Taryn Brumfitt and the body-positivity movement: All you need is love?

This story is part of the Good Weekend: Best of Features 2023 editon.See all 22 stories.

Taryn Brumfitt is standing at the front of an auditorium full of schoolgirls. She has been telling them how she went from hating her body to loving it unconditionally, and how this transformed her life. Beaming at the sea of teenage faces, she says she wants the girls, too, to feel good about their bodies, whatever size or shape they might be. “Embracing your body is your super-power,” she says.

Brumfitt, 45, is a self-declared “thought leader”. Her subject is body image – how we regard our physical selves – and her message is essentially that none of us should yearn for firmer upper arms or thinner thighs: we’re fabulous just the way we are. “There are trillion-dollar industries – the cosmetics, beauty, diet industries – who are out to make money from you feeling insecure about what you look like,” she tells her young audience. “Not all of them are bad, but most are, unfortunately.”

A decade ago, Brumfitt posted unusual “before and after” photographs on Facebook. In the first picture, the “before” image, she was wearing a shiny bikini and competing in a body-building contest. Her physique was lean and taut. In the second picture, she posed naked and smiled at the camera. She was rounder and heavier than in the first shot, and clearly content with the way she looked. The inference: a woman could gain weight, lose muscle tone and not give a damn. She tells the girls the concept was so radical that the post went viral: “It broke people’s brains around the world.” The wonderment wasn’t confined to social media, she says. “It made headline news in most countries.”

Sitting amid the ponytails and navy blazers, I jot the last remark in my notebook. When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced in January that Brumfitt was the 2023 Australian of the Year, I felt remiss that I hadn’t heard of her. Now I’m not just abashed but slightly puzzled. How did I miss those international headlines?

Brumfitt’s website presents her as a globally acclaimed, multi-talented dynamo, not only “one of the world’s most sought-after professional speakers” but a best-selling author and smash-hit filmmaker. On Instagram, she has said her 2016 documentary, Embrace, “took the world by storm, going #1 basically everywhere on everything …” Now she is telling the schoolgirls that in Germany, Embrace not only topped the box office, but beat Guardians of the Galaxy and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword to get there. “I love a good underdog story,” she says.

I do, too. And I want to believe Brumfitt. She’s Australian of the Year, for heaven’s sake. But is she really saying that more German cinema-goers bought tickets to a documentary about body image than to two huge Hollywood action movies? Somewhere at the back of my mind, a faint alarm bell rings.

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It’s busy, being Taryn Brumfitt. Late last month, she was part of the Australian contingent at a White House dinner hosted by US President Joe Biden to celebrate Anthony Albanese’s visit to Washington DC. A few days later, she gave a televised speech at the National Press Club in Canberra. Her schedule has been packed with engagements all year but she has obligingly made time to see me.

Anthony Albanese presents Taryn Brumfitt with the 2023 Australian of the Year award in Canberra in January.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

I arrive a little early, and am waiting at the front gate of her house in a pleasant Adelaide suburb when she swings into her driveway in a black Mercedes. She gets out of the car wearing loose, leopard-print pants and white sneakers and leads the way inside. Brumfitt lives with her second husband, Tim Pearson, and the four children they have between them, but only her exuberant schnauzer, Chico, is in evidence on this cool spring morning. In her speeches – I’ve attended three by this point – she jokes that the blending of the two families has been a mixed success: the kids get along well but Chico and Pearson’s two cats detest each other. From the open-plan living area, I can see the baby-safety gate that’s been fitted across a hallway to keep the animals apart.

Brumfitt met Pearson via the dating app Bumble in 2020, soon after the breakdown of her first marriage. “Tim was the first guy I swiped and the first guy I dated,” she tells me. Blind luck? She prefers to think it was part of a higher plan: the universe didn’t want her wasting time on a search for a new partner. “It was like, ‘Quickly! So she can focus on doing the work.’ ”

“It’s almost like I’ve just followed the breadcrumbs. This is what I was meant to be doing.”

Taryn Brumfitt

As Brumfitt sees it, teaching people to love their bodies is not so much her career as her calling. In her first book, Embrace: My Story from Body Loather to Body Lover, published in 2015 (followed by Embrace Yourself in 2018, Embrace Your Body in 2021 and Embrace Kids in 2022), she wrote that she always suspected she was here for a reason, “and now that my purpose has been unveiled, I can’t help but feel an incredible sense of freedom”.

As Chico bounces around the room, she confirms her belief that her path was pre-ordained. “It’s almost like I’ve just followed the breadcrumbs,” she says. “This is what I was meant to be doing.”

The first Australian of the Year, in 1960, was Nobel Prize-winning virologist Macfarlane Burnet. The second was Joan Sutherland, one of the greatest sopranos of the 20th century. Since then, the honour has been bestowed on high achievers in various fields – the arts, science, sport, medicine and so on – as well as on individuals who have displayed exceptional heroism or humanitarianism. The South Australian before Brumfitt to get the award was ophthalmologist James Muecke, in 2020, for his work preventing blindness in some of the poorest countries in the world.

The selection of Brumfitt, a body positivity advocate, sparked debate on social media. Many were delighted (“Taryn Brumfitt absolutely deserves to be Australian of the Year!!!“) but a few were distinctly underwhelmed. Commentator Mike Carlton tweeted: “My Australian of the Year would be a doctor or nurse working nights in intensive care or the ED, dealing with COVID and daily death. Real, compassionate work. For very little money. NOT someone who makes a buck out of saying it’s ok to be a bit fat.”

I ask Brumfitt how the negative commentary affected her. “It bothered me for a minute and then I had to move on,” she says. “Because I could see how distracting all that is to your mission.”

In her address at the awards ceremony in Canberra, Brumfitt painted a picture of a nation racked with despair about the way we look. “We have been bullied and shamed into thinking our bodies are the problem,” she said. “It is working, because 70 per cent of Australian school children consider body image to be their number one concern.”

“I began a global movement to help people embrace their bodies.”

Taryn Brumfitt

Reading the speech transcript in the course of researching this story, I pause at that startling statistic. Seven in 10 students are more worried about body image than, say, climate change or passing exams? I make a note to ask Brumfitt where she got the 70 per cent figure, which is much higher than in any of the studies I’ve consulted.

Unsurprisingly, politicians were receptive when Brumfitt returned to the national capital in March to lobby for financial backing to tackle the problem. In May, her non-profit organisation – The Embrace Collective – was awarded $6.2 million in federal funding to produce educational programs aimed at helping boys and girls to build and maintain positive attitudes to their bodies. The programs, being developed this year and next, are targeted at teachers, sports coaches and parents as well as at the kids themselves. They consist mainly of free online resources: lesson plans, activities sheets, behaviour guidelines and so on. Brumfitt says the grant enabled her to increase her staff from 13 to 19 people: “It’s a big expansion, which is really exciting.”

The way Brumfitt tells it, she practically invented body positivity: “I began a global movement to help people embrace their bodies.” According to her website, her 2013 before-and-after pictures were such a sensation that she was interviewed by every major news outlet in the world. The Australian of the Year website says: “Taryn’s work has reached more than 200 million people.” Keen to learn more about her international impact, I contact Viren Swami, professor of social psychology at Anglia Ruskin University in England, who writes and talks about body image in the British media.

Brumfitt’s Instagram post from Maldives Club Med.Credit: @bodyimagemovement/INSTAGRAM

On the phone, Swami says politely that until I emailed him, he wasn’t aware of Brumfitt’s existence. I am taken aback. He hasn’t even seen Embrace, the documentary that took the world by storm? “I’ve never heard of the film,” he replies.

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One Thursday afternoon, I watch Brumfitt address a conference of South Australian nurses and midwives. It is an impressive performance. She challenges them. She charms them (not least by mentioning that she has married into their tribe: Tim Pearson is a nurse). She makes them laugh. She makes them think. “She’s an incredible communicator,” says Zali Yager, body image researcher and co-director of The Embrace Collective. “There’s something magnetic, sparkly, magical about her, particularly when she’s on stage giving keynotes.”

In her speeches, films and books, Brumfitt talks about body image in a highly personal way, telling her own story with engaging candour. Says Yager: “People come up to Taryn in the street, at the airport, everywhere, and tell her that she has made a profound impact on their lives.” Executive coach Mia Handshin says her friend Brumfitt is the type of leader whose strength derives from her willingness to show vulnerability. “Embrace was made because she was prepared to bare her body and soul,” Handshin says. “The whole movement was founded on this.”

Brumfitt was raised in Adelaide, the youngest of the three children of Bettyanne Butterworth, who owned delicatessens, and her husband Geoffrey, a sales rep for a medical company. Taryn left school before she finished year 10, and took off for Melbourne when she was 16. For the next few years, she bounced from one job to another: washing dishes, waitressing, working in a nursing home, nannying. After living in London for a while, she returned to Australia and landed a sales job in a hotel marketing company. She thrived in the corporate world and had climbed to the position of operations manager when, in 2001, she was rocked by the death of her 27-year-old brother, Jason, who was addicted to heroin. At the wake, she reconnected with one of Jason’s friends, Mathew Brumfitt. She moved back to Adelaide, married Mathew and had three children.

Taryn has written that she grew up believing her prettiness was her most important characteristic: “There was a time when beauty ruled my life.” Though she adored her kids (two sons, Oliver and Cruz, followed by a daughter, Mikaela), she was appalled by the effect on her body of three pregnancies in quick succession: the stretch marks, the sagging breasts, the spongy belly. When her attempts to regain her previous form failed, she went into an emotional decline. She stopped going to social gatherings. She stood in front of her mirror and said: “You are fat. You are disgusting. You are ugly.” She wept.

“[Dieting] was really hard and it made me very, very unhappy.”

Taryn Brumfitt

Brumfitt is 168 centimetres tall and currently wears size 14 clothes. “That’s the largest I’ve been,” she tells me. Size 14 is the Australian average, so it isn’t as if she’d blown out to huge proportions when she was sobbing on the bathroom floor, but she disagrees that her reaction was extreme or unusual. “I think I represented what most women were feeling around the world, but were hiding,” she says. In 2012, she went to a cosmetic surgeon, who agreed to give her a tummy tuck and breast lift. The prospect exhilarated her: “You know, ‘Here we go!’ ”

A couple of weeks after the initial consultation, she was sitting at home watching Mikaela playing with her toys when she had what she describes as an epiphany. “It was like a lightning bolt struck from the sky, right in front of me.” Suddenly she knew that she couldn’t go ahead with the surgery, because what sort of example would she be setting for her daughter? If she took such drastic action to correct perceived physical flaws, how could she expect Mikaela to grow up with a healthy attitude towards her own body?

Having ruled out going under the knife, Brumfitt decided to remodel herself another way: she would train for a body-building competition. She had established her own photography business – she took portraits of families and children – but started making time to spend hours a day at the gym. She severely restricted her diet and lost 15 kilograms in 15 weeks. “It was really hard and it made me very, very unhappy,” she says. After she paraded before the judges, she couldn’t wait to get offstage and eat the Easter eggs she’d been saving. Gradually she returned to being soft and curvy – and found she didn’t mind. “I’d made peace with my body.”

Taryn Brumfitt’s before/after Facebook post challenged the idea that being lean and taut is “better” than being rounder and heavier.

In her first book, Brumfitt made clear that she didn’t wake up one morning and smile at her reflection as she walked past the mirror. “But rather than rubbishing the crap out of myself, I would just not say anything at all. Eventually, over time I was able to say something nice to myself and before you know it, a monster of positivity was born …” She still exercised, but not
relentlessly. Her emphasis was on feeling good, rather than looking good. Energised and upbeat, she started a blog so she could share the insights she had gained. In September 2012, seven months before posting the before-and-after pictures, she registered Body Image Movement as a business name.

Throwing away her bathroom scales seems to Brumfitt one of the best moves she’s made. Apart from anything else, it means she doesn’t know her Body Mass Index (BMI), the number calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by the square of their height in metres. A BMI of 25 or above is classified as overweight. Obese is 30 and over. In Brumfitt’s view, these labels are counterproductive, serving to shame and stigmatise people. She has no doubt she would be in the overweight category, yet as she points out, she is a fit and active person who has run two marathons and intends to complete a third. “When you make people feel bad about their bodies, they’re more likely to go and eat the pie and the chocolate doughnut,” she says. Weight stigma begets weight gain: “To me it’s a no-brainer”.

In Embrace, Brumfitt writes that she once assumed being overweight was unhealthy but now knows this to be untrue. “On average, ‘overweight’ people live longer than ‘normal’ weight people,” she writes, going on to claim: “Research that indicates there is an ‘obesity epidemic’ has been funded by pharmaceutical companies that make a great deal of money from weight-loss medications and other treatments.”

Unfortunately, the notion that it’s all a pharmaceuticals industry plot is easily contradicted. According to reliable sources, such as the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, an independent government-funded agency, Australia’s obesity rate has risen to almost one in three people (from one in 10 in 1975). Two-thirds of Australian adults and one in four children are overweight or obese. The institute reports that carrying excess weight increases the likelihood of developing cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, some musculoskeletal conditions and some cancers.

“There’s a certain point where your body shape is not good for you,” says medical journalist Norman Swan, presenter of the Health Report on ABC Radio National, who sees the rise in obesity as the almost inevitable consequence of societal factors, including the wide availability of cheap food laden with sugar and fat. “I’m completely on Taryn’s side about not stigmatising, but getting rid of that stigma is only a tiny part of the solution to obesity.”

“My way initially was, ‘Everybody love your body, because that’s what I do.’ ”

Taryn Brumfitt

Body positivity isn’t new. The idea that we should celebrate all bodies – regardless of size, shape, skin colour or physical capability – grew out of the fat acceptance movement of the 1960s. The philosophy has had a resurgence in the past decade or so, partly in response to the unrealistic ideals promoted in filtered and edited images on social media. “The body positivity movement is a crowded space,” says English academic Viren Swami, “with lots of people vying for the right to call themselves an expert in the field. Just go on Instagram and you’ll find hundreds of them.”

The movement has its critics, who say all this talk about loving our bodies inadvertently reinforces society’s preoccupation with appearance. What’s more, individuals who just don’t love their bodies, despite their best efforts, may be left feeling like failures. “I don’t see the pressure on women really easing up, and then you’re supposed to have this bullet-proof self-esteem on top of all that,” said Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, author of Face Value: The Hidden Ways Beauty Shapes Women’s Lives, in a 2017 interview in New York Magazine. She continued: “Body love keeps the focus on the body. The times I’m happiest are when I’m not thinking about my body at all.” Columnist Natalie Reilly echoed the sentiment in The Sydney Morning Herald: “To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, who said that a truly humble man will not be thinking about humility: a truly liberated woman is not reciting mantras about how much she loves her body.”

Increasingly, what’s espoused – for both women and men – is “body neutrality”, where you don’t have strong feelings either way about your appearance. Brumfitt’s approach is evolving, too. “My way initially was, ‘Everybody love your body, because that’s what I do.’ ” She has come to realise that this is impossible for some. (“You could just like your body,” I heard her tell the schoolgirls. “You could be okay with your body.“) Nevertheless, healthy self-regard is the goal she continues to push in most of her speaking and writing, and in the online Embrace You course she advertises on the website of Body Image Movement. “Want to love your body in 4 weeks? Join the program.”

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The Australian of the Year award doesn’t come with a salary – just an allowance for travel and incidental costs. Brumfitt says she’s charged little or nothing for most of the public appearances she has made around the country during the year. She is paid for addresses to corporate groups, and accepts financial support from companies whose values align with her own. For instance, she agreed to use her Instagram account to promote San Remo pasta because it is “a great South Australian family brand, who wanted to promote body confidence and a positive relationship with food”.

In a picture she posted on Instagram in September, Brumfitt modelled an outfit she’d been given by a new sponsor, Witchery (“Thanks Witchery, who knew fashion was so much fun!“). She has posted glowing endorsements of companies that helped her with one-off projects, such as finding a partner (Bumble) and renovating her backyard (“Working with @stratcoaustralia to bring this vision to life has been a dream”). After adding Club Med as a sponsor in 2019, she told her more than 140,000 Instagram followers she intended “to bring the life-changing message of Embrace to resorts around the world … What a blast we had in the Maldives! Thanks to the @clubmedkani team.” Above the head office address on her website is a cheerful message: “We love free stuff (especially chocolate). Send us goodies here.”

An Insta post from Brumfitt’s backyard in which she praises home improvement firm Stratco.Credit: @BODYIMAGEMOVEMENT/INSTAGRAM

The week Brumfitt was named Australian of the Year, the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission announced a crackdown on social media influencers who failed to declare they were being paid to promote products. There were news reports that Brumfitt hadn’t always made the required disclosures on her posts. “I mean, how ridiculous,” she says, still indignant that her integrity was called into question. “It was an honest mistake.”

Brumfitt sometimes posts selfies in which she’s tired or dishevelled, demonstrating that she has bad days like the rest of us. She also posts pictures in which she looks glamorous, sending her followers into ecstasies: “Gorgeous woman!!!!” “I LOVE your hairstyle.” “Wow!!!” “You have to tell us how you get that dewy skin!!” “Are they your real eyelashes? If they’re not, can I ask what brand of falsies?”

In the past, Brumfitt presented herself as a free spirit. She was often photographed dancing or jumping in the air. She gave the chapters of her early books titles like F--- Off! – addressed to advertisers who undermine our body confidence in order to sell us stuff – and Motherf---erhood. She wrote that she once worried about falling short as a mother, but no more: “… I’ve learnt the joy of not giving a rat’s arse about what anyone else thinks of my parenting, or me.”

These days, she’s more image-conscious. In an exchange of emails before the Good Weekend photo shoot, her communications manager said Brumfitt had vetoed a suggestion that she wear a zingy red dress: she wanted the pictures to capture “her new laser-focused, entrepreneurial identity as a leader and changemaker (still with plenty of vivacious energy, of course!).”

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A decade ago, when Brumfitt set out to make the documentary Embrace, she decided Adelaide filmmaker Hugh Fenton would be the perfect collaborator. “Our intentions were the same,” she wrote in the book Embrace. “We both wanted to work on a project that could change people’s lives.” Fenton tells me he threw himself into making the two-minute trailer that spearheaded the campaign to raise funds for the film, charging no upfront fee for his work because he believed he and Brumfitt had embarked on a joint endeavour. It was his understanding that if they reached their $200,000 target, they would direct the documentary together. The Kickstarter platform raised more than $300,000. “Taryn had a celebration night and invited about a hundred people,” Fenton says. “She gave a speech and she didn’t mention me once. I was stunned.”

By the time the pair left for several weeks’ filming overseas, Fenton had lost hope of being co-director (he is credited as cinematographer). He retains respect for Brumfitt though. “Her work ethic and her drive are unmatched,” he says. “Her passion, her skill as an orator, her ability to capture people’s hearts with her messages: all of that stuff is off the charts.” He has no doubt her commitment to her cause runs deep. “Her identity was wrapped up in how beautiful she looked. Then she had babies, her body didn’t bounce back the way she wanted it to, and she was absolutely crushed. All of that is 100 per cent genuine.”

In her speeches, Brumfitt says “a global study” of the impact of the documentary found that women who watched it had a higher appreciation of their bodies. In reality, more than 80 per cent of the 1429 participants in the study were members of Brumfitt’s Facebook group. And fewer than half of those who had seen the film said their level of body appreciation and confidence rose after watching it. Fenton himself questions whether he and Brumfitt achieved their goal of changing lives. Appearance anxiety seems to him a complex problem with no easy fix. He wishes the film had examined the methods a range of women used to overcome their insecurities. “For me, it never sat right that the solution was just to love your body,” he says.

According to the online database IMDb, Embrace had worldwide box-office takings of $US1.1 million. Half that revenue ($US504,000) was from ticket sales in Germany, so Brumfitt is justified in telling her audiences that the film did well in that country. But King Arthur: Legend of the Sword did 10 times better, taking $US5.8 million at the German box office. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 easily surpassed both, taking more than $US30 million. I ask Brumfitt in an email how she can say that Embrace beat the other two films to be number one in Germany. Her office responds that box-office rankings and total box-office revenue aren’t the same thing: “In the reporting period during which Embrace premiered in Germany, it went to number one at the box office.” That sounds reasonable. But when I check IMDb, I discover that even on the one weekend Embrace screened in Germany, it was thumped at the box-office by both Guardians, which was number one, and King Arthur, which ranked second. Embrace ranked fifth.

“Taryn has written four best-selling books,” says Brumfitt’s citation on the Australian of the Year website. Yet according to the sales-tracking agency Nielsen BookScan, Embrace sold just 2600 copies across Australia, Embrace Yourself sold 6600 and Embrace Your Body sold 5300. Her fourth book, Embrace Kids, which like her documentary of the same name was released last year, sold 1600 copies. When I question how they qualify as best-sellers, her office tells me best-seller status is in no way dependent on a book’s total sales, only on how its sales compare with other books’ sales in any given week. Um, okay. (Mark Fraser, CEO of the National Australia Day Council, which runs the Australian of the Year awards, says the council checks the bona fides of nominees but does not have the resources to investigate every claim they make.)

Brumfitt says her before-and-after pictures made headlines in most countries. “Headline news in Paris,” she declares in the documentary Embrace, as an article written in French flashes onto the screen. A viewer might presume it was published in Le Monde or Le Figaro. In fact it’s a clipping from Ma Grande Taille, a fashion magazine for the fuller-figured. An internet search shows Brumfitt was indeed interviewed by a number of foreign mastheads – among them HuffPost, The Baltimore Sun and Florida Today – and appeared on various morning TV programs. She certainly made a splash, and all credit to her for that. But it’s hard to find evidence of the global media frenzy she says took place.

In her address at the National Press Club last month, Brumfitt described Australian children’s negative attitudes to their bodies as “a paediatric health emergency”. Younger and younger kids were developing eating disorders, she said. “We now have data that shows that 37 per cent of three-year-olds – three-year-olds – want a different body to the one they have.” This was a reference to 2011 research by Melbourne psychologist Emma Spiel, who asked 294 three-year-old children whether they would prefer to “stay the same” or change to a different body shape. Spiel tells me that 111 kids (almost 38 per cent of the sample) indicated they would like to change. Alarming, you might think. But it turns out that only seven of the children indicated they wanted to be thinner. Six indicated they wanted to be rounder. The other 98 gave no indication either way. “The majority of them just sort of shrugged their shoulders. Didn’t really understand,” says Spiel, adding that she followed the children over a couple of years, and as they got older they were more likely to associate positive characteristics with thinness, negative characteristics with fatness.

What of the centrepiece of Brumfitt’s speech at the Australian of the Year ceremony: her announcement that body image was the number one concern of 70 per cent of Australian school children? In response to my request for the source of that information, her office says: “It is very hard to get a good sense of the prevalence of body image concerns, as there are more than 20 ways to measure this variable, and researchers don’t often ask the questions to gather the data in ways that young people understand.” Huh? The email also says Brumfitt’s assertion is “consistent with research”. But as far as I can see, it isn’t consistent with recent research. In Mission Australia’s 2022 youth survey, body image was not the first but the fourth-highest concern of respondents: just over one-third were extremely concerned about it. This tallies with a study last year by the Butterfly Foundation, a national charity dedicated to the prevention and treatment of eating disorders and negative body image, which found 38 per cent of participants aged 12 to 18 were extremely concerned about body image.

That’s a long way from the figure Brumfitt quoted, but it’s still a large cohort. “There are a lot of kids who need help who are not getting it,” says the ABC’s Norman Swan. In the opinion of Brumfitt’s friend and fellow motivational speaker, Gemma Munro, she is the ideal person to have on the case. “Taryn is ferocious in the best possible way,” Munro says. “She just gets shit done better than anyone else I know.”

For help with eating disorders or body image, Butterfly Foundation 1800 33 4673, butterfly.org.au.

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