Taryn Brumfitt: ‘People are done hating their bodies’
POSITIVE body image speaker Taryn Brumfitt is on a mission to change how we see ourselves — one stretch mark at a time.
Stellar
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IT was supposed to be the moment Taryn Brumfitt would revel in her perfect body, congratulating herself for having the self-discipline to make it materialise.
After 15 weeks of gruelling exercise and dieting, Brumfitt took her place in a line-up of women wearing bikinis at a May 2012 body-building competition, the culmination of her decision to train until she was ready to flex her finely honed physique onstage before a panel of judges.
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The moment did not go as planned. “It was very unjoyful,” she says, of both the event and the training, which involved a restrictive diet largely comprised of lean chicken and broccoli. “I arrived in that body and thought, ‘No, I can’t do this forever.’ I had hoped I would be happy. The light-bulb moment came getting off the stage: my body is not an ornament, it is the vehicle to my dreams.”
It was a phrase that was to become a mantra for the mother of three, to Oliver, 12, Cruz, 10, and Mikaela, eight.
Leading up to that fateful event, three pregnancies had changed Brumfitt’s body, and she found herself unhappy with the way she looked. She wondered if plastic surgery could not just remove the stretch marks and sagging skin, but also replace it with the confidence and happiness she so craved. “After three kids, I decided I would have surgery to fix what I thought was my broken body. I booked it in: I was going to have breast augmentation, a tummy tuck.”
Looking at her daughter Mikaela, however, gave her pause. The decision to alter her body through surgery didn’t sit well with the former photographer after all; was she setting a poor example? She cancelled the procedure and decided to work with a friend, who was a personal trainer, with a view to take part in a body-building competition.
But when that didn’t work out the way she imagined, Brumfitt found something else: self-acceptance. “I came to terms with eating more for nourishment and energy, as opposed to weight loss, and just moving my body and learning to move it for pleasure and not punishment.”
It was an evolution she shared nearly a year later, on April 21, 2013, via a couple of photographs on social media. They illustrated the “before” and “after” of weight fluctuation — but with an important distinction.
The “before” was her onstage in a bikini during the body-building competition, and the “after” image was Brumfitt naked, carrying more weight, but also looking radiant. She showed visible stretch marks, sagging skin — and a smile. The pictures went viral and made news around the world.
Brumfitt, 40, realised her message was an antidote to a culture that accepts, and proliferates, a very narrowly defined physical ideal. She says there were more than 7000 emails from people who wanted to share their stories of eating disorders, and experiences that contributed to their body-image issues.
“I had women sharing their accounts of sexual abuse — one woman had never shared it with anyone, so I was the first person in her life that she’d ever shared it with. But the stories were varied, and full of misery, mostly,” she says.
Once Brumfitt realised the image had hit a nerve, she was determined to do more and felt a responsibility to the women and men who were telling her they loathed their bodies. She sees herself as the leader of what has become a full-time enterprise known as the Body Image Movement, which kicked off not long after that body-building competition.
In 2015, she published the book Embrace, and a documentary of the same name was released in 2016. The latter featured interviews with international celebrities who have struggled with body image and took a global perspective on the issue.
Brumfitt’s new book Embrace Yourself charts her global crusade and message of self-acceptance. She’s also worked with academic experts to create educational resources for school children and has her sights set on another documentary. She is a regular on the public-speaking circuit to talk body image, and is in talks to develop a TV show in the US.
In a way, the aim is to put herself out of a job; to so effectively combat the issue of negative body image that there’s no need for her message of self-love.
“If I could, in my lifetime, turn this all around that would be incredible,” she says. “I think people are done with hating their bodies — people are waking up and going, ‘Oh... there’s a choice.’”
For the time being, Brumfitt is gratified to see some progress in the years since she started Body Image Movement. She says it’s evident in the stories of transformation — of people going from hating to loving their bodies — that are being sent to her now.
“Body Image Movement just turned six,” Brumfitt explains. “In the beginning it felt like everything that was coming at us was miserable stories about people’s bodies. The most beautiful thing, six years on, is now we can start looking at how things are starting to change. We’ve had people who were suicidal, happened to be on social media and saw the trailer, watched the film and went and spoke to a counsellor. That’s pretty remarkable.”
Embrace Yourself by Taryn Brumfitt (Penguin Random House, $34.99) is out tomorrow.