takes up. When I was thinking about this, there were two areas that I’d heard about before that seemed to coalesce to make the self-objectification piece. There’s the concept of the imagined audience – and this is part of a developmental process. As you’re young and you get into adolescence, it reaches its peak, and it’s you thinking about everyone looking at you and, as the name would describe, you being on a stage or you living your life thinking about how you’re seen by others.
Then the other part is the cognitive dietary restraint, which is this perceived ongoing effort to limit dietary intake, to modify body weight and size and shape. And it’s not so much the actual act of doing those things or whether it’s happening in reality. It’s the cognitive load of thinking about those things and planning those things and wanting to do those things. When I read about the self-objectification piece, it felt like it was the Frankenstein’s monster of those two concepts.
Lindsay Kite: Yeah, I definitely think you’re right. I think it explains so much of the burden that people feel around their bodies. And the food part of it is the tip of the iceberg, because when you hate your body and you’re holding it to really unrealistic and unattainable ideals – which is so trite and cliché at this point; I think everyone in the world knows that the beauty ideals that we hold ourselves to and that we see all over Instagram and TV, movies, ads, everywhere, we know that it’s unattainable for most people.
But that does not stop us from having that mental burden inside our minds and placing those restrictions on everything we do and eat and think so that we can somehow fit into those ideals and thus be happier, more confident, healthier. We associate it with all good things in the world, and then when we don’t feel all the good things or experience all the good things and the love and the success, of course we blame our bodies. We’ve been taught that that’s exactly where the problem lies.
It’s this burden that people don’t even know they carry. I think that’s one of the scariest parts. It’s so invisible, it’s so normalised. Especially the eating part of it is so normalised. People never even question the fact that they’ve moralised different food groups, or even just the fact of restriction is such a norm for people, and yet it’s messing with us in such severe ways.
Like you said, the messy relationship with food is like a catch-all category for what so many people are experiencing. I love that term. I think so many people underestimate how prevalent that is in our lives and how it really affects everything we do and think. That’s such a burden.
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Chris Sandel: Definitely. I think it’s because it’s been changed in our society so that what would be seen as restriction, when you really understand what restriction is, is turned into “This is a pursuit of health” or “I’m looking after myself” or “This is what I should be doing.” You really mistake this thing that is very damaging and problematic for “I’m doing this as self-care.”
Lindsay Kite: Yeah, exactly. “This is self-improvement. The alternative is self-neglect.” They feel like if they’re not actively restricting and starting the new diet and feeling guilty about all ways they didn’t exercise or whatever, then they’re feeling like they’re the ones that are out of control and wrong and doing a disservice to their bodies. It’s really hard to get people out of that thinking.
One of the ways that Lexie and I did that through our PhD research – part of mine in particular was to help women think outside of the traditional boundaries of health and fitness. In my research I looked at the ways health and fitness for women in particular is taught to us, especially through mainstream media, and also cultural ideals about that that are circulated and reflect mainstream media but also inform it.
Of course, what I found is no big surprise: the ways health and fitness is defined for girls and women is almost entirely about appearance. It’s looking more firm and fit and strong and lean. It’s being thinner. It’s weighing less. It’s having smaller measurements. It’s all of these things that are just so related to appearance. We’ve been completely duped into thinking that all of those measurements will tell you whether or not you’re a heathy and fit person.
The way to get around that, what I try to identify in my research, is how to really give people an effective intervention. There aren’t really interventions out there. There aren’t big sources where people will be able to see, “Wait, all of the other messages I’m receiving about my body and my health are manipulated or engineered to make me feel bad and to make me focused solely on aesthetic ideals.”
What Lexie and I did was create an online curriculum that women would engage with online, just as individuals on their own time, once a week. Part of mine was a health information intervention where I talk to people about all the ways health and fitness is currently defined and all of the aesthetic ideals that go into it, and I ask them about how they define health and fitness at the very beginning and whether or not they consider themselves to be heathy and fit.
Then I broke down all of the ways that those messages are particularly engineered to cause us to focus so much on thinness and looking this one strict ideal of fitness that has actually changed really dramatically over time and that isn’t associated with actual indicators of health and fitness through a lot of science research, a lot of exercise science and physiology stuff.
I also showed them all about the BMI. I think a lot of people are now recognising how the Body Mass Index is so problematic and so limited I the information it can give you based on your height and weight. But after I presented all this information, of course I asked the women through a follow-up questionnaire how that may have changed their perspectives and if they’re thinking about their own fitness and even their size differently.
Overwhelmingly, when people are presented with factual information and they can recognise the ways that media has engineered that in problematic ways, they’re able to see how it is true in their own lives. They haven’t always been the healthiest or the happiest at their thinnest weights or at their height of restriction. And they weren’t always the saddest or the least lovable or the least healthy and fit at their higher weights, or when they’re outside of the boundaries of the BMI that’s supposedly perfect for them.
When you personalise it is in those ways, it does help people to see, “Okay, maybe I don’t need to pledge allegiance to these particular ideals that I’ve been fed my whole life. Maybe I can focus on how I individually feel, how my body works, how it moves,” and it’s much more of this perspective of valuing your body from the inside as opposed to looking at it from the outside.
Chris Sandel: The thing I remember with that bit of research, if I’m remembering the figures, it was something pretty demoralising in the beginning where only a small percentage of people actually thought they would ever reach a place of health or fitness and thought it was completely unattainable to them. Then by the end, that had drastically changed in terms of people’s perception.
Lindsay Kite: Yes. That was really interesting to me. You’re right; up front, I asked people how they personally defined health and fitness and then whether they considered themselves to be healthy and fit.
Something like 80% of the women did not consider themselves to be healthy and fit, and that made perfect sense when you looked at how they defined health and fitness. It was overwhelmingly ‘being in the correct normal BMI category for my height’ and it was ‘looking fit and toned with no excess flab anywhere on my body’ or ‘being able to fit into the same clothes I wore when I felt really healthy and fit at age 19’. It’s these really limiting, appearance-focused ideals that people were trying to hold themselves to.
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Chris Sandel: In terms of that other piece you mentioned, in terms of trying to find pieces of data that show someone that their beliefs around when they were healthy and fit or when they were most happy with their body don’t necessarily match up, which is typically what I’m working on with clients – when I’m working with people who are recovering from an eating disorder or disordered eating, most of the time they’re going to be gaining weight. So in their mind, they’re like, “Gaining weight equals bad, equals my life is going to be worse,” and it’s then getting to go through experiences and seeing how that can actually change. You reach this place of cognitive dissonance.
I was actually having this conversation with a client last week about this. You’re now at this place where “In one part of my mind, I’m holding this idea that my life will be better when I’m thinner or when I’m looking differently, and then I’m having this experience where I’m actually having really enjoyable things happen. I’m able to appreciate things more. I’m having a good time. I’m able to do things that I wasn’t able to do earlier on when I was thinner. So there’s this part of me that’s like, actually, my life is now better even though I’m not living in that body that I think I should be in.”
You’re having these two ideas that really don’t sit very well together being held in your mind at the same time, and there’s this cognitive dissonance that is going on. I think that’s quite a slow process. That takes time for those things to start to sort themselves out. But with enough time, you can start to realise, “Hang on a second. There’s this idea that I will be happier when I’m thinner – I’m spending more time not in that place and realising that that’s not proving to be true.”
Lindsay Kite: Oh yes. I love that so much. I think that is the way to really personalise this stuff for people. We get so stuck in this one narrative, and it makes sense because we have been sold this narrative in every form throughout our entire lives – and that is that thinner women are happier and healthier and more successful and more worthy and deserving of love.
A lot of us growing up never saw people on TV who were anywhere over a size medium who were in relationships, who were being pursued romantically, who were healthy and happy or the lead in any type of a narrative, like a movie or TV show or anything like that, let alone advertising. We never were able to envision people who weren’t thin as being able to have the things in life that we all know that we want. So we believe this story.
And in order to break this narrative and to recognise that it is a total myth and a lie that is scripted and given to us – it’s not based in reality – in order to do that, we have to be willing to prove ourselves wrong. We have to be willing to prove that that narrative doesn’t really hold up and that it is false and it’s a lie. Being willing to prove yourself wrong requires some real courage because you might have to go out and try for the opportunities that you want to play the sports or get involved in the physical activities that you want, you might need to take chances in dating and relationships and put yourself out there more. Even in your body doesn’t look the way you think it needs to in order to be happy in those situations or to be deserving of those situations.
When you can really do that, when you can convince someone to try, they will see – it’s not always a perfect formula. You will have disappointment and rejection still. You will experience adverse health outcomes and troubles in your career and whatever else you’re going for and seeking in your life. But that’s because of the very nature of being human. That snot about your fat. That’s not about your weight. Thin, ideal looking people get cheated on all the time. They get fired from jobs. They get cancer. They get depressed. They go through all of the negative things that we associate with fat people being more deserving of, honestly.
Chris Sandel: I always use the example of Ryan Reynolds broke up with Scarlett Johansson. Two of the most beautiful people on the planet broke up. Obviously, that happens to everyone.
Lindsay Kite: Right. And Halle Berry has been cheated on. There are these stories that people just – you would never blame her body on why she got cheated on, yet for someone who feels like she’s too fat or doesn’t look good enough, instantly she blames her body if she gets cheated on or gets rejected. It’s this really insidious narrative.
You might not even have to experience it for yourself at first to be able to get that cognitive dissonance in your mind that is the key to being able to think in a new way or challenge those previously held beliefs. You might be able to see that in someone else’s life, or even in media. It’s important to be able to see people and even stories that break those moulds because it plants the seed in your mind that “Okay, maybe I could also experience these good things without first having to change my body.”
I’ve experienced this personally. That’s been so transformative for me. I knew all this stuff on an academic, intellectual level starting in my early twenties, and yet it still didn’t click in my brain that this was for me too. I’m not so abnormal and so out of control with my body that I can’t also challenge all of these things personally instead of just encouraging other people to. I still, in the back of my mind, felt like, “Yeah, once I can really get this food stuff under control and have more discipline and lose some weight, then I’ll be much happier in relationships or more willing to date and more willing to do big speaking engagements and go out for media interviews and things like that.”
It wasn’t until I really started putting all of that fixing on hold and instead doing what I wanted to do and just really putting myself out there more, without any apologies for how I looked or any disclaimers about it, that I started to prove myself wrong. That narrative started to really crumble, whether in terms of success in dating and my own physical health – all of these things have been the best I’ve ever had while being way fatter than I ever would’ve thought that I could be deserving of these good things in my life.
And I don’t hesitate to tell people about that because maybe my example can help someone else to develop that cognitive dissonance that says “I will be happy once I’m thinner. I will be worthy of love once I look right.” None of that is true. Break your own heart and break that story down and try to see for yourself if it’s really true. I think people will find out over and over again that it’s not. That you are already okay. Go and do the things that you need to do instead of self-objectifying in your own mind and holding yourself back from what you want.
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Chris Sandel: The self-objectification piece is a learned behaviour. There was a really great study that you referenced in the book around mothers and their young daughters standing in front of the mirror. Do you want to talk about that?
Lindsay Kite: Yeah. Was that a personal story that we had quoted?
Chris Sandel: No, there was a study where they took mothers and daughters and they were standing them in front of the mirror, and basically whatever the mother said, the daughter would echo. If the mother said, “I don’t like my eyes,” the daughter would say the same thing.
I think there was a follow-up or something where they were actually able to change it in the other direction and insert more positive things, and the daughter would basically follow suit.
Lindsay Kite: Yes, exactly. That’s huge because it does show that it’s learned behaviour, and it shows that people within families have such huge influence on how their little kids think about their own bodies. Every family has different characteristics that you might pass on down the line, and you recognise that you have the same hair texture as Grandma or the same nose as your uncle or whatever it is.
Sometimes we take pride in those things, but sometimes the story in your family is that that big nose is embarrassing and that it needs to be fixed, and the weight that we carry on this half of the family is something that is like a defect that we have to battle for the rest of our lives – instead of being maybe just a natural inherited part of how we live our lives and the ways our ancestors adapted to scarce food environments or whatever it is.
It’s so important to be able to tell different stories about our own bodies within our own families, obviously avoiding the very negative talk, avoiding the self-criticism and the comments about “I can’t eat dessert today because Mom’s getting really big.” Daughters will immediately repeat that stuff. And sons are doing it more and more too.
The other thing I was thinking of was that we had a personal example that we quoted related to that in the book where a teenage girl and her mom were swimsuit shopping and they were looking in the mirror together, and the mom kept saying, “Oh look, we’re the same size! We could share this swimsuit! Isn’t that great?” She was really objectifying both of them and pointing out the ways they were similar and saying, “Ooh, now that I’ve lost this weight, we look so similar.”
It was really triggering for the daughter in ways that she couldn’t really understand or describe because the mom is cheering about how she looks so great because she looks like the daughter. But it still placed such emphasis on her appearance and this self-comparison thing that it didn’t do anything positive for the daughter’s body image because she is even more in this mode of self-objectification, just like her mom is teaching her to be.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. Kids just model behaviour. I was thinking about this on the weekend. I’ve got a son, Ramsay, who’s three, and we had an Etch-a-Sketch in the back of the car and I was writing. He was saying, “Can you write out words?” and saying ‘gate’ or ‘mirror’ or ‘light’ or whatever, and I’d write them out and then he’d look at them. After a while it’s like, “I have to stop this because I’m feeing really nauseous. I can’t be writing like this in the car.”
Then he took the Etch-a-Sketch off me and was writing for a little bit and then he’s like, “Dad, I’ve got to stop. I feel really nauseous.” [laughs] It really highlighted how much kids repeat what you say and want to do the same things that you do.
Lindsay Kite: Totally. And not only just mimicking it, but also moralising it in all the same ways. They pick up on what we value and they learn to value those exact same things. So even if you think you’re being pretty neutral about the way you talk about food and the way you’re referencing your body, they pick up on the little eyerolls and the times when you are restricting or opting out of something they know you love. They know you love that pie at Thanksgiving, and if you’re not going to eat it, they know that it’s because there’s a positive value in restricting. They see that.
Just don’t ever underestimate the effect that you have on especially younger people who love you and respect you and will absolutely pick up on even the littlest nuances in how you feel about your body and how you treat yourself.
00:38:59
Chris Sandel: Another aspect of the work – and you talk about this in the book and also in your TED talk as well – is body image resilience. I know you’ve touched on some of that already, but can you be more explicit and talk about what that is and what that looks like?
Lindsay Kite: Yeah, totally. Basically, one thing that everyone understands when you dig into this body image stuff is that everyone is experiencing negative things in their bodies, because of their bodies. They’ll blame their appearance, overwhelmingly, for the negative things that happen to us. The rejections, the disappointments, the frustrations, the not fitting into the clothes that you used to wear all the time. All of this triggers these feelings of body shame, and they also trigger self-objectification.
When someone makes a comment about your appearance, maybe it’s negative, but maybe it’s trying to be positive, and it triggers you to think more about how you look and to think, “They must’ve thought I looked worse before,” and you think back on how you maybe should’ve felt that as well.
There are so many things that we go through in this objectifying world that places so much value on women’s bodies and especially on thinness and these beauty ideals. We’re always going to go through things that will stir up that same old body shame, no matter how much work you do to be able to recognise that your body is an instrument, not an ornament, and to know that you are more than a body. We still, just by the very nature of it, live in a world that objectifies bodies. Especially if you grew up feeling that way.
The important thing is to recognise that for most of us, our body image comfort zone is probably pretty uncomfortable. It’s going to take some work to recognise that and to see our way out of it. But that’s the whole thing with body image resilience.
Resilience, as most people know, is this ability to bounce back from hard things, to grow stronger through growing through difficult things – not just in spite of the hard things that we go through. Body image resilience is the same. It’s this idea that we go through hard things in our bodies; it causes us to feel negativity toward them and to hold ourselves to unrealistic ideals. We learn to self-objectify and generally feel crappy about our bodies. But through resilience, we need to recognise how we’re responding to those negative things that we go through.
We call them body image disruptions. Those negative things – maybe you’re at Thanksgiving and someone makes a negative comment about your weight or what you’re eating or what you’re wearing. Maybe you go through a breakup where either explicitly or subconsciously your appearance is blamed for why that person lost interest. A miscarriage, a pregnancy, an illness, an injury – all of these things will change the way you see and relate to your own body. Consider those disruptions to your body image.
Now how do you respond to those? For most people, we will have our automatic responses that we don’t even think about. For most people, we’ll probably go into what we call hiding and fixing. Clinging to your comfort zone. That would be through things like untagging yourself from the photo that you found unflattering and trying to delete it off Facebook or Instagram or whatever.
It could be trying to find new makeup, new clothes, planning for cosmetic surgery, going on a liquid cleanse, a crash diet to try to fix the problem that you’ve seen in yourself or that you think is to blame for this hard thing that you’ve gone through. But even worse, some people will try to cope with that disappointment and that shame by what we call sinking deeper into shame – doing anything that numbs you for a moment or distracts you for a moment, but ultimately leaves you feeling much worse than before about your body.
Things like self-harm, things like disordered eating and addictions of all types would fit into this category. Anything that actually leaves you worse off. We see that so often. Especially cutting among young girls is extremely rampant. All of these, consider them ways that you are responding to disruptions.
So if you can see yourself on those two paths, in the past and as new disruptions to your body image come up, I want people to know that by developing their body image resilience, they can choose a different path, a better path, that we call rising with body image resilience. But to do that, you have to be really conscious of how and why you are processing your shame and your self-objectification and these triggers to your body image in the ways that you have been.
Look at the ways that media and your immediate environment have affected the way you feel about your body. Take inventory of those kinds of things and what might still be affecting you and causing you to think negatively about your size, your skin, your appearance in any way. Try to root out those issues where they are. You might need to unfollow, unsubscribe, stop watching certain TV shows, even though they’re fun and they’re interesting. They’re feeding you messages that are causing you to feel this constant need to hide your body and fix your body.
Then take inventory of the people you’re surrounded by. How do they think about bodies? How do they talk about it? In the book we organise all of this stuff into how to see more in your world, which is like your immediate environment and the people around you, how to see more in others, the way they affect you and the way that you affect them, how to see more in yourself, which is rooting out the self-objectification that so many of us have at our cores, and then how to see more in order to be more – how to be more than a body.
There’s probably 1,000 different really practical steps that people can take in order to respond in healthier and happier ways to their disruptions, and some of those, like I mentioned, are developing your media literacy. Being able to question, when you get a message from social media or from a TV show that you’re watching that makes you feel self-conscious and triggers that body anxiety that makes you want to fix and hide yourself – instead, you can ask really thoughtful, critical questions about what you’re seeing, why it’s engineered the way it is, who profits from you feeling this way, and that can help you to alleviate that shame without having to go fix yourself. Instead, you pin the blame on the message that is manipulating you as opposed to your body.
There’s a lot of different ways that we can develop our body image resilience, but we have to be willing to do it. We have to be willing to make a new choice and take a new path in response to these disruptions that are never really going to go away. But it does get easier over time. As you develop your resilience, it becomes a more innate and natural response to the hard things that we go through because we no longer have to blame our bodies.
Instead, we can recognise that we’re feeling shame, and to move forward, I’m going to talk to my therapist instead of restricting or binging or self-harming. instead, I’m going to open up to friends and family or even on the internet about the pain that I’ve experienced. I’m going to help other people who are experiencing similar pain.
We heard a story of one woman who, when she was young, she was sexually assaulted, and ever since that time, she felt like her body was used as a weapon against her. She hated her body for it and took out that resentment and that disgust on the way she treated herself and the kinds of relationships that she entered into and allowed herself to stay in and the disordered eating that she engaged in, because she felt like she deserved it and her body was disgusting.
But when she got to college, she recognised that the sexual assault had really had a negative impact on the way that she was eating and thinking about her body and the way she treated herself, so she decided to volunteer for a shelter that helped women and girls who had been sexually assaulted. Through that, she was able to find her passion and her mission.
But she wouldn’t have been able to do that without the hard, awful things that she had been through, that she would never choose for herself, but that opened up her eyes to the suffering of other people and ways that she could be of assistance. And it revolutionised the way she thought about her pain and also her own body, because she would never let any of those other women think of their bodies as disgusting weapons that they need to turn against instead of turn back toward.
00:47:30
Chris Sandel: That’s what I liked so much about the book in terms of what you described there. It is a huge amount of information in terms of how to build up that resilience and going through so many different methods and tools that you can do as part of it.
One of the mantras that appears a lot in the book is “My body is an instrument, not an ornament.” I know that on the surface, it can be pretty easy to understand what that statement may mean, but can you just delve into it a little more?
Lindsay Kite: Totally. That’s a statement that is incredibly meaningful for us because it shifts the focus away from objectification. The difference between our work and so many others is that we recognise the objectification of our bodies, our obsession with appearance, is at the root of all of this. So how do you combat that? You turn your focus back inward. Instead of looking from the outside, we start from the inside and look outward, not at our own bodies, but at the world, at our experiences.
If your body is an instrument for your use, your benefit, and your experience, then it is not an ornament to be looked at. You won’t value it just according to how it appears, and you won’t place so much emphasis on how other people see it, either. It puts the agency back on us. It gives us the power and the freedom to live inside our bodies and focus on how our bodies feel and what they are able to do and how we can live and experience the world through these vessels that are our bodies instead of just looking at them from the outside – which is a huge disservice to us.
I don’t want anyone to walk away thinking that “my body is an instrument, not an ornament” is something that is limiting or exclusive only to people who have perfect physical ability and fitness. I think sometimes people will perceive that as being an ableist thing. In some ways, focusing purely on function over form can definitely be ableist. If you say only fit bodies are worthy and only bodies that can run marathons and have full experience and full health are worthy, then that is ableist and that’s not at all what we’re saying.
What we’re saying is instead of taking an objectifying, external perspective on your body, live inside your body. Be embodied. Being embodied is so much different than being objectified, than being an ornament. When you focus on how you feel as you go throughout your activities – maybe it is exercise, but maybe it’s how you eat. Maybe it’s how you show up in your job or for your family or in relationships.
When you live from the inside, you don’t hold yourself back because of how you look. You don’t have to hide. You don’t have to make plans to fix and restrict and hurt your body into whatever shape you think it needs to be in before you’re worthy to do all the things that you want to do, because your body is an instrument. And when you use it that way, it’s easier to remember that.
Chris Sandel: That is a really great explanation with all of this. Why I wanted to ask that question is because I feel for a lot of people, especially clients I work with who are struggling with disordered eating or eating disorders and there’s this real exercise component to it, you could very easily read “my body is an instrument, not an ornament” and that then be used as justification of “I now need to really do everything so that I can run more miles or I can do more things in the gym.” Very much viewing ‘instrument’ through this very narrow lens and being about what activities it can do.
Almost like my body is a temple, but my body is a temple in terms of what it can do as opposed to thinking about it in the way that you’re talking about it, which is actually much broader. This is this vehicle or vessel that I have to experience all of my life, and how can I treat it in the best way so that I can have a really enjoyable experience across all the different planes of experience, whether that be job or relationships or being with myself, etc., as opposed to using this statement to further someone’s disordered relationship with exercise.
Lindsay Kite: Totally. People will take things to extremes. When you’re used to thinking of your body in such extremes as either bad or good or improving or regressing, then you might interpret anything, even that’s intended to be much more broad and holistic and empowering – you can twist anything to fit your agenda, treating the extreme eating side of things to the extreme exercise side of things, which is just as bad and can really do damage to people.
So I really want people to think broadly about that. How is your body an instrument for your use and experience? At the most basic level, it’s incredible that our lungs can breathe without us even thinking about it. Especially in this time of an airborne virus that limits the use of your lungs, we should be grateful and appreciative that these instrumental lungs we have are allowing us to breathe without even having conscious effort to do so.
It’s also, how can you use your voice? What senses d you appreciate? Maybe you are able to run, and that brings you great enjoyment and mood improvement and relief from stress and all of that. Of course value all of those things that really do enrich your life and the ways that you can use and move and understand your body.
But if you do have a chronic illness, if you do have a disability or an injury or anything that limits your use of your body, that doesn’t mean that your body isn’t an instrument. It still doesn’t help you to evaluate your body from the outside as an ornament. That’s still just as bad as it is for anyone else. You’ve just got to shift your perspective on how your instrumental your body needs to be before you can appreciate it and respect it.
00:53:39
Chris Sandel: Definitely. One of the other things that you talk about is the problem with comparison, which I thought was really helpful – and talking about the fact that even when you’re viewing yourself higher up the hierarchy than someone else, this is also still just as problematic. Do you want to talk about this piece as well? This will probably be the final thing we touch on just because I do find that comparison is really at the root of so much of the discomfort and the struggles that a lot of my clients have.
Lindsay Kite: Oh yeah, it really is. It comes from this insecurity we have with wanting to be normal. Everyone wants to not be abnormal and to fit in and not do anything or be in any way that’s embarrassing. So it’s this natural instinct we have to make sure we’re on par with other people.
But it’s also a pretty adolescent way to think about ourselves and live our lives. At this point especially, as adults, we should be able to have a grasp on what’s okay and who we really are, what we really want from our lives. Doesn’t mean we do, but it means we need to think in those terms. But if we are constantly comparing ourselves to everybody else’s lives, especially in this age of social media, then we are always going to come up short.
The research on that is super interesting. It shows that especially for girls and women, the ways we compare ourselves to people is physically. It’s through appearance, especially on social media. Girls and women use social media so much more than boys and men, spend much more time on it, are on it in greater numbers. What we’re doing is largely comparing ourselves physically and in terms of lifestyle and aesthetics to other women.
And it’s not just other women that we perceive to be better than us or more beautiful or more ideal in whatever ways. It’s to literally anyone. We are doing this automatic mental thing where we compare ourselves, we stack ourselves up against somebody else.
The more interesting thing about this research is that of course when you’re self-comparing to someone who you think is better than you and you feel worse, it leaves you feeling worse off about yourself. You have increased body anxiety. You’re self-objectifying more. You’re led to hide and fix and buy the things that they have and that they recommend and all of that kind of stuff. We know that.
But what’s also interesting is that even when you’re comparing yourself to someone that you perceive to be lower than you in whatever way, whether it’s in terms of their beauty or their popularity or their lifestyle, whatever, you still come out feeling worse. You don’t feel better by comparing yourself to someone, even if you feel like you come out on top in that comparison. And that’s because the self-comparison, by the very nature of it, leads us to feel lonely and in competition with other women.
It decreases the unity that we feel with other women. These are all really negative things. It increases our self-objectification just by the very nature of comparing looks to looks. Even if it’s just someone else’s highlight reel, when someone else on social media in particular is showing the very best moments of their deceivingly perfect life, you’re comparing probably your worst moments – your sweatpants on the couch, home on a Friday night feeling bad about it kind of moments to their out on the town, looking amazing moments.
It’s so artificial. So this self-comparison thing is really something we have to actively be aware of and mitigate in our lives. A good way to do that is to take a break from social media, but it’s also important just to look people eye to eye and to recognise their humanity. We are all humans. We are all dealing with real difficulties. Especially when it comes to our body image, the ways we feel about our bodies. We’re all going through hard stuff. It doesn’t matter how beautiful and thin and perfect and whatever your life looks like from the outside; we’re all dealing with really similar struggles, and we need to have compassion for that for ourselves and also for other people.
That compassion can really help limit the self-comparison that you’re automatically doing. Instead of taking inventory of what that person has and what you don’t have, instead you’re thinking, “She probably has problems too that I’m not even aware of, and I don’t blame her for not putting them on the internet. But I want to feel kinship with her as opposed to competition.” It’s a practice, but it will really help.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. It’s interesting with what you just said there. Whenever I see someone who has the body that matches up to our societal norms, my instant reaction isn’t, “I wonder how happy they are. They must have the most amazing life.” It’s like, “I wonder how happy they really are. What do they have to do to get to this place? What is their relationship like with their body? What is their relationship like with food? How high on the pedestal do they put their looks in comparison to everything else?”
My instant reaction isn’t “Wow, they must have an amazing life.” It’s normally from a place of compassion; I’m pretty sure they’re going to be struggling.
Lindsay Kite: Oh yeah. I’ll comment on that as well because that’s been something that’s really eye-opening for Lexie and I as we go do speaking engagements all over the country.
There’s almost always a couple of really traditionally beautiful women in the room, and they’ll often be up front. Maybe they’re not smiling, maybe they’re showing even negative emotions sometimes as we speak, and my gut instinct, my self-consciousness says “She hates what we’re saying. She hates this talk about objectification and beauty ideals because she probably thinks that it’s not even real and she’s just naturally this way. Or maybe she really loves the power and the value that she gets from looking so perfect.”
But overwhelmingly, it is those women that come up to us first afterward, and they have tears in their eyes, and they want to give us a hug because they say, “My whole life, my value has come from how I look. Even my parents have always valued me for being so beautiful and so naturally thin” and whatever. But it becomes a huge burden throughout their lives because if that is the source of their value and their self-esteem, then they are forced to work even harder than another person to maintain that in order to keep up their own personal self-worth and feelings of normal, their baseline feelings of just being okay.
So they are ruthless against themselves, and the world is pretty ruthless against them too. It doesn’t mean they don’t have huge privileges and protection against a lot of the discrimination and bias that people experience, but they also experience really heightened levels of self-objectification and objectification by other people as well, and it’s really important to be able to feel compassion for those people. Maybe they are going to extremes to be able to maintain their looks or get to the next level and fight ageing and weight gain and everything in really extreme ways.
I don’t hate them for it. I don’t judge them for it. I know so well the pressures that women face to be able to maintain those looks and keep up with what other people want from them and value in them. So you’re so right about the questioning how they really feel, how they’re really doing. Give people the benefit of the doubt and recognise that you probably have more in common with them than you think.
01:01:06
Chris Sandel: Definitely. We have barely scratched the surface of what is covered in your book, and I really want to implore or recommend that people check it out. Where should people be going to find out more about you, Lindsay?
Lindsay Kite: Thank you so much. The book is called More Than a Body, and the subhead is Your body is an instrument, not an ornament. It’s by me, Lindsay Kite, and my sister Lexie Kite. We co-authored it. It’s available anywhere you buy books, the indie stores as well as Amazon and Barnes and Noble and everywhere else.
You can find us online at Instagram. Our handle is @Beauty_Redefined. Our website is morethanabody.org. You can also get there at beautyredefined.org. We’re going through a bit of a rebrand at the moment. You can find all of our work from there. We offer an online course in helping women develop their body image resilience, and we often do speaking engagements, now virtually. So there’s lots of opportunities for people to be able to learn more about our work if they’re interested.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. I will put all of those links in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on today and for all the work that you’re doing. It’s really great.
Lindsay Kite: Thank you so much, Chris. It was really great to talk to you.
Chris Sandel: That was my conversation with Lindsey Kite. She and her sister Lexie are doing really amazing work. If body image is an issue for you, then please check out the book, More Than a Body. It’s a fantastic read and it’s incredibly practical.
That is it for today’s show. I’m not sure when you’ll be listening to this, but this episode is coming out on the 24th of December, so if you’re listening to it on that day or shortly after, I hope you have a nice Christmas and holiday period – although I imagine it is very different this year than usual.
I will be back next week with my yearly round-up of favourite podcasts and documentaries and books and all of that. Until then, take care and I will see you soon.
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