Our Bodies Are Instruments w/ Drs. Lindsay & Lexie Kite

our bodies. Today I'm speaking with twin sisters, Dr Lexi Kite and Dr Lindsay Kite. They are founders of the nonprofit Beauty Redefined, which helps women recognize and reject harmful messages about their bodies worth and potential and the meaning and value of beauty in their lives. They also have a book More Than a Body, Your Body Is An Instrument Not an Ornament, now on Amazon. Lexi and Lindsay, I'm so happy to have you here, Thank you, Thank

you you women. And body image has been it's like part of our DNA, and it's something that it doesn't matter how old you are. I feel like I discussed it as a little girl. I discussed it with my teenage daughters, and I discussed it with my female friends now and I discussed it with my eighty six year old mother, So it is amen an ongoing discussion battle.

I've been thinking in the past few days about the history of women and bodies and how it's changed through the centuries, and that you know, there was a time when voluptuous, heavy women were considered incredibly desirable and also heavy women were sexy. Have you guys studied historically why it changes. Yeah, I mean there's definitely a history to it, and you nailed it talking about how voluptuous figures were really prized right aud the turn of the century is

actually where a really into same phenomenon happens. I included this example in the book. Lillian Russell was a famous actress. She was kind of just known for her beauty. She was a bit of a social light in New York and you'd see pictures of her and she's They described her as robust and voluptuous, and she was really prized

as this beauty icon at the time. Even her obituary mentioned that she was robust and curbacious, a larger woman, and there were there was one New York Times newspiece that mentioned her weight, and it was around two hundred pounds, and they were kind of celebrating this as a feature of her beauty because obviously at the time it was seen as healthier and you'd be more wealthy if you could afford to stay indoors, you did not have tuberculosis and a lot of the things that caused finness time

and then you see just what sixty seventy years later, all of a sudden, twiggy is in fashion. And ever since then it's been this tiny ideal and there are so many factors that go into whether or not thinness is prize. Unfortunately, since I've been alive, it's been skinny with big boobs. Um, the Kardashians have changed it a little bit because now there's now you have to have a butt too. I know, now you have to have a butt. But I'm an old lady. I'm all about

growing tomatoes now. So I'm like, sexy is over, so let's move on. But I do have two teenage daughters. But ever since advertising has really taken over and been so directed at women after the Industrial Revolution, and women are indoors, then we see all of this economy that's built around women's value is coming from their right, from

their desirability, especially within fact. It's interesting because then I was thinking about Jane Mansfield and to Phia loren And and I was thinking about what makes them so sexy, and I thought, it's a very Darwinistic thing, which is, when you see a voluptuous woman with big breasts, you go, oh,

she can hold a baby and feed a baby. When I see a very very skinny woman who's adhering to whatever Vogue magazine says is in I look at her and I go, well, you need some cheese, first of all, and second of all, you just don't look healthy to me. So you know, if you think about Darwin and you think about survival of the fittest, it does, for me go against a lot of what the media throws at

us of what should be attractive. Well, there's definitely this evolutionary argument that I think gets used a lot of the time to sort of justify why women are so valued for having crevacious hips and a small waist. And you know this ratio that is so prized and valued

as the beauty standard, and it's youth. Obviously youth is highly prized, but this same evolutionary argument is used against women because it's putting the value slowly on a woman's physical appearance, solely on her sexual desirability and her availability to men. And so still we're learning to see women's bodies through this lens of a sexualized male, heterosexual perspective, and we learned to term that view against ourselves as well. So we see people who are curvationous, or we see

them as too skinny or whatever. We're putting them in these categories in our own minds, objectifying them, really seeing them as objects to be evaluated. And we turned that same perspective on ourselves, which really just splits us not only against other women, but also against our own bodies. That's the really hard thing here with objectification. Yeah, it's it's incredible how as women we do flip the mirror onto us instead of saying, hey, Richard Gear not so

cute anymore. You know, he's got white hair, but no, he's still stay desirable. He stays o yes, And he gets to marry a thirty two year old and he does movies where the wife is cast much younger. I mean, that's all still real. Is there a reason that women in our culture don't flip the mirror. Why aren't we all saying that's a double standard? What about you? What

about you? Besides penis sides, I don't know what else we I guess they have to have abs, but they are not put under the microscope the same way women are. I mean, we can blame a few different reasons for this. One is patriarchy, another is capitalism. Another is sexism, which

goes hand in hand with patriarchy. But what we're talking about here is the majority of girls and women in Western culture, if not many more cultures that are raised from the time we are tiny, being told from every conceivable angle, even the people we love, that our value

is based on how we appear. That's why we give little girls dress up kids and make up kids, and the shows they watch always always revolve around the female characters being curvaceous, being sexualized, being decorative in ways that

we don't ask male characters to be. And then we're raised believing that our value comes from our sexual appeal and our beauty, and that is reinforced to us by the ways people treat us, by the diets are moms asked us to go on with them until we are a hundred years old, still worrying about the carbs we're eating, still worrying about the wrinkles on our face. Because multibillion dollar industries prey on these insecurities. So it's no wonder that we get to see men being lauded and praised

for just showing up as they are. The bar is low. They get to be praised for their talent where women must be talented, plus they must look good doing it. And haven't we all internalized that? Yes, it's interesting. There aren't any little boy beauty pageants, are there? No, we don't give boys scholarships for looking good. Now, it is interesting, and when you think about how we're all put literally put on the stage at such a young age, boys aren't. It's go out and be macho, Go shoot a deer,

go play football, go do all those things. Absolutely, it's this thing where we require this of girls in ways we don't do men. And Lindsay and I in our book, we hit this angle hard where we talk about the idea that a lot of people are trying to fix female body image and self esteem issues by a range of body positivity or body positive mantras helping people see themselves as beautiful, you know, flaws and all, or you know,

beautiful in all of their glory. And we try to expand these notions of who gets to be beautiful so that we can increase girls and women's confidence, but we do not do that to boys and men. How laughable would it be to, you know, have a viral video or a well intentioned speaker say to the boys and the men with body image issues, you are so handsome just as you are. If you only knew how cute

you were, you'd have the confidence to change the world. No, that's not how we treat boys and men, because they know they are more than bodies. And yet girls and women are relegated to just trying to feel beautiful and believe they're beautiful. And so we try to expand these notions of beautiful to encompass everybody, and yet we're still stuck at just beauty, at just bodies, and we're trying

to expand this. This standard of what constitutes beautiful and attractive and even just normal for girls and women is set so far out of reach that we are all constant trying to become just normal, trying to lose enough weight to feel like we're acceptable, we're in control. We're constantly striving not only to be successful in our careers and to have grate fulfilling relationships, but we don't feel like we have achieved anything unless we also look good

doing it. And this is a message that we received throughout our whole lives, and it is a huge double Standpope, get me started. We don't have that much time. But what I will say is when I was sixteen years old, I went to live in Spain. It's like a broad program, and I had a very happy, heavy Spanish family. I lived with who ate six meals a day, and I gained a ton of weight, to the point where when I got off the plane my mother walked right by me,

didn't recognize. And I spent my freshman sophomore years of high school as a heavy girl. And two things came out of it. One was complete freedom to not worry about that stuff, to see all the mean girls do in their lashes with mascara on the tip of a safety pin, which I never gotten nowhere. Or I had a roommate. I went to boarding school, I had a

roommate who didn't eat, just couldn't be skinny enough. So there was a little interactia going on with her, and I worked on my personality and one summer I fell in love with the cutest boy who looked like James Spader from Pretty and Pink, and I won him over because I was funny and I was smart and I gave him a hard time. And it was a huge lesson for me because the weight ultimately fell off because it was it was the opposite of trying to be skinny.

I couldn't keep the pounds on, but I it was a lesson to me that I could rely on who I was. My authentic inner self prevailed, and I tried so much to hammer it into my I have two teenage daughters and to work in it, and I'm always saying to them, developed the inside, because the outside is going to change. It's going to go through all different things, and it's not who you are totally. It's just not

who you are. It's so interesting that we learned this story our whole lives about what it takes to be happy and confident and desirable. But what you just described is the reality when you actually push back against those narratives that tell you thinness is the key to everything. Then you can realize for yourself. But that is not necessarily true, like you might come against some barriers because then is definitely prized and rewarded in an objectifying culture

like this. But you can also find out that it's much more fulfilling to have a really dynamic personality and to find out what you actually bring to the table, whether it's in a dating relationship or just in the world. It's so much more fulfilling, and it's so much more sustainable, Like you learned what makes you you? Absolutely I um.

I lived in Los Angeles for thirteen years when I was acting, and that is a town and a culture that propelled actuates this, and I do remember very clearly being very insecure, but then going to a dinner party and there would be some of the most beautiful, famous actresses in the world at the table, but they just were uninteresting. They just really had nothing to say unless they were whispering across the table to the other one

about who did your nose? And I realized that I'm getting the focus, and it's not because my tits are up to my chin or I'm shaking my ass to the guy next to me. I'm getting the kind of focus that ultimately all of us women want, which is real communication, And that to me is so much better than being ogle. That the fact that these men and women at the table were engaged in a conversation with me and laughing and dissecting something, and that image, to me is what I try to give my daughters all

the time. Be the provocateur at the table as you have something interesting to say, not because you have a tattoo of a sword on on your breast, you know. So it's very specific, but it's it's so hard because I I want to bring us into high school a little bit, because so much of our formidable years happened there. And I'm sure and I've I've read a lot of

the research that you guys have done. You've dealt with girls who had trauma, there was sexual assault, something where they was trying to hide their body, or they were bullied at school, and so unfortunately that ends up turning into eating disorders, cutting. And so I think about high school a lot because that is the age group that are so susceptible to all this stuff. And so how are you talking to women that age? How are you

talking to high school girls and saying listen. You know, it doesn't matter that you have a unibrow, or it doesn't matter that Timmy the quarterback doesn't like you. So one thing we want to do to act with these girls who oftentimes are living in a comfort zone that is deeply uncomfortable. We talked about in our book. We use this imagery of being a little girl who isn't self conscious of her body, who's playing on the beach. You're not thinking about what you're wearing or why you

shouldn't be at the beach today. You're just playing. And then over time people start inviting you into what we call the waters of objectification, the sea of objectification, which I love, thank you, where you slip outside of yourself. You start to perceive yourself from the outside, to monitor yourself by the way you appear. After a while, that water feels like the most comfortable, warm place in the world. You can't imagine even getting out outside of it because

it's cold. So you tread water in this deeply uncomfortable comfort zone because it's all you know. So many girls grow up believing that part of the price they have to pay to be female is to be consistently perceiving and monitoring their bodies from the outside, thinking about their worst fears, about what other people might be thinking when they look at them, and they live in this place

of shame and self objectification. So when we can explain to girls that the way they're living inside their heads is actually impacting their real lives in horrible and dangerous ways, they start to see it in this light. Bulb goes off.

It did for us when we started recognizing that self objectification, that idea of your identity being split into living and being looked at, was not just a crappy thing girls have to experience, but actually a thing that keeps us from fulfilling our greatest lives and happiness and potential, from happy sex lives where you're actually living inside your body and getting enjoyment from that, from achieving good grades to

working out. You know, so many girls opt out of sports and exercise because they feel uncomfortable with how their bodies appear. Well, didn't you got You did some research that said girls that are all about body fixation and self objective patition don't do as well in math, Yes, reading comprehension, you don't lift as heavy of weights when you're working out in front of a mirror, or thinking

about how you appear to the guy behind you. You're worried about how you jiggle, you can't perform as well. All of this research shows that self objectification literally halts our progress on our happiness. And when girls learn about this, that light bulb goes off and they have an opportunity to choose a new path. We talk about this idea. Our main idea is body image resilience for girls and women.

Body image resilience is the ability to see your pain, to see your shame, and to come back home by responding to that pain and that shame in a new way, by not doing what you used to do, by hiding out, by not dressing down for pe because you're uncomfortable, by not raising your hand in class, by dieting and self harm and disordered eating, but instead to feel that pain when it comes in, to feel it, to name it and call it out, shine a light on it, take

your power back and respond in a new and healthier way. Yes, there's a lot more to come after the short break, and we're back with more go ass galleys. It's interesting when you were talking about a little girl at the beach and and the whole analogy with being in a bathing suit. I look at my children and I think about how when they were two to four, two to six, they'd be in a bikini. They could care less about

the bikini or their bodies. They're digging in the sand, they're getting dirty, they're running around, They're just spreading their legs and peeing in the sand. They're just who they are. And I would love to be able to go to the beach, not you know, peeing in the sand, but I'd love to be able to go to the beach now as a grown woman with that same freedom. And I think about how many women when you see them, they're not jumping up and down on the beach, you

know what I mean. They're not hitting the volleyball, and we have calf Dan's on are all trying to find the right position on the towel, and God, I just want to run down the beach and not worry about it, because I want to be that four year old girl in the Strawberry Shortcake bikini, not giving a ship what

people are thinking exactly. Isn't that so aspirational? Yes? Really, we can all think back to a time in our lives in our childhood's, hopefully even into adolescence for some people, unfortunately not too many where you can remember not caring how other people or what I was wearing, or my horrible haircuts that my mother gave me. I mean, yeah, no, you were. You were focused on the plato or the sandbox or the things at hand. And you can get

there in little ways. Yeah, And so think of like when you're in the middle of an amazing book, a workout that you love, a walk that you love, maybe you're you're on a drive, Like, what are those examples of your life right now where you actually lose your self consciousness, where you're immersed in a moment. It happens. We all have those experiences, but for women it doesn't happen nearly as often. For girls, it doesn't happen as

often as it does for boys. And so the first step is really a matter of recognizing that this like self conscious, self aware body monitoring is not a natural way to be. It feels like it is now because it's invisible because we've grown up in this culture that teaches us to zoom in on women's bodies and the camera pans up and down bodies. Our eyes learned to do that same thing to real people's bodies in real lives.

But it's not just what humans do. It's it's an a learned thing we've received through this culture, especially in this really immersive media environment. You know. It's it's interesting I found with comedy you can fight a lot of these things, you know, because the laugh becomes a thing instead of the objectification. You know, if you were doing a character just didn't matter. I mean again, the laugh was more important than whatever they were thinking about us sexually.

I want to know what is the special sauce that's going to help us with the next generations of women to pivot their thinking about themselves and when who's watching them and who's objectifying them and sort of focus on something else, focus on going to law school or you know, for me, it was getting a laugh, but you can aim higher. How do we pivot that? And I know that you guys have a lot of ideas about that. Yeah, what you just described I think is how in comedy

you've broken the value system. Yes, so what we've got to do for ourselves It doesn't matter how old you are, whether you're a girl or a woman. We have to break that value system that says beauty is the only way that you will feel fulfilled, because it turns out it's not true. You can be as beautiful, as hot as you want to be, you might still get cheated on, you might still not get the career you want, you might still get cancer and depression and all the other

wore things that happened. Well, by the way I mean talking about looking behind the curtain, I've known some of these women who were the most beautiful, and then you meet them and you go, oh my god, you're incredibly depressed and insecure. And then you start to go, if I had your body, if I like like you, I wouldn't be depressed out. It's not true, not true at all.

It's yes. It is a myth, one thing that that we What we really want to drive home, and this work we try so hard to do is to get women to see their pain, to turn it on its head, and let that anger fuel you to meld you back into yourself where you belong. I cannot say it strongly enough.

Girls and women belong inside their bodies, and we our joy has been stolen from us, the lost potential of so many girls and women who have been unable to embody themselves, to just live inside their bodies, to enjoy working out and loving relationships and their careers is unfathomable.

And so we want women to start out with anger, like to really embrace seeing the ways this objectifying world and even people you love have objectified you and sexualized you and harmed you in so many ways that are both violent and very implicit and hard to see. The violence. It's all violence, and we want them to use that pain as an opportunity to rise in the face of it, to rise with resilience. And the only way we are ever going to do it is by calling it out.

Body image resilience is the feminist revolution that every single one of us needs. And by breaking this value system and showing up, by opting out of these very dehumanizing ideals that we all just play by, we can do that. You know, not all of us have the power to opt out people who can't fit in most clothing in stores. They're gonna have a harder time opting out Black women who are required to straighten their hair where where weaves.

They're going to have a harder time opting out of some of these ideals, but those of us with the privilege to do so must push back to provide a little bit of freedom for our daughters. I have a four year old daughter and a one year old daughter. I have opted out of painful beauty regimens, like even laser hair removal, because I want my daughters to see

that their leg hair is okay, that it's more. When Julia Roberts a few years ago waved her arm and she had all that long armpit hair, yeah, I screamed yes Queen the loudest because I was like, yeah, yeah,

let's change up the imagery a little bit. Yes. And for her to have all that privilege and be pushing back, how amazing is that, you know, to see women like Lizo pushed back on this and Melissa McCarthy like break the value system so many Billie eilish, to see women who are given the opportunity, you know, because that is still power that is offered to us in a very sexist and patriarchal world. But when we received that power, every one of us should push back. For Lindsay and I,

we've opted out of dieting. I can tell you that I am the fattest i've ever been. And I'm the happiest I've ever been. I have the most amazing, loving relationship with a husband that I is just like my dream partner, and babies who loved me at a career that is going incredibly well. And it has nothing to do with my body. And you're probably really healthy. I work out every day. My weight has not changed one bit, but my workouts have gotten me through a global pandemic.

I am so grateful for the way my body can move. You know this mantra we shout from the rooftops that really is a game changer is your body is an instrument, not an ornament, and that can change your life. It will change how you see health and fitness. It will change how you perceive your body every time you're moving, every time you're looking in a mirror. Um, I want to talk to you about the health version because so much, so much stuff that is delivered to us to be

the right thing to do is unhealthy. Right, Um, you talk about intermittent fasting. Is there a way to reframe a lot of this stuff? What you want to do is put the focus on actual indicators of health and fitness as opposed to just those external indicators we have been fully taught to rely on and to define our

health and fitness by. When you ask women to define their health and fitness and whether or not they consider themselves to be healthy or fit, overwhelmingly they'll use thinness, whether or not their tone, whether or not they fit into the genes that they wanted to from five years ago. Yeah, that is why is it such a selling of our genes are like this great status indicator of how we're feeling. Come on, and now you can get a new pair of genes for like forty bucks. So it shouldn't where

sweatpants exactly. Yeah, I've learned that lesson a lot of us have this year. The most important thing is to recognize the ways we have not only objectified our bodies, but we've objectified our health by depersonalizing it, by evaluating it and defining it solely by how we look, how much we weigh, what sides of clothes we wear, our measurements, whatever. I want you to think of these things as objects that actually depersonalize your health and fitness to the point

where it exists outside of you. It is not something that you are experiencing that you are living that you are feeling. And so to reframe this and flip it on its head, we do have to get back in touch with what is it really. We've got to start defining it by what we do, how we feel, what our internal indicators of health like lab tests, cardiovascular fitness.

Your cholesterol is a good example of that because it can show you when something's out of whack, when maybe you've been coping in ways that are actually harmful, especially as a result of the disordered eating and the restriction that we all cope with in this environment. And so we can start to take that power back by focusing on your body as an instrument as opposed to an ornament. It's there for your use, your experience, your benefit, nobody else's.

You can learn to appreciate and get back inside your body by focusing on how you feel, what you can do, and seeing what actually determines your health and wellness. It may not be weight loss. You know, you might take

diet pills. You might be on pun bend and your heart's out of whack and you're thinner and everyone thinks you're healthier when yeah, you might be getting ready for a heart attack, and your doctor can tell you that actually you still have type two diabetes, you still have all of the risk factors for cancer or whatever it

may be. What actually fixes that, what actually decreases your health risk in so many ways, is simply increasing your physical activity level, not in crazy ways, walking, moving your body thirty minutes a day, get your heart right up. This is sustainable. And it also improves your body image because then you're recapturing that relationship by using your body

instead of just looking at it. There was research that said that during the pandemic, which we're still in but at the beginning anyway, women gained weight and men got fit. And I read that and I was like, is that true? And I thought about it and my sort of poor girlfriends. We're all baking bread and freaking out and like, how do I take care of my children and what's going to happen? And the men were out on three hour bike rides or strength training for the whole day or whatever.

And I thought, is that interesting that the women the first thing they do is lose the relationship with themselves. They don't take care of themselves. And I I was stress eating and I went to the doctor who told me that my cholesterol was three, which is really bad, and she said, what have you been doing. I said, I've been eating ice cream NonStop and she said, we'll stop, and I thought, okay, yeah, my doctor told me to stop. I'm gonna stop. And I was like, why was I

eating a pint of ice cream every day? Like I didn't need to, There was no reason for it. Um, it was it was my coping. But I'm curious as to why that was my coping, Like why wasn't I doing zoomyoga with my husband in the other room. Why wasn't I hiking? So what I did was I have this dog, this that I rescued that is my other husband, and I started walking him. And it was never about ego, right, My My doctor didn't say you're not going to look good in a bikini this summer unless you stop eating

ice cream. She was like talking about heart attacks, and it was less ego and more like do you want to live? Right? So, I'm walking like seven miles a day and I've never felt better, I've never or felt stronger. I'm able to think like my brain, I'm like coming up with eight million movie ideas a second. And it never stemmed from any of this beauty place, which was very empowering for me. And my husband even said to me the other day, you know, I was like in

my underweark getting dressed. He was like, God, you look amazing, and I was like, oh really, oh good, you know, but I mean it was like, oh, that's just a good side effect of what I'm doing, but it's not the reason I'm doing it. We're gonna take a short break and we'll be right back, and we're back. The friends of mine in l a who, like I said before, the industry of entertainment, that kind of this is what

they sell. Those women I've noticed are having a really hard time with like age transition because they're told that they're self worth, that their whole value is to be young and sexy. We can't all be young and sexy for the rest of our lives, and they're what they're hearing now is oh, you're expired. Your shelf life is over.

And instead of going, Okay, this is what you're dictating, but I can go off and be you know, Jessica Tandy or somebody else, they're getting their third facelift and they're popping opiates to maintain the stress of having to battle this constantly, and I feel for them, I really do. I feel for them, and I'm always trying to find a way to message what you guys have been saying, which is find the other outlets. You know what I mean, Like, suddenly I'm in good shape and it was from something

completely different. Oh yeah, that's what you're describing, is using your coping mechanisms dealing with these disruptions that come up in your life. For some people, it's going to be your body changing. So the disruption may not even be like I'm at home during a endemic and baking bread. The disruption might be I gained a bunch of weight and now my cholesterol is out of whack and I have been coping breathing ice cream. And what you did

is you switched your coping mechanisms. So instead of responding to this disruption by sinking deeper into shame like you describe with opioids or with self harm and disordered eating, you switch that coping mechanisms to where you weren't trying to hide your body or fix your body. You weren't clinging to this uncomfortable comfort zone of oh my body doesn't look right, and so I'm gonna do a quick

fix to figure it out. You switched it up, so you used your body as an instrument, and you found that joy and fulfillment in actually experiencing how your body can help you move through the world and see the world and enjoy it, as opposed to how the world

experiences your body. And so when you're talking about these women who are aging in Hollywood, they've been reaping the rewards their whole lives in this system that values thinness and youth and beauty, and they probably felt like they were on top of the world, and everyone else probably perceived that they were winning. Because as as long as you've got uni in thinness and youth and plus a little talent to go along with it, then you can be okay in this system. But what you're describing is

how it does not work that way. Eventually, all of us fail in a system that values women's bodies at the expense of our humanity. And so when we're just playing into the same value system that will inevitably fail us, we will not be sustainably happy. And the answer really is to find what truly fulfills us, what truly values us, and how we can understand our bodies from a new perspective, not an outside viewers perspective, but our own internal, first

person perspective on the whole world. And it it depends on who controls the value system. So obviously in Hollywood, we know that as men overwhelmingly white men, and they have specific sexual preferences on what women's bodies need to look like to be valued. And it is a value system that is harming all of us because we export those ideals all over the US to every age group and then all over the entire world. And we need to recognize the ways it's harming us in our own

visual lives. What have I been held back from? What have I opted out of? How have I been actively harmed by thinking about my body from some white male Hollywood executive's perspective? And then how can I use that spotlight on my shame and my self objectification, the ways

I've learned to to dehumanize myself. How can I use that to take active steps the next time that shame comes up to where I can use my body as an instrument where I can reach out to other people socially and share this, you know, annoying self objectification this paim that I'm experiencing. How can I reconnect with my own inner child self, who wasn't so hung up on how my face and my body looks, and instead could just live my life the way we all should continue

to do. She was paying on the beach, that little girl. Now, I want to talk to you about social media, because that, to me, is one of the biggest hurdles with this. I'd grow up with it. It exists now and again. I have tuned to teenage daughters and I look at social media and I just think, Wow, the Instagram influencers and models, not only are they sticking their thong in the camera, but they're getting paid, so now they're literally being valued at a price. And I fear for this

whole generation of girls. I scream and yell at my daughter's about sexually exploiting and all this kind of stuff. They're not allowed to post anything. It's like kittens and puppies. But they look at their friends and they think, she just posted a sexy photo, and she's getting lots of likes, and she's getting popular, and therefore this can only lead to great things. And I feel like what they don't tell parents now is that this becomes as big a

battle as getting them to eat vegetables. Is constantly parenting them about social media. Yeah, if they're a paid influencer, they're making some money from it, but they are in the rat race, the dehumanizing, sexualizing rat race, and their time will come. They're playing by objectifying rules that do

not value them in any real way. But for the rest of us that are scrolling through our own social media feeds every day, we have got to talk to these girls about the real world consequences of that simple scroll. What does it feel like when you are looking at your phone? We have to curate our feeds like Instagram, TikTok, snapchat.

It can literally be self help or self harm, and research shows but also real life experience shows that the more time you spend on these heavily visual mediums, the more likely you will experience body shame and self objectification, envy, loneliness, depression,

and on and on. The more time we spend doing the very natural thing of comparing ourselves to literally everyone of thousands of millions of edited images that hit our screens, the more likely we are to self objectify and to hate what we see and to not only hate what we see, but feel so defined by our own bodies

that we then replicate everything we're seeing on screen. My job is to unfollow, mute, hide, do whatever I have to do to take care of myself because we only we can only look out for ourselves in this world. Tell me about the classes or the seminars that you offer on your website, because that's fascinating. Yeah. So we've been doing a ton of speaking engagements ever since we first developed this visual presentation during our masters and PhDs.

So we've taken that all over the place, whether it's high schools, universities, treatment centers, and we turned a lot of that into an online course that we offer at our website, more than a Body dot Org. A lot of that stuff is in the book. Honestly, we recommend that people turn to the book first and if the process that we lay out there about learning to see more in yourself and in other people and then be more more than a body, more than an object, more

than an ornament. If all of that resonates with people, they can dig deeper through our online course. Everything we do is intended to help people to work through really practical steps to build their body image resilience. This is not body positivity. It's not just we hope you feel beautiful and then you might feel terrible an hour later

when you compare yourself to somebody else or whatever. Ours is a process, it's a methodology so that you will you absolutely will, no matter what feel body image disruptions. You'll feel negatively about your body in small ways and in huge ways because of this culture that we live in that values beauty and thinness over so much else.

And when those feelings come up, we give you a plan to actually respond to it in a healthy and empowering and meaningful way that can actually reconnect you with your body as opposed to separating you from it, turning you against it to hide and fix forever. Your whole self esteem doesn't have to take a dive because you did gain a little bit of weight, or your face is aging and it's becoming more noticeable. These things can just be attributes of our changing, aging, growing, shrinking bodies.

They don't have to be defining factors of who we are. And this is a process that works. Yeah. What we want people to know is possible is that body image resilience gives you this ability to feel freedom you never could have imagined. You know, we talked about in the book Lindsay and I from the time we were in seventh grade, we were dieting. We quit competitive swimming at age sixteen because we were ashamed of the cellulite on

our legs, you know, and on and on. We know this intimately, and yet it is our body shame that opened our eyes to this thing that we could devote our lives too, to help people take their bodies back from systems and cultures and social media that wants us to be inanimate objects constantly in need of fixing. And this happens in little ways. This happens for me in my own life. You know, I had a baby a year ago. My body has changed a ton, and I I'm great, Like my life is good and happy, and

it has nothing to do with how I appear. I want people to know that if you go to your closet right now, after having lived a year in a global pandemic, and you put on jeans you have been worn in a few weeks or months, and they are tight or they don't fit, it does not have to break you. You do not immediately have to set forth the plan for how you are going to lose that weight. You can reframe that as my body took care of me in a pandemic, and you know, maybe it's okay,

but I gained some weight. Maybe I was actually coming back home to myself. Maybe I was opting out of the disordered eating that was my comfort zone, the only salad I could eat out at that restaurant every day that made me feel in control. Maybe I've actually gained a little bit more freedom to see that it's okay to gain a little bit of weight and eat more food and move my body because I love my body, not because I hate myself. Like that's what body image

resilience can give you. It's what it's given me. Well, you look great from Zoom. Thank you. More than a body, Your body is an instrument, not an ornament. Lindsay and Lexie, thank you so much for being with me, and particularly as a mother of two teenage daughters. I thank you very much. Thank you, Ali, Thank you Ali. I definitely want to make sweatshirts that say our bodies are not ornaments, because I think it's such an important thing, especially for

women and girls. And the fact that I have these two teenage girls that are always going to wrestle with you know how they feel about themselves and their bodies because of the media and television and everything else. And I love what Dr Lindsay and Lexi say about how we, particularly women and girls view your own bodies because you know what, and I'm telling you make a bumper sticker out of it. Our bodies are not ornaments. Boom. Yeah,

thank you for listening to Go ask Ali. Join me next week when I talked with sex therapist Dr Tiffany Henry about the touchy relationship women seem to have with sex. Do you think of sex with your partner as an obligation or a revelation? You'll want to hear this one. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review the podcast, and follow me on social media on Twitter at Ali e

Wentworth and on Instagram at the Real Ali Wentworth. And if you have any questions or guest suggestions, I'd love to hear from you, call or text me at three to three four six three six or email Go ask Alli podcast at gmail dot com. Go ask Alli is a production of Shonda Land Audio and partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shondaland audio visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.