@thebodzilla on body image, the power of conscious creation, and pausing before you post
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From edited photos to fitness posts and ‘What I eat in a day’ videos, social media is overflowing with content dedicated to our physical appearance – and the impact is profound.
So profound that recent data from the Butterfly Foundation has revealed six in 10 Australians say diet and fitness content on social media impacts their body image.
But while they might be feeling overwhelmed and oversaturated with appearance-led content – like the countless fitness and diet-focused videos that are pumped algorithmically into the feeds of Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook users – two-thirds aren’t adjusting their social media behaviour.
It’s why Australia’s national charity for eating disorders and body image issues is calling for Aussies to pause before they post as they partner with Instagram for a new content series named ‘Enter the Chat’ – and it has roots right here in Canberra.
Alongside five other Aussie creators, local April Hélène-Horton (@thebodzilla) has thrown her support behind Butterfly Foundation, ‘entering the chat’ with her own experience with body image.
We sat down with the body acceptance and fat positivity content creator to talk about her passion for bringing awareness to racial, gender, and size equality, the power of social media, and why we need to be more conscious when we post.
Tell me about when you were first starting on social media, what set a fire in your belly and how did you do it?
I started blogging in 2014; I actually started out talking about losing weight, because that was my focus at that point, that’s what I was doing. Truthfully, it got so much attention from friends and strangers, because we know that people still are stuck in the mindset that losing weight is a good thing to do and an important thing to do. After a while, I stopped writing the blog because – as we now know – pursuing weight loss through unhealthy habits and practices isn’t sustainable. I wasn’t losing weight so I didn’t have a lot to write about because I really struggled with what to say if it wasn’t ‘positive’. I felt ashamed and like a failure. So I stepped out of socials in that context for quite a while and didn’t really think about writing or creating again until after my son was born.
During 2019 I started reposting things that talked a bit more about bodies and weight, more than I had ever done before, and I had people comment that they liked the stuff I was posting. A photographer I knew encouraged me to embrace the idea of talking about bodies and loving yourself in a more structured way – she helped me with photos and even came up with the new name that embodied what I wanted to say: @thebodzilla. What I got from her was that maybe people were interested in talking about things that were about bodies but weren’t about weight loss – which felt like new information to me because I’ve forever been told whether directly or indirectly, that talking about my body was only good if it was about how I’d shrunk it and how I made it smaller.
Why is bringing awareness to racial, gender, and size equality important to you?
Not everybody realises that body positivity as it was originally conceived was a movement for body liberation for Black, fat, queer people. When we talk about self-love and loving yourself, that’s all valid and really important, but the ideas around body positivity were political.
We talk about privilege and I feel like lots of people don’t always know right away the difference between privilege and having experienced difficult life circumstances. There are as many unique identities as there are people, but understanding that being part of one marginalised community – whether that be disability, your race, gender, sexuality or body size – when you start to add those intersections and identity together, you do start to see the way that oppression comes at you from different places.
Let’s say you’ve experienced harm as part of systemic bias because of the size of your body – but not because of your race, not because of your gender identity, not because of disability. Of course you – and allies to the fat community – should speak loudly about not oppressing fat people.
But you should also perhaps think about passing the mic to someone whose experience means that not only were they harmed or oppressed because of their fatness, but also because of the colour of their skin or their identities in other ways. I mean, it’s not cut and dry. I think it’s about bringing awareness across every medium, not just media, but that’s where I feel like I can make the most change. These barriers need to get broken down permanently for us to actually move past, otherwise it’s just like the tide – it comes in and out. We do a lot of work, and we make a lot of change … and then it recedes and we’re right back where we started.
What has your experience been like as a content creator?
I like to think that I’m reasonably savvy with who I’m following and what messages I’m consuming, but what have I witnessed often is that people will get very defensive… I do think that we often see creators who are working in the health and ‘wellness’ space, talking about bodies, but you look at them and realise that they’re not representing people in the conversation who don’t already have a voice. My view has always been that there is space for all of us to have conversations about bodies, no matter our size, as long as we’re like being mindful – and I think that’s what the ‘Enter the Chat’ conversation is all about.
How do you ensure that your content is body-positive?
The purpose of what I do, everything I create, and everything I’m involved in is I try to be conscious of the fact that I’m not the first or the last person on earth whose voice should be heard on this subject. In the body positive community, I’m what you’d call a ‘small fat’. I can still shop most plus size brands, but I have struggled my whole life to buy clothes and I’ve had different difficulties my entire life with the fashion industry because of my body size. But as someone who is now a size 20 and has a very full wardrobe, keeping my content focused on what I’m trying to do is important. My evolution as a creator has been [that] I thought I knew exactly what I was trying to say – I had a message, and I would stick to it – talking about what body positivity is, why it matters, and why we should care about it. But now I’m asking: why is it important that we change the way we see bodies – so that we liberate ourselves from standards that oppress fat people day in and out?
I keep my content focused on changing the way that everybody sees themselves by making space for other people’s voices in conversations, and by amplifying people who I believe have something important to add to the conversation – as well as being open all the time to listening and hearing from other people about their experience.
I try to be myself on the internet as much as possible. I don’t share everything…I think it’s about understanding what the definition of self-love is, not about performing faux positivity for the public gaze… I think it’s about showing up and not letting my fatness inform all of my choices, or hold me back, or make me have to change what I do. I rock up on stories to do a ‘Get ready with me’ in my undies because thin girls do that all the time!
What are your tips for nurturing a healthy relationship with your body?
I think being realistic about the fact that you’re not going to wake up every day and go, ‘Oh my god, I’m the sexiest person alive’. You’re going to wake up and you’re going to have thoughts about your body because you’ve done that every other day of your life – and every other day of your life you’ve been informed by media and beauty standards.
We’ve been taught our whole lives to be concerned about our appearance and to try to hold ourselves to standards that are set by the fashion and wellness industries. I think if you can wake up in the morning and go, ‘I’m cool with me, I like the person that I am’ or ‘I want to work on this thing about myself today’ and know that it’s not about moralising your body as either good or a bad – or food as good and bad.
You can break that pattern and choose not to think nasty things about yourself – or at least correct that narrative with yourself. When I say your body’s not the most interesting thing about you, I say that because it’s about learning and understanding that the value that you place on other people’s opinion of your body is going to ruin your life, if you let it dictate everything that you do. It’s not that you shouldn’t care, it’s that you should care more about your own opinion of yourself.
How do you drown out the noise of diet culture online, especially with so many conflicting messages?
This is one of the main reasons I said ‘absolutely’ when I was approached about being a part of the Butterfly Foundation’s ‘Enter the Chat’ conversation. If you check the website, they talk a lot about the things that you can do. But for me it’s an unfollow, it’s a mute and maybe it’s a block depending on the person.
Instagram has a feature that you can turn on that encourages you to stop scrolling…those features are really useful when it comes to imposing personal limits on things. Use the native tools that are offered to avoid content that makes you feel negative and be conscious of the content you’re consuming and that you want to create…taking breaks from devices is positive, but if you’re someone like me who spends a lot of time online because of work, you have to be in control.
How can we support people struggling and how can we create a safe space online?
I don’t know if anyone doesn’t know someone who is struggling, so I think being mindful all the time is important.
There are lots of resources on the Butterfly Foundation’s website because it’s a hard conversation to have and we don’t want people to be driven away. Try to be sensitive to the fact that anyone going through an eating disorder is probably not feeling 100 per cent well mentally and just be gentle with them (and yourself). It’s about getting them to understand support is there and it’s not limited to a certain type of person or body shape – if they don’t feel seen or represented in the eating disorder support space, that doesn’t mean that support isn’t for them. Eating disorders don’t have a ‘look’ – just because your friend doesn’t look like the ‘usual’ person who experiences an eating disorder, it doesn’t mean they couldn’t.
If you think they might be suffering from disordered eating, reaching out gently is valuable because you don’t know if you might be the person who asks the right question at the right time and makes the person feel safe to say “Actually, I’m struggling, I need help.”
Images supplied.
