333: Body Image, Eating Behaviour and Social Media with Charlotte Markey

Chris Sandel: Hey! If you want access to the transcripts, the show notes, and the links talked about as part of this episode, you can head to www.seven-health.com/333.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach and an eating disorder expert, and I help clients to fully recover.

Before we get on with today’s show, I just have an announcement that I’m currently taking on new clients. If you are living with an eating disorder and you would like to fully recover, then I would love to help. It doesn’t matter how long this has been going on; whether this is something that’s been in the last year, whether this is something that’s gone on for multiple decades, I truly believe that you can fully recover, and I would love to help you get there. And I know that the idea of full recovery can seem so far off in the distance or it can seem so unattainable, but I truly believe that everyone can get there, and I would love to help to demonstrate that to you. If you’re interested, you can send an email to info@seven-health.com and just put ‘coaching’ in the subject line, and I will get the details over to you.

So, on with today’s episode. Today it is a guest interview, and my guest today is Charlotte Markey. Dr Charlotte Markey is a professor of psychology and Chair of the Health Sciences Department at Rutgers University, Camden. She is a world leading expert in body image research, having studied body image and eating disorder behaviour for nearly three decades. With experience as a scientist, teacher, writer, clinician, and parent, she’s passionate about understanding what makes us feel good about our bodies and helping others to develop a healthy body image. Dr Markey is an author of five books, including The Body Image Book for Girls, Being You: The Body Image Book for Boys, and Adultish: The Body Image Book for Life. Her research has gained widespread media attention, having been featured in publications such as the New York Times, the Economist, ABC News, and Time Magazine.

I became aware of Charlotte – I’ve got some of her books, and I read through them and thought that it would be good to have a conversation with her on the podcast. I’d also seen her interviewed on other podcasts and enjoyed hearing what she had to say.

As part of this episode, we talk about Charlotte’s upbringing and relationship to food and movement and body image. Ballet was a big part of her childhood, so we talk about how this impacted her in good ways and not-so-good ways, and the subsequent work that she’s done to repair some of this. We talk about what body image really means, and I really love Charlotte’s definition with this. It launches itself into a real conversation around the depths of body image and that so often, we think about it in this very narrow way. So I liked having this conversation about what it truly does mean.

We talk about some of the common struggles that can occur with body image as kids, as teenagers, as adults; the differences between boys and girls and men and women with body image; the benefit of having honest body image conversations with our partner and how liberating that can be, how much it can reduce shame, and really the importance of this. We talk about the impact of social media on body image and how we can navigate this or also navigate it for our kids if we’re parents. Why it’s okay to care about how we look. If people start getting into a lot of the body image work, it can feel like “I have to just not care about my appearance at all, like it doesn’t have any impact on my life” and we talk about why that’s just not the case. We also talk about clothes and body image, and also how to navigate this if you’re in recovery.

I really loved this conversation with Charlotte, and I think we cover a lot of helpful topics and ideas. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Dr Charlotte Markey.

Hey, Charlotte. Welcome to the show.

Charlotte Markey: Thank you so much for having me.

Chris Sandel: You are a researcher and an expert in body image, and I know you’ve been studying this for a very long time – I think studying body image and eating disorders for nearly three decades. I think that’s what our conversation is going to be about today.

00:04:30

A bit about Charlotte’s background

As a starting place, do you want to just tell listeners a bit about you from a background perspective? Who you are, what you do, what training you’ve done, that kind of thing.

Charlotte Markey: Yeah, of course. I’m a professor of psychology at Rutgers University in New Jersey in the States, and I’ve been at Rutgers – this is the end of my 23rd year, somehow. I grew up in California, so when I took this job, which is on the East Coast, I thought it would be for a couple of years. [laughs] How many times have all of us said something like that in our adult life?

Chris Sandel: I’m originally from Sydney, and I said, “I’ll just move over to London for a couple years”, and we’re 22 years on and I’ve not left. I’ve left London, but I haven’t left the UK.

Charlotte Markey: So exactly the same. I should’ve caught that. I’m proud of myself usually now for, as an American, being able to figure out the difference between Australian and British and Irish and other accents, but I didn’t catch that right away. Maybe you’ve started to sound like you’re from the UK.

Chris Sandel: I never had a strong accent to start with, but I either get “You don’t sound Australian at all” or “You haven’t lost your accent, you sound very Australian” depending on the person.

Charlotte Markey: It’s funny. But anyway, I started studying body image and eating behaviours and eating disorders during my undergraduate studies, so since the 1990s, and then went on to earn master’s and PhD degrees as a health psychologist. I do original research, so actually trying to ask questions and collect data from usually hundreds of people and try to understand answers to those questions, but I also try to then translate that research to more diverse audiences outside of just the academy. That’s what’s led me to write a lot of articles and books.

The most recent set of books is the body image book series, which is currently still being published by Cambridge University Press. There are books for girls, and there’s a second edition of that book coming out next year, The Body Image Book for Boys, Adultish is a book for young adults, and I’m also working on a book for women.

00:07:00

How ballet affected her relationship to food + body

Chris Sandel: Awesome. If we go back to you before all of this, growing up, what was food like for you? What was food like in your household? I’m just trying to get a sense of how you found your way into the work that you’re in.

Charlotte Markey: I think on the one hand, I’m a woman living in this culture, and all of these issues are pretty salient, I think. I never have trouble talking with people about the work I do because it resonates with I think everyone, essentially.

So on the one hand, my personal story is almost irrelevant; on the other hand, I did grow up as a ballerina, and there was a lot of focus – you know, the 1980s was not a great time in the dance world. I hear it’s improved since. But in terms of disordered eating being pretty rampant and the focus on bodies. I mean, when your body is your art, it’s a difficult thing to completely divorce how you look and how you’re taking care of yourself from what you’re doing. So that was definitely formative for me.

It really wasn’t until I left that world and started studying these issues, I think, that I saw how dysfunctional some of my childhood was – because like most of us, growing up, that’s the only childhood we’ve ever had, so we don’t necessarily know that “Actually, this is not completely normal.” Most people are not trying to avoid food before puberty.

I think for better or worse, the way I often cope with things is to intellectualise and to study, to learn, to try to understand. That’s very much what I think I did in my late adolescence and early adulthood. And I guess it’s probably what I’m still doing.

Chris Sandel: At what age were you when you got into ballet?

Charlotte Markey: Oh, I was four.

Chris Sandel: And for how long were you in the ballet world, and what were your aspirations with it, or what track did you go down with that? Was this something “This was a really big part of my childhood”?

Charlotte Markey: Yes, it was a big part of my childhood. As I mentioned earlier, I grew up in California, and I took lessons and danced at San Francsico Ballet. But I didn’t actually even live in San Francsico, so this would involve my family hauling me into the city from the suburbs multiple times a week. I would never say that I was a particularly confident child, but I did believe I was good. I did think that I had – this is not an unusual story, I very much appreciate, but maybe like most little girls, I thought I would grow up to be a ballerina, and I didn’t care that that meant probably having a very short career because most ballerinas are done by the time they’re in their thirties, pretty much, with performing.

My mom had danced a little bit, and even as an adult took lessons just for exercise and had a real appreciation for it. Took me to shows and things like that, too. So it’s not like we were a performing family. I would never say we were that good. [laughs] But for whatever reason, it did feel serious to me, and that may just be because I’m a serious person. I have no way to verify now, really, if I actually was any good at this.

Chris Sandel: And what happened in terms of when ballet stopped? Was there a realisation of “I just can’t do this anymore” or you got injured, or what happened?

Charlotte Markey: It actually was a formative turning point in that I did audition for a company position, and these are very competitive, and I was pretty young at the time. I think I was like 12 or 13. And I was told, “You do not have a dancer’s body. You will never be a dancer.”

I had no idea what to do with that. I hadn’t even finished puberty. And it was a different era. No-one talked about that. It’s not like I got a pep talk afterwards from my family. No-one commented on that at all. Everyone knew what had happened, but my choice at that point was I still kept trying for a few more years, and then, again, there wasn’t really a conversation about it. I don’t remember my mom or anything coming to me and saying, “Listen, this really isn’t going anywhere, and this is a lot of time and money, so I think we should stop.”

Best I can remember, it was just like, “I guess it’s done now” around the time I went to high school. Maybe there were other things starting to be interesting to me, to want to be around friends more, to not always be travelling away from people to do this other hobby. So it just faded. But I think there are some scars from that era of my life.

Chris Sandel: Do you remember the time receiving that news and how crushed or otherwise you were when you heard that?

Charlotte Markey: I do, yeah. I very vividly have memories of the room where I did the audition and there was a table with three people sitting there watching me. I wasn’t the only one there for that whole audition, but then afterwards, the girls were called in one by one for the results of what they thought. My mom was with me, and I remember being just devastated. Again, just not really even knowing what to do with the information I was given.

Chris Sandel: Which is so tough, because it’s not like it’s unfair that you didn’t reach the pinnacles of ballet; not everyone gets to do that. But you would hope – and we just know more now in terms of “let’s have a conversation about this”, and how we navigate that and not pretend it didn’t happen or “let’s just hope it goes away.” Being able to acknowledge how much time you’ve spent on this thing and how important this thing is in your life, and you’ve just got some fairly devastating news, and how do we help this young girl navigate this?

Charlotte Markey: Yeah, parenting has changed a lot since my parents’ generation to me. I have young adult children now, and I tease them that then someday, they’ll be parents and the pendulum will swing the other way or something and they’ll be saying, “Why was it you were always talking to us? Why were you so indulgent of us? Why were you so interested in us? Why didn’t you just let us do our own thing?” [laughs] Because that’s the way these things seem to work where there’s this back and forth a little bit in terms of culturally how we view almost everything – parenting, politics.

Chris Sandel: For sure. At some point it feels like we’ve reached enlightenment, and then you go forward 100 years and it’s like, oh my God, why did they use to think that thing?

Charlotte Markey: Exactly.

Chris Sandel: I have enough hubris to know that the things I think I’m doing well, there’ll probably be some pushback on it at later points in life.

Charlotte Markey: And I say that in part because certainly I think many adults can look back on their childhood and feel like, “Wow, that could’ve been handled better”, but I also think it was very much the way I was brought up concerning food and bodies and body image, and even just the pursuit of dance for that matter, that was in the context of a particular timeframe. I don’t mean to completely defend it, but there was a lot of dysfunction, and there’s a lot of things – like I said, all of us can think back on our childhood and wonder, “Wow, why didn’t someone have a conversation about that?” or whatever. But that’s not what people really did.

00:16:08

How her relationship to food changed in adolescence

Chris Sandel: For sure. It sounded like there were some pressures on you to look a certain way, eat a certain way, do these things for ballet. As you transitioned out of that, what happened in terms of your relationship with food? And while that was going on, would you have thought of yourself – later on, when you’ve got some perspective on this, would you have categorised yourself as having disordered eating or an eating disorder during that time?

Charlotte Markey: I think actually while I was in dance, I was young enough that I was probably somewhat restrictive of what I ate – that was also very much modelled in my home life in terms of not having a lot of sweets or a lot of ‘junk food’. But I think really when puberty hit, a little bit after that, in high school, my eating became more disordered later, actually.

I think some of the mentality was there from those ballet years, and I had never frankly worked through it. There was a consequence to never having those conversations. I don’t remember ever having any kind of formal diagnosis, really. Again, that was just of the time. This was the late 1980s. When you look at the study and the literature of body image and eating disorders, it was just starting, really, around that time. The public conversation was super limited.

I do remember being taken to the family doctor because I had lost weight at some point, and they ran tests to make sure I didn’t have a tapeworm. I don’t even remember. I just remember there were a number of tests following that appointment, and there was some conversation of “We need to do our due diligence here and make sure there’s nothing physically really wrong.” I remember even at that young age thinking, “There’s nothing physically wrong, you guys. You could just ask me. I’m pretty sure that’s not it.” But that wasn’t, again, of the time. That wasn’t the way people approached it.

I think there was a certain amount of appropriate “Let’s make sure we’re ruling everything out and let’s figure out what’s going on.” And then once everything physically seemed okay, it was like, “All right, I guess we’re good here.”

It was a bit of a struggle for a few years, and then at some point, I half-jokingly say I think I just got hungry. And I mean that almost metaphorically. I think that at some point, the restriction and almost desire to control or police myself or please others or all of those things – I couldn’t articulate why, but it was like, “I just can’t do this anymore. This doesn’t make sense.” It just stopped making sense, I think. And it wasn’t one day, certainly. It was just gradual, across maybe a year or so.

I think the evolution, like for many people – and this is almost a cliché story, so I don’t always share it because as someone who’s studied these issues for so long, I’ve heard other people retell almost this exact same story to me. I know better than to think it makes me particularly unique. But like all those other people, it was then for probably at least a decade a learning and unlearning and divesting from certain belief systems and becoming, literally, a psychologist in the process, that led me, many years later, to where I am now.

Something I’m grateful for and I’ve appreciated about my career is that as the context shifts, as society shifts in ways, there’s new topics to explore, there’s new things I’m studying and thinking about, and personally continuing to evolve as I think about. When I started doing body image research, there was no social media. For a very long time, there was no research on social media and body image, so I’ve been able to do some of that with my students and my lab at Rutgers.

More recently, weight loss medications that are – I’m going to say relatively effective, prior to past iterations, anyways, of weight loss medications – this is a whole new phenomenon, so in my lab we’ve been able to do some research on that lately.

And then certainly as a parent who’s parented children from zero to almost 18 and almost 20 year olds, and also now reaching my own mid-life, there’s all these different junctures and questions that come up as you’re on your own personal path, too. So the context changes and there’s more issues and ideas to consider, and we change.

Chris Sandel: Given the work that you’ve done, it’s going to be shoved in your face through the studying and then through the research and everything that it’s not that people can’t continue to live with disordered eating or with eating disorders or with struggles during that phase or while doing this kind of work, but there is this level of cognitive dissonance that continues to grow and to grow and to grow – or, as you did, “I now start to do this work.” As you say, “I just became hungrier. I wanted more than just this.”

Charlotte Markey: Yeah. I think, too, it’s just in some ways maturing, almost, maybe. As we mature as individuals and as people who are trying to learn and understand ourselves and the world around us, my views have shifted a little bit about a number of issues across time. When I was in graduate school, the beginning of the year is when everyone was talking about the obesity epidemic. And if you wanted to get funding to do research, to study weight or eating, you were writing grants to study obesity, the obesity epidemic. And now, in my field, you are disparaged for even using the word ‘obesity’.

So like I said, things change, and certainly I’ve evolved in ways, I think, because of that.

00:23:37

Broadening the definition of body image

Chris Sandel: Yeah. Let’s start with the topics that you’re covering in the books and the topics that you write about and do research on. Let’s start with the term ‘body image’. I would love for you to define it and how it’s defined in your work.

Charlotte Markey: In research in general, body image is often defined as how we think and feel about our bodies and appearances. And I’ve always found that to be a very narrow definition. I define it much more broadly. I think body image is an integral component of who we are, our identity. I say that in part because of the research I’ve done that shows these connections with body image in many other facets of our lives.

We know that body image impacts our behaviours, especially health behaviours – things like what are you eating, how active are you. We know that body image affects our relationships. How do we engage with other people? Is it with confidence and self-assurance, or is it with deference or someplace in between? It’s associated with our mental health. Body image is a predictor of depression, anxiety, substance use, and of course, eating disorders.

I think if I have to give a short definition, I like to say body image is: how comfortable are you in your own skin? That touches kind of everything else.

Chris Sandel: I like that because it gets away, as you said, from the narrowness of it just being about aesthetics or “how closely do I match up to some societal definition of beauty or thinness?” or whatever it may be, and really getting into someone’s sense of self and self-concept and how they view themselves in relationships. As you were talking there, I’m just thinking someone’s body image is going to have a very big impact on their ability to have difficult conversations. Or could have an impact. It could have an impact on someone’s level of being able to set a boundary.

So I agree with you; I think it bleeds out into all of these different areas.

Charlotte Markey: Yeah, and I really reject the idea that it’s just this superficial “I feel good about how I look.” I’m not going to say that’s not a piece of it. It is, because how we look is part of who we are. But we also know people who maybe aren’t conventionally attractive who are very confident and very comfortable with themselves, and all of that actually makes us perceive them as more attractive.

I think that just shows how subjective this is. So when we talk about the physicality of it, we have to remember that that physicality is very subjective and also somewhat – I don’t know if I want to say time-limited in that the ideals and the expectations surrounding appearances are constantly shifting. It’s not necessarily that our impressions of other people’s appearances are constantly shifting, but the cultural norms do. It’s very murky.

Chris Sandel: For sure. I think about, what was in fashion aesthetically through the last handful of decades? Someone who is at this point held up on a pedestal as being very attractive, you go back a couple of decades, no-one is putting them in that spot because that’s not what we’re praising at this point.

Charlotte Markey: Right. This is why we all love celebrities’ high school yearbook pictures, because someone who may be the epitome of beauty now, you can look at their picture at 17 or 18 and see a semblance, but maybe you wouldn’t have picked them out of that yearbook back then. Some of that has to do with maybe how they’ve fashioned themselves and present themselves to the world now, or even cosmetic work they’ve had done to themselves, and some of it is just our perceptions are shaped by –it’s celebrity. It’s an actress, it’s someone famous.

00:28:10

Why she chose to write body image books for young people

Chris Sandel: For sure. I know with the books that you’ve written, they’re very much aimed at boys and girls and tweens and teens, this area up to young adults. Is that the area that you’ve done your research on? Or you just felt like there’s this gap in the market and no-one’s talking to that space? Why is it that that’s the area you’re writing about?

Charlotte Markey: I think a couple of things. One, I have done research looking across ages, but I think the longer you do this kind of work, the more you realise how essential prevention is. I’ve talked with so many adults, even in some of my clinical work, who have had essentially disordered eating for most of their lives. And the distress that that has caused across their lives is just gutting. It’s just devastating to think about. And it often does make me think, that could’ve been me. I was on that path in many ways. I don’t really know exactly how I got off of it, but I did.

There are so many people who don’t. I think that we want those messages for young people to be much more accepting, much more – I don’t know, confidence-building, informed, healthy, adaptive – so many words come to mind – than the silence a lot of my generation, including myself, got.

So I thought about it in proposing The Body Image Book for girls and boys very much in terms of “If I could get this to a 10-year-old” – when I was working on the girls’ book, my own daughter was about that age, and I actually had her and some of her friends read drafts of it and I focus-grouped it with her and friends and other young girls who were in fourth, fifth, sixth grade. Because I really thought, god, what would it have been like to grow up with these messages in your head, these thoughts in your head? It was just so fun to be in that space as a parent, too, and to be thinking so much about “How do I do this right for my own kids?”

Something that also led me to thinking about these books was when I had started reading through puberty books with my kids when they were – I started all of this very young, because this is what I do for a living, so I’m more comfortable with it than a lot of people, I guess. [laughs]

But I remember my daughter was intellectually curious, almost, like wanting to read the next chapter sometimes and probably wanting to just not go to bed or whatever, but then having this lightbulb moment of like, there are some good books about puberty and physical changes and biology for kids now, and that’s, I think, pretty new for this generation. But where’s the comparable book about mental health and body image and how we feel about ourselves? Because there was like a paragraph, maybe, in the book about that. But as someone who does that for a living, I was like, we need much more than a paragraph.

When I proposed the books to the editor I very fortunately still am working with, she was really receptive. I had all of these ideas going into it. And then the book I published last year, Adultish, was really intended for older teens and young adults and the next step. Like, you’re out of puberty, you’re transitioning into taking care of yourself and being a grownup, and now there are new things that may be triggering concerns. You’re in your first serious relationship, you’re going away to study at a university; how do you navigate some of these same issues as those elements of your world start to change? So it was a little deeper dive into some of the topics.

Chris Sandel: A couple of things that come to mind with this. One, you can’t write about everything. You have to pick a topic. So it’s not that “For adults, I don’t care about this.” It’s just like, “I need to pick an area, and this was really speaking to me at the time because of my own personal experience with reading books with kids.”

And I just want to add that no matter what has happened at what point of life, I do think that these things can definitely change. I’ve had the experience where for a couple years, I was very much working predominantly with people in their midlife, where for whatever reason – I talk about eating disorders, I talk about people who’ve lived with eating disorders for a long time, many decades, so I was attracting that group of people pretty exclusively.

I would say over the last six to nine months, I’m now getting much more of a mix, where I’m now having people who are in their early twenties. I don’t work with anyone who’s under 18, but people in their early twenties all the way through to people who are in their mid-fifties. It’s just a really useful thing to recognise and to be able to share with the people who are in that younger age group and say, “Look, I know this feels like it’s been going on for a really long time; I don’t want this to go on for multiple more decades like this. You can change, and I want you to change so that you don’t have to go through this.”

And then the people who are in their mid-fifties that I’m working with, it’s like, “Hey, you still have many decades ahead of you, and it’s already gone on for a really long time. I don’t want this to go on any longer than it has been.” But it’s been interesting seeing that shift in terms of now having more people of different age groups that I’m working with again. And also realising that yes, there’s some differences, but man, it’s the same. [laughs]

Charlotte Markey: As you were speaking, I was just thinking that exact same thought. I’ve written the books for kids, I’ve parented kids, I’ve worked with kids; I’m now working on this book for women, and it is somewhat prompted by the fact that I’m in midlife and I’m doing more clinical work with people in midlife, and it’s just interesting to me to think about this life transition – which frankly, before I hit it myself, I was not thinking about a whole lot.

But there are so many things that, like you say, are the same. It doesn’t matter what age group you’re talking to; some of the same issues come up. And yet there are these little differences. Even social media, it’s a constant, even with a lot of the older people I talk with. They’re impacted by social media. But it’s also a little bit different in that there’s more impulse control when we’re older, or you have a job so you can’t just be on your phone all the time.

Chris Sandel: Or you remember a time when there was no social media versus “It has always been there and since the age of eight or nine or whatever, it’s been a constant in my life” versus “This was a thing that cropped up in my mid-thirties, and I remember life before Instagram.”

Charlotte Markey: Right, yeah. So I don’t know, I think that’s what’s both so interesting and kind of fascinating to me about these issues. Like I said, they really resonate with everyone in some similar and also some unique ways. Keeps it interesting.

00:36:36

Her goal in creating the books

Chris Sandel: You talked about with reading other books to your kids, finding things that were great and then stuff that wasn’t so good. So when doing these books, what did you want to have them be, or how did you want to shape them to be different from what else was available for young people at the time?

Charlotte Markey: Really there was not a body image book available for kids. There are a few now. There are none that I’m aware of aside from mine really focused on boys. There are boy puberty books, but there’s really no other boy body image books that I’m aware of. There are a few other girl body image books just since 2020 when I published the girls’ book.

I really wanted and I aim for all my books to be evidence-based and to talk about research in super digestible ways, and to talk about how our bodies are not just the source of an infinitely malleable project that we keep having to work on, and then when we finally get it how we like it, everything’s going to go well. That’s kind of an important theme throughout all the books, to reach some degree of self-acceptance and pushing back against some of the cultural messages that are very – they’re consumer messages. They’re about buying and fixing and transforming our lives in ways that are often very unrealistic, and we need certain products to do that. There’s beauty industries and diet industries making a lot of money off of all our insecurities.

I think trying to make all that really clear, like this is kind of a rigged system, so you have to make a choice: how much do you want to participate in this rigged system?

I think also, I really wanted to normalise conversation about issues like body image and mental health more broadly, because it’s not unusual for someone at least temporarily to have some kind of mental health challenge. But there still remains a fair amount of stigma. Certainly that’s gotten a lot better. People are often still kind of embarrassed to admit they need help or they feel like they have to then be saying that they’ve failed in some way, and I think that if young people grow up realising actually, it’s normal; you’re probably going to have something that’s going to challenge you, and it will be easier if you get yourself support and help, and that can be informally or formally – it may be you buy a book or it may be you start therapy, whatever – but that’s okay. That’s totally normal.

I guess I think about these things as an academic in some ways, like what’s the evidence, what kind of research can I pull on to make this evidence-based, and then also I think about it as a mom and a person, and how can we normalise and shift the culture and help young people feel more comfortable with themselves?

Chris Sandel: For sure. As I was going through the books, there was definitely a reflection of, I would’ve loved to have had something like this as a kid or as a young teenager, because I think there were a lot of things in there that I would’ve liked to have known at the time around that. And there just wasn’t the culture of talking about those things. Again, we’re many decades on from me being a teenager, but yeah, there was a lot of stuff in there that would be really important to know.

And also, as you were talking about the challenges of life and things that come up, so much of what I work on with people is to help them recover and having these coping skills so that you can eat this food or you can take that time off exercise or you can do these things in recovery – and these are the things you’re going to use for the rest of your life. Everything I’m showing you, I use in my everyday life. I’ve got a wife, I’ve got a seven-year-old child at the point of recording this, I’ve got a business that I run, I’ve got parents.

Stuff happens in life, and being able to have these various ways of being able to cope that aren’t an eating disorder or aren’t something that is disruptive or maladaptive or you’re paying a huge price for – to be able to have those skills is really, really important.

Charlotte Markey: Absolutely. And again, back to the whole concept of almost prevention. Helping young people to appreciate that, gosh, if you can attain these coping skills, if you can have a healthy mindset about some of these issues before you’re even an adult, that might really save you a lot of struggle later. That’s not to say that everyone who reads a book is going to have a complete epiphany. I know better. But at least it’s adding to the cultural conversation.

There’s nothing more flattering to me than when a friend, or a stranger even, sends me a message and says, “I just walked in on my son, who’s in fifth grade, and he’s reading your book. And I just snuck back out because he was really into it.” Because kids often will – just like I remember my son with the puberty books – be like, “Do I have to read this with you? This is embarrassing.” And I remember just leaving it in their room sometimes and being like, “We don’t have to talk about a lot of it right now, but I’m going to leave this here. Let me know if you have any questions. We’ll come back to this more later.”

I remember another mom friend once saying to me, “What puberty book do you have at your house? Because my son was saying that they were looking at it when he was over there.” And I was like, “Oh, they were?” Kids are naturally curious, and a lot of the issues that I write about are not maybe quite as sexy – literally – as some of what’s in puberty and physical development books, but some of them are still pretty interesting to young people. So I think having that information out there in the culture more is important.

00:43:25

Why separate books for boys, girls, and young adults?

Chris Sandel: For sure. When you first had the idea of doing it, was there always “I will do one for girls, I will do one for boys, I will do one for older adults” and the reason for doing the separate books?

Charlotte Markey: Yeah, I talked with my editor at length about that, and it’s kind of an ongoing conversation, I think, because the book for girls just felt so pressing and probably in some ways personal to me. And yet right away, we were like, we don’t want to create this gendered dichotomy that isn’t a reflection of the real world, and how do we address that? It’s a tricky issue, and yet I also did want to talk about puberty a little bit, so to put it all in one book I thought would be overwhelming.

And frankly, when you’re writing a book, you have to think a little bit at least about your audience. If people don’t read it, then there’s no point in having written it. That’s why the girls’ book, the cover is purple, and the boys’ book, the cover is black. I mean, it’s not because those are my preferences, and it’s not because I want to stereotype the genders. But there are different things that appeal to different genders.

My editor also has two boys of her own, so once we had agreed to write the girls’ book, she was like, “But by the time my boys are old enough, you’re going to have a book for them.” That was very much in my mind. The boys’ book, I was writing before the girls’ book was out. They went really in quick succession because I very much didn’t want to leave that gap where there was one gender addressed and not the other.

And then we weren’t sure where to go next. I really did want to continue the conversation for a little bit of an older audience, and part of that is because when you’re writing with a 12-year-old as your target audience, there’s a lot you have to leave out. And it’s not just because they can’t understand it developmentally; it’s just because I think it would be overwhelming, probably. To talk in-depth about a dating relationship is a little bit – they’re not quite there yet, probably. It didn’t make sense.

That’s part of why I was really committed to Adultish, to thinking about, okay, what’s next? As these kids age out of these books, what’s next?

00:45:55

Body image concerns for young boys and girls

Chris Sandel: For sure. So then let’s talk about this more in a little bit of detail. In terms of the concerns that girls may have or the concerns that boys may have with their bodies, their appearances, what are some of the similarities or what are some of the differences?

Charlotte Markey: A lot of the similarities have to do, of course, with how girls and boys believe they’re perceived by others. Most people are concerned with not appearing too heavy, with trying to attain gender beauty ideals or appearance ideals. And they’re not exactly the same if you’re identifying as male versus female, of course. Girls want to be relatively slender and a little bit muscular but not too much, and petite, oftentimes. And boys want to be tall and more muscular and more powerful. So there are similar issues at the broadest level and then the specifics start to look different for girls versus boys.

And there’s more restricting, often, in terms of food consumption among girls versus boys. When boys start to engage in more maladaptive behaviours, they often don’t conceptualise it that way. And people around them often don’t, either. We know that when boys are diagnosed with an eating disorder, they’re usually in the more serious throes of an eating disorder than a girl because it takes longer to get to a diagnosis and it’s usually a more serious problem.

And that’s because they start off with things like “I’m going to go to the gym every day”, and most people in the vicinity of a boy would say, “Oh, that’s great. You’re being healthy.” Or they’ll make choices like “I’m not going to eat dessert anymore.” And again, “Great, very healthy.” People are always like, “Are those red flags, then?” It’s tricky because I think yes, they are. But they aren’t always, is the problem. There truly are young people who are physically active and careful about what they eat in a way that’s not maladaptive. There’s also a lot of borderline cases and then some that go really awry and end up in disordered eating or eating disorder territory.

So boys are interesting in that way, in that it’s kind of less obvious, I think, what’s going on, and I think that’s part of why they just weren’t studied in the academic literature for so long. We were so used to thinking about body image and eating disorders in terms of the manifestation among girls and women, which was much more focused on restriction, often. When people started asking more questions and different questions of boys and men, we were like, “Oh, wait a second, this doesn’t sound good either. It’s not the same, but…”

Chris Sandel: Yeah. It also mirrors how we as a society talk about dieting, whether it’s for girls and women versus men and boys. There’s very much for men, it’s about longevity, it’s about biohacking, it’s about productivity and performance. And especially if that’s then connected to “I’m doing this sport”, it’s like, “How can you be making the track team or how can you be getting to this elite performance, or how do we connect this to maybe you’re going to get a scholarship and go off to university?”

All of these things where it very much can fly under the radar, and it can look very much like dedication and all of these things that are very praised. And it’s not that it can’t happen in the same way for girls and women, but I think often the way that it’s portrayed with men, it becomes even more difficult to be not under the spell of “This is just about health and this is just about someone who is very driven.” So I think that’s often how it can very easily get missed.

Charlotte Markey: Yeah. I noticed as you were describing it, with boys and men, it’s so much more often functionality related. Like “I’m going to be a great athlete” or “I’m going to become really strong.”

Chris Sandel: Life-enhancing.

Charlotte Markey: Right. It’s not portrayed as an appearance issue. It’s a show of strength and not submission, almost.

Chris Sandel: It’s not about insecurities.

Charlotte Markey: Right. And yet it often is.

Chris Sandel: For sure. But as a performance piece, it’s not about insecurities. [laughs]

Charlotte Markey: Right. What’s so fascinating to me – I sometimes think about when we’re talking about boys and men and so much focus on muscularity and protein and being the biggest, best version in this powerful way – it’s not that I don’t appreciate the aesthetics of that. And I’ve never been a man, so I guess I don’t know from my lived experience what it is exactly to embody that.

But I sometimes stop and think, but what do you need those muscles for? It’s such an interesting – I get that maybe they look nice, and having some strength is good just for living your life. But what’s really admired, you don’t need those kind of muscles unless, I don’t know, maybe if you’re in the army. Most of us just live, frankly, kind of sedentary lives and sit at computers. Unless you’re getting in bar fights on the weekend or – I don’t know, it’s kind of strange.

Chris Sandel: What it feels like – and I can’t remember where I heard this on a podcast before, but I really relate to it. It feels like there’s been a conversation with the wrong group. Men have talked to men about what they think women want, and women have talked to women about what they think men want. There’s this real mismatch between what someone is trying to achieve because they think it is this desired thing versus what the other person really wants.

And I’m making some big broad brushstrokes here. I’m talking about heterosexual relationships and all those kind of things. But if you ask most men about their insecurities, it’s like penis size, it’s about the size of muscles, these kind of things. And if you ask women, “What is the thing that you’re most looking for in a prospective date / husband / long-term relationship?”, most people are not putting penis size anywhere on that list in their top 10, top 20, top 50. And yet if you ask most men, that’s going to be in their top 2, 3, 5.

There’s this real mismatch. And it’s the same as when I’m talking to female clients. From their perspective, all the concerns and their worries are “No-one will ever date me, no-one will ever want to sleep with me” – it’s like, I’m not sure you’re really understanding what men are really into and really care about.

So yeah, it feels like if we could be having some honest conversations with the other parties as opposed to the bigger muscles – yeah, other guys may be impressed with that, but most women, it’s just not that important.

00:53:39

Charlotte’s research on body image + romantic partners

Charlotte Markey: Yeah. You’ve called to mind for me a few studies that I’ve done across my career. One of them is, in broad strokes, looking at how romantic partners view each other’s bodies. What’s interesting is that if me and my husband were asked about this – this is kind of how we did it in the study – separately, though – if he’s satisfied with my body, then I’m more apt to be, and vice versa. So there is some sense of how the other person feels and views you being relevant to your own self-perceptions.

But men are much more likely to think that, frankly, a less emaciated woman is healthier. And women think that men want them to be this very small, perhaps not well-nourished kind of figure. So we saw that looking at romantic partners. What you describe as this cultural phenomenon, we identified and tried to map out among actual couples.

And then in a different study, we actually had couples then first fill out these body image instruments on their own, and then we asked them to get together and we recorded them having conversations with their instruments in front of them. So they had to talk through how they had rated themselves and their partner with their partner.

And it did seem to be that having this conversation with their partner increased their understanding – I know this is so intuitive, it shouldn’t almost have to be a study, but it increased their understanding of what their partner thought about them and improved their body image a little bit. Because like you say, we just don’t have those honest conversations very often. You can imagine when we then introduce this task to couples that right away, people kind of freeze.

Chris Sandel: They’re like, “Please don’t make me do this.”

Charlotte Markey: “Oh my gosh”, right? It turns out we actually have not really used these videotapes in any productive research way, but we’d also layer on, “We’ll be recording you doing this.” [laughs] There were a lot of jokes initially. This was over 10 years ago now that we did this study, but I did a lot of the data collection. I had a lot of people helping me, too, students and graduate students, but I did a lot of it, and it was a very hands-on, labour-intensive effort to do this kind of work where you’re having people in real life come in and then making them talk.

But it was also just really – once they made their jokes about “Oh God, we should’ve driven separately here” or “This isn’t gonna go well” or whatever it was, it was also just so rewarding to see exactly what you just described. Like, if people just communicated with the right people about these issues, it would work out so much better.

Chris Sandel: Yeah, and I think once you’ve communicated this once, the amount of shame that then can come down from being able to have that conversation – and look, it’s not right to have that conversation with everyone. not every partner is going to be the receptive partner that you need in that conversation. But being able to have that kind of a conversation with the right kind of person – especially if we’re talking about teenagers and young adults, having one of those things at a young age can then really set you on a great track for the rest of your life, to be able to say, “Okay, cool, every time I get into a relationship, we’re going to have some conversations about this. I’m going to be able to say what are my preferences, where I have struggles”, all of these kinds of things where otherwise this stuff is in the background. We’re not having those conversations.

And I’m talking about this very personally. There’s lots of stuff I wish I’d very much done differently in getting to this stage later in life and going through therapy and recognising, “Okay, it would be a lot easier for me to just have a difficult conversation” that then turns out to not be that difficult the second and third time I then have that conversation.

Charlotte Markey: Yeah. I think also, not to keep bringing it back to books for kids and not to suggest that this is more of a panacea for what’s going on in the world than of course it is, but I do feel really strongly that having this information available to young people – and I want more books. It’s not just my books. I want more books, I want more conversation, I want more webpages. I just want to be a small part of it, but I’m not trying to take over the market.

I do think then if we can reduce that shame – that shame is so lonely, and there’s so many of us who grew up with some degree of shame and loneliness and not having had good conversations with people who could maybe offer reassurance or just say, “Actually, no, I don’t care if you have muscles. What for? I want you to take care of yourself so that you’re healthy and not sickly, and we can do fun things together. I don’t want you to spend hours every day on this body project that then detracts from other areas of our life.”

Not that, of course, 16-year-olds are going to have those kinds of conversations. That would be a bit intense. [laughs] But I think there are developmentally appropriate conversations at different ages, and I do find it really rewarding and I love it when I talk to young people now – and there has been some really positive cultural shifting. Young people can identify a lot of this. Even if they haven’t internalised it, they’re definitely wiser about body image issues, I think, already. Met with some good information, that wisdom I think is really protective.

But it’s just so fun to see when you are talking with a 14-year-old – there’s a girl – I think her story appears in more than one book, actually. She was literally 14, saying to me, “The media would make you believe we should all hate ourselves, but I just decided recently that doesn’t make sense. I’m not gonna do that.” I think, God, wow, that’s good for 14. That just is amazing.

Chris Sandel: Yeah, it is. People have that moment of enlightenment at age 50. At 14, all the better, for sure.

Charlotte Markey: Yeah.

01:01:10

Advice on raising body positive kids

Chris Sandel: There’s probably lots of people who are listening here who are the adult, who do have young kids, and just wondering, “How can I be setting a good example for them?” Or even just the question of “Can I even do this? Can I raise a body-confident kid or can I raise someone who feels good about themselves when I feel not so good about my own stuff, and I’m working on this? Maybe I have an eating disorder, maybe I’ve got disordered eating, but how can I be a good role model even if I don’t have this necessarily figured out for myself?”

Charlotte Markey: I think one thing as a parent that I love to say to my kids – and I hope they hear it – is none of us have this all figured out. None of us have everything figured out. I think there’s real value in letting our kids know from a young age, “Listen, I’m doing my best, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to behave in this situation” or “I don’t know how to handle this” or “I don’t know what to think about it.”

First of all, give yourself grace. If you don’t have it all figured out, that just means you’re a human being. None of us have it all figured out. Second of all, if you’re struggling, if you’re distraught, then that’s not good for you or your children, so I think it’s a good investment in yourself and your children to find help in a way that makes sense for you. Again, I think that we can self-educate. We can read, we can listen to podcasts. There’s a lot we can do on our own terms. But then oftentimes talking to a professional is really helpful. And I think someone especially who specialises in these issues, whether it be a therapist or a coach – there’s even registered dietitians that do a lot of this kind of work now.

It’s not that it will necessarily require a weekly commitment for the next decade. I see people have breakthroughs sometimes pretty early on, actually. It’s not necessarily good for business because some people I’d like to keep talking to. But it’s great that sometimes just getting the support, getting to process things that no-one’s let them talk about, really, before, or not in an honest way, and with support, can be really, really helpful.

So I think that if you’re a parent and you’re struggling, think about making the investment in yourself, whatever that looks like, and sometimes saying to your kids, “Well, maybe I feel a little self-conscious about this, but I shouldn’t” – I think that’s okay.

I think also, it can be really valuable to fake it till you make it in some things, especially if you have really young kids. As your kids get older, introducing more nuance into the conversation becomes more honest. But young kids aren’t always able to get that, so you don’t want to be visibly stressing about food in front of your young kids because you’re going to teach them inadvertently that food is stressful, then. So even if it feels stressful to you, I’d say this is a good place to fake it. Get yourself support.

The interesting thing is often, the more you fake it, the more – it’s not faking it at some point. And similar things can happen with body image. If you have a child in the room with you as you’re getting dressed – which, as we all know, if you have small children that follow you around, these things happen – instead of looking at yourself after you get dressed in the mirror and saying what may come to mind, which is like “Ugh, this is not looking good”, just say, “Oh, this feels really comfortable. Let’s go.” Or “These pants are so perfect for what we’re doing today.” Again, don’t be self-disparaging, and don’t make topics stressful that we don’t want to be stressful for our kids. And then that’s what they learn. That’s what they see.

Chris Sandel: For sure. What I’ve also noticed with clients are a couple of things. One, often if they have kids, there’s this recognition of “Oh, I would never want to speak to them disparagingly about their body in the way that I’ve naturally started to do it to myself.” I think for me, that can often be a useful reframe for them. When they’re struggling, it’s like, “Imagine this is your daughter. What would you be wanting to say to her in a moment where she’s tried on a dress and it feels a little tight and she’s feeling upset? How would you help her navigate with that?”

For most people, that’s where they’re able to be so much more compassionate and they’re able to find the words and support. The struggle can still be “But I don’t feel like I deserve that”, but at least in the beginning, let’s imagine that this is that small human that you spend so much time with, that you have this love for and so protective of. How would you like to speak to them?

And then I think the other piece that comes up is there can be insecurities or worries when that child reaches a point where that was a difficult point for them. For example, they’ve reached puberty and they’re now starting to put on weight and they’re in a bigger body, and that was the point when this adult had their mum or dad take them to Weightwatchers, or this was the point at which they had this thing happen at the school dance.

There can be this feeling of being pulled in two directions, like “I want to protect them” and there’s this feeling of “I can protect them by helping them shrink and avoid these kinds of things” and also the recognition of “This didn’t necessarily work out well for me when I’ve gone down that road.” I think that often gives someone a chance, if they’re open to it, of doing some good work with their kid and also doing some reparenting with themselves.

Like, you’re getting a chance to do the thing that you would’ve liked to have happened when you were that 12-year-old, when you were that 14-year-old, of someone sitting you down and having a conversation of “I know people have been saying these things to you at school and I know that must be so hard”, and the solution is not for us to start dieting. It’s to help that person feel that they’re valid and they have self-worth and that they’re intrinsically beautiful and all these different things, and be able to give that to them in a way that is also giving it to themselves.

Charlotte Markey: Yeah, I love the way you said that. I think it’s so true. I hear so, so many stories from parents who say there was this turning point, there was this paediatrician or doctor appointment, there was this kid at school who made fun of them, there was the parent who took them – God, the parent who took them to Weightwatchers, I feel like that should be the title of a book. “My Mom Took Me to Weightwatchers.” Because it’s crazy how often that comes up.

And sometimes I actually wonder if those parents were going someplace themselves and weren’t even really realising what they were doing to their child in bringing them. Like I think sometimes it wasn’t like they thought the child needed to lose weight. They were just introducing them to this – I mean, sometimes they did think that, but sometimes I think maybe they didn’t, but the child still internalised so much of this experience.

So I hear those stories so much from parents, and so often they’re very committed in this sense of “I am not doing it this way with my own kids” or “If this was to happen to my kid, I will protect them.” It’s a very fierce, almost visceral sense of “I was not protected, and I will protect my child from this at all costs. Just tell me what to do.” And there’s not just one thing, of course, to do. Like you said, a lot of it is reparenting yourself and being self-compassionate and accepting of yourself.

And also, that means sometimes that you’re going to make mistakes, of course, as a parent. Even if you are really dedicated to being a better parent in this regard, you’re not going to get it right all the time. Parenting is supremely humbling. Fortunately, your kids are somewhat stuck with you, typically, so there are re-dos. So when you make that comment you didn’t mean to make that was like your own parent’s voice in your head coming out, you can still circle back and try your best to make amends or say, “I didn’t really mean to say that. It’s totally fine to have another serving of ice cream. I just kind of wish you didn’t do it before dinner sometimes.” [laughs] You know, whatever, explain yourself.

Chris Sandel: I think that’s important. And I’m not saying that people should mess up intentionally so they can repair. You’re going to have enough opportunities without doing that intentionally. But I would say that the repair work is so important for them being able to show that you are this fallible human being, that you know how to have self-awareness and recognise “I made a mistake in that moment”, how to have a difficult conversation and take accountability. These are all really important skills that kids then learn when you make a mistake and you know how to apologise for that mistake.

Charlotte Markey: Absolutely. There’s, in my mind, so few things more important than teaching our kids that perfect doesn’t exist. We all mess up. But we also can keep learning. We can keep trying. That doesn’t mean because we’ve messed up that we’re bad, there’s something wrong with us; it’s just part of our own personal journey, I guess, to figuring things out.

Chris Sandel: It then helps in terms of the self-compassion piece for the adult in learning self-compassion. Like, “I can recognise I’ve made a mistake here and that I need to make amends, and I don’t have to call myself all the names under the sun about this. I can recognise we all make mistakes and this was an area I did, and I’m going to make it right by having this conversation.” I think that perfectly encapsulates what self-compassion is.

Charlotte Markey: Absolutely.

01:12:35

Social media’s impact on body image

Chris Sandel: What about in terms of social media? Obviously, social media is something that’s, I don’t know at this point, 10-15 years old. So what is the research showing around kids and body image? I know this is a very broad question, but what have you learnt from your research or other people’s research?

Charlotte Markey: There’s this growing body of research about social media, and yet there are still limits to what that research can tell us because a lot of the research is not longitudinal, so we don’t really have many studies that follow kids let’s say before they’re on social media until they get on social media and then across adolescence. Because social media hasn’t been around, frankly, long enough for us to have the results of that kind of research.

That’s what would be ideal in my mind, if we had studies across a decade. Your kid gets on social media – it’s supposed to be not before 13, but let’s be realistic, 12 or 11 – and we’re following those same kids until they’re in their early twenties, and every year or every other year we have assessments of their body image, their mental health, their different use of social media. I don’t know of a study that’s that thorough.

What we have are more short-term, often cross-sectional studies. What I think they suggest as a whole is that social media presents a risk factor. It’s not going to be a detriment to every kid; in fact, it can be a real source of support for some kids. Some of the research that my lab has done that I’m most proud of as it pertains to social media tells a very simple story in that what the study I’m thinking of shows is just it depends on how kids are using social media.

And I know, again, that’s very obvious, but a lot of the early research focused on, what platform are they on? Or how many minutes every day? Or maybe their age, or if there was another risk factor or whatever it may be. A lot of that early research never really asked kids, “What are you doing on social media?” Again, I hate to be stating the obvious, but if kids are just sending their friends messages so that they can meet up and go get pizza or they’re posting pictures of their puppy, this is all pretty benign. It’s actually a lovely form of human connection in many cases. And we saw socially during the pandemic, that was really valuable to a lot of teenagers.

But if they’re following celebrity culture really closely, if they are invested in some of the ‘fitspiration’ kind of social media universe of how you should be lifting weights and what kind of foods you should be cutting out and what kind of protein you should be adding in and whatever – I don’t actually follow those things very intentionally, so I don’t even know what they’re doing at any given time necessarily, but all of that can be really detrimental. Or the ‘What I eat in a day’ kind of – it just makes no sense, and yet social comparison is so incredibly powerful and seems to be one of the primary mechanisms that then drives body dissatisfaction and even disordered eating and other mental health concerns, because it’s just very hard when we get that real visual of someone doing something that seems better than us, or looking in a way that feels better than us. It just makes us feel bad about ourselves.

There’s been some research even like, can we label images if it’s on social media and say, “This was edited” or “This isn’t real life”? But what’s interesting is those labels in that kind of attempt at intervening in terms of any negative consequences of viewing and engaging with that kind of media tend not to be very effective in most of these studies – because our response is just really – it’s like a knee-jerk response that we can’t always reason our way out of very easily.

Chris Sandel: For sure. I think there will be moments when someone feels really triggered and it is very obvious, and then there’s lots of other ways where it’s just subtle information that’s under the hood where people are like, “I don’t actually think I’m really impacted by social media or advertising or whatever. I know that they photoshop things. I know they do this. It’s not having an impact.” It’s like, no, it clearly is having an impact on you. You are not above this. The only way you’re getting above this is you’re not consuming it. But it’s going to have an impact on you just because you’re a human being, and we all compare. It’s not something we’re going to ever stop doing. It just happens. “When that happens, what do you do with that?” becomes the more important piece.

01:18:05

Nuances of social media consumption / screen time

And I do also like that you started this by saying it really depends. It depends on what social media they’re consuming and that some things can be much more helpful than others. I’ve got a seven-year-old son. For the first three years of his life, we did no screens. We were really adamant, like “Screens are bad, we’re not doing any screens. Especially at that time of life, we shouldn’t be doing it.” Very much on our pie horse around that kind of stuff.

And now at this point, he uses an inordinate amount of screen time. And actually, it’s really regulating for him. The way that he is, the way that his mind works, actually being on a screen is a really good thing – and yes, we do other things, and that’s not the only thing that he does.

But it’s really interesting when I then hear conversations around “Kids shouldn’t be on screens for more than three hours a day” or blah, blah, blah. We’re like, okay, we need to be thinking about this in the context of the individual and what they’re spending their time on, what are the other things going on in that person’s life, what’s going on in terms of their relationships, all of these different things. Because yeah, there are some people where spending eight hours a day on a screen is not a great idea, and for other people, that’s actually a really useful thing for that person to be doing and is very helpful for them.

So I think that there can be the same sort of nuance when we’re talking about the social media piece as well.

Charlotte Markey: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And as you were talking about your son, you made me think of when my son was little. He was my first child, and I think with your first child, you start off idealistic. By the time we had my daughter, we had already lost all of that. They were very close in age, so it was just like survival of the fittest right away with her. But with him, we did have those moments, at least, of like “Okay, we’re not going to do this, we’re not going to do screens.”

But speaking of regulating and using screens for good, he was just so high energy. We could not get him to sit down and eat. The only way we could actually get him to sit down and eat is if he was watching something also, and we were tricking him. It’s like the opposite of what anyone who studies these issues would tell you to do, right? There was no savouring of the food. It was literally like, for whatever reason, his physiological makeup was such that it just was impossible. And then we have a baby screaming also in the house. [laughs] Like, you need this. This is regulating, as you say. I love that word.

And there’s really no reason to believe – I think even as we’re older – that sometimes screens or some of these cultural influences we malign can’t have some benefits. I think part of what is problematic about media in general is that it seems to condition us to think in extremes, and algorithms drive that.

And yet in fact, I would say that how we think about media itself shouldn’t be in extremes. It shouldn’t be all or nothing, necessarily. It’s like, how are you using it? What is it doing for you? Like for us, this is our job. We’re doing this for work, essentially. So I don’t know. I do worry about the extremes and the polarization of so much of the conversation. And I don’t mean that politically speaking necessarily as much as in terms of health also, because the loudest voices, squeakiest wheels, get the most attention, often. And that is problematic. But I don’t know that that means we should do away with the messenger, so to speak.

01:22:20

Advice for parents re: social media for kids / teens

Chris Sandel: So what is the advice that you have for the parents with kids or teens with social media? Is there some general guidelines that you have?

Charlotte Markey: Yeah. I would delay it with social media. And I think that context here really matters. For me, I always felt sensitive to not wanting my kids to feel ostracized or unable to connect with their peers. Some parents are a little less sensitive about some of that, and maybe that’s a good thing. I’m not actually sure. But I think your kids’ social network matters, so it can become sort of individualised.

But we do know that the research looking at negative consequences of social media does suggest that the 12-, 13-, 14-year-olds are just more vulnerable. They don’t have the same impulse control. Some of this is physiological. There’s limited prefrontal cortex development at that point in our lives. We’re not very good at being able to identify what’s real from what’s not real and abstract thought isn’t very involved. So there’s reasons to hold off if you can, if it makes sense for you and your family. Some psychologists will even say hold off until 16. I think those psychologists must not have children, frankly. I don’t know any parent who’s lasted that long without their kid on any kind of social media. But I guess hold off as long as you can, maybe.

And then I do think with the interaction of social media, it’s a really interesting opportunity to engage with your child at first and to maybe set some preliminary ground rules. Like, “Okay, here we go, maybe now you have a smartphone, and now you’re on whatever platforms, and once a week I just want to sit down and I want you to show me what’s going on. I’m interested in what you’re doing.” And try to communicate non-judgmentally about some of that.

One, it’s a little bit of a safety check, frankly, but more importantly, kids like to talk about popular culture, and it’s something they’re better at than us, usually. They know more about popular culture than us. So it’s a good way to sometimes connect and talk with kids, and also just to discreetly work in, “Oh, that doesn’t look very realistic” or “Why are you following that person?” or ask some questions. It can be a way for parents to at least initially engage.

Again, if you have a 16-year-old letting you do this, then God love you. I have no idea how you’re making that happen. But if you have a 12- or a 13- or a 14-year-old and they’re stepping into this world, then I think having some monitoring and some conversation is appropriate and can be really helpful.

And I think aside from delaying, communicating about, trying to set some boundaries – whether that be no phones in the room at night or no screens – some of it’s really basic. No screens during meals actually becomes really difficult at some point depending on the age of your kids. And that sounds ridiculous, I know, but we’ve definitely had arguments in my house where it’s like, “We’re all eating! Just sit here for 10 minutes.” Like, “What are you doing?”

I think also we have to do a better job – not just as parents; I don’t think this is all on us at all – but culturally, in working on media literacy. I really view media literacy as a public health issue, and I wish that educators could take it up more. I think that a lot of teenagers are ripe for finding it interesting to think about, “Oh, are we being fooled? Where’s the advertisement here? Where’s the promotion here?” A lot of that is interesting to young people, and it’s a really powerful and good developmental period to be talking to preteens and teens about media literacy.

And then in theory, when they’re on TikTok and they see some diet or health regimen, they can broach that with a little more wisdom. Because we’re going to all be exposed to pseudoscience and misinformation, and we’re all going to fall prey to it sometimes, because often it’s very compelling. But if we can limit that, I think that would be a huge win.

Chris Sandel: For sure. Even if something’s not pseudoscience, it’s accurate information that doesn’t leave you feeling good. It’s like, okay, this is still not helpful. As you were talking about all the things that would be useful for you doing as a parent with your child, I was thinking this would be the same thing that would be useful for an adult to do with themselves.

01:27:57

Benefits of a social media break

It’s really interesting; I never really got into social media in any big way. I was on Facebook when it first came out in 2008 or 2009 or whatever, and I was on it. Never really got into Instagram in any meaningful way. Started doing them both from a business perspective because that was what everyone said to do, and then at some point I was just like, “I can’t be bothered with this.” So I had a good two years, maybe longer than that, where I was not on social media in any way. Didn’t have any apps on my phone, wasn’t using it for business or anything.

Probably last June or July, I made the intentional effort of getting back on Instagram purely from a business, like “I think this could be helpful from a business perspective; I feel like I can do it in a different way. I want to figure out how to do this where it’s actually really supportive and meaningful for what I do, for the changes I want to make in this world.”

So it’s been really interesting to know that I’ve had this time of having no social media and then this time of actually having social media. And as much as I say I just want to use it for business, it’s amazing when I go, “Let me just check out that post”, and then I start scrolling and then I follow this thing and that thing.

Just noticing those differences and being able to take a step back and notice all the times where I end up scrolling is when I’m really tired or I’m feeling a little more anxious or things are feeling a little more overwhelming. So I’m able to notice, “This is the fourth time you’ve picked up your phone today. What’s going on?” And being able to have that recognition.

I think that only comes about where there can be truly a point of contrast. If you’re constantly on this thing, it just feels like “This is the norm, this is how I wake up and this is how I spend my day, and this is what I do when I’m not feeling great” or whatever.

So my suggestion for anyone listening is have a break for some length of time, whether this is a week, whether it’s a month, whether it’s whatever, so that you can have a point of contrast to when you come back and notice, “Hmm, this last week since getting back on social media, I don’t feel as good about myself. There are more insecurities coming up about the food I eat or the exercise I’m not doing” or whatever. But I find that it can be hard to notice that except in the really extreme moments and those things. For all the subtle stuff, people just are unaware.

Charlotte Markey: Yeah. I think, too, it’s important, whether you’re a kid or an adult or a parent or whatever your stage of life, if you’re using social media – I often tell people if you spend even a half hour or an hour trying to clean up your social media, or purge, unfollow, or try to manipulate your algorithm for good, essentially – I have not done a study of this, so I can’t say this with certainty in an evidence-based way, as I wish I could.

But I feel like because most of us probably are spending at least an hour on social media – and we know for teenagers, it’s more like four hours a day, which is just crazy – but if you were to take that half-hour or an hour and really consciously think about what’s appearing in your news feed and what you can try to get rid of, I really feel like that could affect mental health in a really positive way.

I guess the best evidence I have for that is just that I’ve been pretty cognizant ever since I’ve used social media of how I’m engaging and who I’m following. I’m sure my news feed looks fairly bizarre compared to most people’s and that it’s almost all about mental health or silly motherhood stuff or positive body image. Some of the negative influences, I frankly never see because of what I do and how I have used social media. I mean, for the most part. It’s not perfect by any means.

But I think it can be a positive experience. I’ve actually met people through social media that are really valuable to me professionally and that I’m friends with at this point. We’ve connected because I’ve said, “Oh, I just read your book and it reminds me of what I’m trying to do” or “Would you want to do something together?” There’s at least a dozen people I can think of, probably, who I’ve literally ‘met’ on social media, which sounds kind of weird to me at my age. But started out in a professional – we’re both psychologists or we’re both authors or we’re both parents or whatever.

So it can be a valuable resource, like you said, for business or for connection or for getting interesting information. It’s just a matter of how we use it. There is research, though, looking at social media breaks. There are some studies on this. We just did one in my lab that actually looked at kids when they went to camp in the summer and they couldn’t use their phones at camp. They weren’t allowed to bring them. It was a clean break for the longest, I think, any study has looked at. That’s not published yet. But as you’d expect, there are some positive consequences of having that break.

Chris Sandel: Yeah, I can definitely understand that. Again, I know from me coming back on it how much the algorithm is impacted upon by what you’re then clicking on and what you’re following, all of those things.

I had an experience recently; I don’t know how something about art came up in my feed. Either it was a great painting or someone doing something or whatever, and I clicked on it and read through it and I started following them, and the next day there were two or three of those things that were coming up. I was like, “Oh, this is interesting. I like seeing this.” So you click on a few more things, and then before you know it, that becomes a little more of what’s showing up.

The difficulty with this is someone can be in a spiral and not in a good place and click on a couple of things, and now we’ve suggested that this is what we want to see more of, and now you’re trying to get out from under that for a while. But I do agree with you; you can set it up in a way where actually, “I’m seeing some lovely, supportive stuff that is genuinely helpful.”

Charlotte Markey: Yeah. I think, too, like you said, the algorithms are so sensitive – and I talk about this as if I really understand the science behind algorithms, which I’m sure I don’t at all – but I think you click on some mental health messages that are available to you, that are positive, that are affirming, and you’re going to get more of those. And actually, in some ways that’s kind of cool. It’s just a matter of people manipulating what they see to benefit them.

I think it’s possible we’d all be better off without social media, but I’m pretty sure that the cat’s out of the bag here. I don’t think that’s going to happen. So in the absence of that being a viable option, then I do think make a point to click on things that you know feel good for you, that are informative or assuring or interesting, because then you get more of that. And then it becomes a much safer space.

Chris Sandel: Yeah, for sure.

01:36:42

It’s okay to care about how you look

I’m just thinking of some of the other topics or ideas that you cover in the book that would be useful to touch on with the remaining time that we have. One of the ideas that you get across in the book is that it’s okay to care about how you look. I think there is obviously a lot of nuance with this, but talk about this and why you think this is important for kids to understand or for teens or for anyone to understand.

Charlotte Markey: Psychologists sometimes talk about this in terms of adaptive appearance investments and maladaptive appearance investments. I kind of love those terms because I think that – it’s not a dichotomy, of course; it’s more complicated than that. But for any one person, you might be able to somewhat put your behaviours and habits into one of these two buckets.

For some people, an adaptive appearance investment is spending time grooming their hair. That’s something they maybe enjoy or they feel good about, doesn’t take that much time. There’s really not a huge downside to it. I’m not going to demonize that or say there’s anything wrong with that.

I think for most people, because dieting has been shown to be ineffective and harmful and predictive of disordered eating, it’s a maladaptive appearance investment for most people. I say most just because I want to leave room for the one exception, I guess. But if you are trying to adjust your eating and activity habits with the goal of weight loss and you’re engaging in behaviours that aren’t really sustainable, then that’s over time not going to be adaptive. It’s maladaptive.

If you’re engaging in behaviours that are risky in some way – and sometimes people will use some kind of drugs or other substances, like steroids, let’s say. I’m going to say that’s pretty risky. That’s a maladaptive appearance investment.

I guess why it’s really important for me to identify that sometimes this is adaptive is that I think it’s really unrealistic to just say “We just shouldn’t care.” I mean, we have data to suggest that yes, people do react to how we look. We know that. We experience that. To pretend that’s not happening feels, I don’t know, dishonest. I’m not saying it should happen. I’m not saying that’s how I want the world to work. But we know it does to some extent.

I think also, how we present ourselves to the world, it’s not just about trying to meet appearance ideals. I often think of it in terms of professionally. I’m a professor; I go stand in front of a lecture hall and I teach students. If I showed up in my pyjamas and I hadn’t showered in a week and you could tell, it would probably be perceived as a sign that I was not well, that there was something mentally going on, because it’s a sign of respect for my students and for what we’re doing in the classroom that I try to show up looking like a professional.

And that’s not the same thing as I’m trying to look attractive, necessarily. I’m trying to spend some time grooming and wearing clothes that would be considered professional-looking, because I do take my job seriously, and I do respect my students, and I want them to respect me. So some of these investments we make in how we present ourselves to the world, again, it’s not just like “I want to be beautiful or meet some ideal.” There are other connotations associated with caring about how we look.

And I think sometimes, too, some of it is an investment in ourselves in a way that is trying to take care of ourselves or respect ourselves, not necessarily trying to meet unrealistic ideals. And I guess I say that more thinking on the side of grooming kind of behaviours than more distinctly appearance behaviours.

So I don’t know, it’s complicated. I love thinking about this topic because I do think that there are certainly people in the body image world who would just say “It doesn’t matter” or “I don’t care” or “You shouldn’t care” or are very one extreme, and I just think that doesn’t resonate, probably, with at least 80% or 90% of all people. It doesn’t frankly resonate with me very well, even. I think if that’s where you are, great. That’s good, too.

But we all should feel some sense of body autonomy, and body autonomy means doing stuff to our bodies that we want to do sometimes, that we think maybe enhances our appearance. And maybe they don’t, maybe no-one else sees it that way, who knows. But it’s just what we need to do to feel comfortable living in our own bodies.

Chris Sandel: For sure. Some things that come up when I hear you talk about that – I think having this be driven much more by an internal sense than anything else. I’m thinking of a couple of clients that I’m working with now who are going through recovery, who are seeing their body changes as part of that, and obviously that’s a challenging experience to go through and navigate. And then talking about how much they’re into fashion and how much fashion is something that’s important to them, they like to be able to express themselves through clothes.

I’m not wanting to say to them, “No, you shouldn’t do that. You should just dress in a hessian sack. It shouldn’t be important.” This is something that is creative. If they say they like dressing a certain way, it’s not, as you say, all about “I’m dressing in the way that makes me the sexiest human alive.” It’s just “I see this as a creative expression of who I am, and I like having this particular kind of style. This is, in a lot of ways, about how I feel comfortable in who I am.”

So yes, from my perspective, there’s nothing inherently wrong with caring about how you look. It’s just, what are the methods that you’re going to, to achieve this thing, and how much of your self-worth is baked into this one thing? If this is your one and only sense of identity and self-worth, you’re in for some trouble, whether it’s next week, next month, next year.

Charlotte Markey: Eventually. [laughs]

Chris Sandel: Eventually this is going to not be a great thing. But if there’s a decent amount of identify diversification and there’s this one area that is part of this that you really like, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that – as you say, as long as you’re able to do things in a way that is sustainable. We’re not going into huge amounts of debt because “I’m trying to buy this brand of clothes and I really can’t afford that.” But yeah, otherwise, I don’t necessarily have an issue with it.

Also, piggybacking on something you said earlier in the conversation, when we think about appearance, often when we think about it for ourselves, we can get very black-and-white about the aesthetics, but when we think about how we think about other people, we notice that there are so many different dimensions to it. “This person is so smiley or bubbly” or “I really love having these in-depth conversations with this person” or “I always feel like they’re super present and really engaged.” Those things are attractive, for lack of a better word.

Charlotte Markey: Yeah, of course.

Chris Sandel: And being able to understand, when I think about I care about how I look – can we bring some of that into it? And again, not for this external validation reason, but just “Hey, I want to show up as this kind of person.” I love getting the response that “you were really engaging”, not because I wanted that from the other person, but it’s like, that’s a value of the kind of person I want to be. So how can we take this thing that is not going away, that is intrinsic to being a human, has evolutionary reasons for why it’s here, and do it in a way that is genuinely serving us and not creating more harm?

Charlotte Markey: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more with everything you said. It’s so funny; when you made reference to a client whose body is changing, the first thing in my head was you’re not going to just tell them “put a sack on, then, who cares?” I often tell people in similar situations, “Is it within your means to buy some clothes that feel comfortable to you, that feel good, that make you feel like yourself?”

Maybe that’s not the long-term solution, maybe that doesn’t really buy you a positive body image per se, but it doesn’t hurt, necessarily. I think at least as a short-term “hey, I’m kind of having a tough time with this thing, can I at least just feel comfortable?” Because especially when we’re talking with people who are in recovery from eating disorders, and oftentimes that means a change in weight where they’re getting bigger – to then be wearing clothes that feel restrictive is like a constant reminder of that, and it’s really, really stressful. It really can impede recovery to have that physical reminder if you’re feeling that discomfort.

So it’s really not just materialistic or fashion or about appearance; it’s about being comfortable in your body and allowing for your body to change, because all of our bodies change across our lifetime. Even if we’re not in recovery from an eating disorder, we’re going to get older, we’re going to get sick. Some of us have children, some of us get injured. Things happen.

Chris Sandel: Yeah. I also think that it can be part of the acceptance process. If I could only buy clothes that felt comfortable or felt fashionable or whatever when I had this smaller body and I can’t do any of that as I go into this bigger body, or this bigger body is like a temporary thing and I think I’m going to get out of the ‘overshoot’ and then I’ll get some new clothes – I think it just keeps people stuck.

Charlotte Markey: Absolutely.

Chris Sandel: As opposed to saying – yes, I know there’s a financial piece connected to this, but can you buy some nice stuff? Do you need to go on Vinted and get things second-hand? Or do you need to sell your own stuff on Vinted to get these things?

In the same way I think a massage is more than just about the physical touch, it’s telling yourself “I care about me and I’m doing this thing to support me”, I think the same thing about the clothes piece. It can be really important to say, “Hey, I know I’m in a bigger body now, and I still want to buy things that are comfortable, are fashionable, are an expression of how I want to be.”

Charlotte Markey: Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Sandel: Charlotte, this has been a lovely conversation. I feel like I could chat with you for a lot longer than just this. But where can people be going if they want to find out more about you?

Charlotte Markey: Agree, first of all. I feel like this has passed incredibly quickly. It’s good that you’re going to cut us off, otherwise three hours from now we might still be talking about these issues. [laughs] And I would still be enjoying it, I’m sure.

But yeah, I’m on the internet; www.thebodyimagebook.com is the easiest place to go, probably. I am on social media, mostly just Instagram, and it’s @char_markey. But yeah, I have my own ambivalent feelings about how much time I spend there and what I do there. So who knows. At least for now, that’s where I am, though. Thanks for this opportunity.

Chris Sandel: You’re welcome. And I’ll put all of those things in the show notes. Thank you for coming on. As we talked about through this, you’ve got lots of books, so if people are interested, please check out the books.

Charlotte Markey: Yeah, thank you.

Chris Sandel: So that was my conversation with Dr Charlotte Markey. I really enjoyed this one. If you found it helpful, if you liked what she had to say, then as I talked about at the top, she’s got quite a number of books with this. So I would recommend checking out her books or going to the links she talked about in terms of her website.

That is it for this week’s episode. As I mentioned at the top, I’m currently taking on new clients. If you’re interested in help reaching a place of full recovery, then I would love to be that help for you. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com and just put ‘coaching’ in the subject line.

So that is it for this week’s episode. I will be back next week with another show. Until then, take care of yourself, and I will see you soon!

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Here’s what we talk about in this podcast episode:

Intro