EP 21: Leading With Body Resilience with Co-Author of More Than A Body, Lindsay Kite, PhD

eating disorders Feb 19, 2021

Caring about those you lead means caring about the harm you may unknowingly be doing.

Many of us who fit western standards of beauty and live in conventionally abled bodies don't understand how our choices can cause pain. We've internalized ableism and fat-phobia to the point where we can't even grasp how our words & deeds cause harm.

In particular, in the last year, and perhaps for a while longer, many of you have come to terms with the way you operate in the world and cause pain or harm in a way you have no idea.

Talking about beliefs around body, health, size, and beauty can feel like a tenuous social quagmire. Perfectionism and shame love to hang out and have a party with both mindset and mental health when tackling nuanced and vulnerable topics like this one.

We breathe in the many conflicting messages on what it means to be enough, to be strong, to be worthy. Our bodies carry the burdens of these messages and beliefs.

Recognizing how collusion with systems and toxic beliefs affects too many means taking action to alleviate this pain and suffering.

Because accepting these standards unchecked and at face value is dehumanizing and devaluing.

It’s time to choose the socially and morally responsible path to learn what it means to cultivate an environment that supports rathan than harms.

While many companies and organizations are stepping up and making an effort towards this, my guest today shares how the good intentions are often missing the intended - and needed - impact.

Dr. Lindsay Kite is co-author of the new book More Than a Body and co-director of the nonprofit Beauty Redefined, alongside her identical twin sister Lexie Kite. They both received PhDs from the University of Utah in the study of female body image and have become leading experts in body image resilience and media literacy.

Today, Lindsay and Lexie continue to help girls and women recognize and reject the harmful effects of objectification in their lives through their new book, their online Body Image Resilience course, social media activism, and regular speaking engagements for thousands of people of all ages.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

Self-objectification and body resilience: These are the game-changer in how you can change your outlook and approach to body anxiety.
Dr. Kite unpacks what gets in the way of how we see ourselves and how that impacts our courage and how we show up in work and life.
The call Dr. Kite puts out for all of us—especially those with privilege—to challenge our bias around body size personally and in our places of work.

Learn more about Dr. Lindsay Kite:

Learn more about Rebecca:

Resources from this episode:

Scroll Down for The Full Episode Transcript:

Lindsay Kite: As leaders, as aspiring leaders, as people who want to have a positive influence and also be completely fulfilled and truest to ourselves, like reach out own maximum capacity in life, we have to be willing to push those boundaries and to test those lies that live in our minds about which bodies are acceptable and how important the appearance of your body is to the success of your life.

[Inspirational Intro Music]

Rebecca Ching: We can't avoid hurting people. We’re human. We make mistakes. What we can do, though, is learn to recognize the ways we’re most likely to cause harm and start to address those patterns in the way we lead. I know you don't want to hurt people. I sure don't. It guts me when I learn I’ve done something that causes someone else to feel pain or brings up bad memories, and to make the changes we desire, we have to build the inner capacity to feel through painful learnings while remaining open to feedback.

We live in a complex world, and leadership that mitigates doing harm is supported by respecting nuance and relationships over transactions and checklists. Addressing the patterns that cause harm requires practices and systems that invite feedback and space to learn, unlearn, and grow.

I'm Rebecca Ching, and you're listening to The Unburdened Leader, the show that goes deep with leaders whose burdens have inspired their life's work. Our goal is to learn how they’ve addressed these burdens, how they rise from them and become better and more impactful leaders of themselves and others.

Caring about those you lead means caring about the harm you may unknowingly be doing. Many of us who fit Western standards of beauty and live in conventionally-abled bodies don't understand how our choices can cause pain. We’ve internalized ableism and fatphobia to the point where we can't even grasp how our words and deeds cause harm.

0:02:07

In particular, in the last year, and perhaps for a while longer, many of you have come to terms with the way you operate in the world and cause pain or harm in a way you’ve had no idea. Talking about beliefs around body, health, size, and beauty can feel like a tenuous social quagmire, and it is in a lot of spaces, right? Perfectionism and shame love to hangout and have a party with both mindset and mental health when tackling nuanced and vulnerable topics like these.

We breathe in many conflicting messages on what it means to be enough, to be strong, to be worthy, and our bodies carry the burdens of these messages and beliefs. Recognizing how collusions with systems and toxic beliefs affect too many means taking action to alleviate this pain and suffering because accepting these standards unchecked and at face value is dehumanizing and devaluing. It’s time to choose the socially and morally responsible path to learn what it means to cultivate an environment that supports rather than harms.

While many companies and organizations are stepping up and making an effort towards this, my guest today shares how the good intentions are often missing the intended and needed impact. Dr. Lindsay Kite is co-author of her new book, More Than a Body, and run don't walk to get this on your bookshelf stat. She is the co-director of the non-profit Beauty Redefined, which, again, one of my favorite spaces on sometimes a complex place in social media. Beauty Redefined is putting out some really important, steady, good content for all of us, and she’s done this alongside her identical twin sister, Lexie Kite. They both received PhDs from The University of Utah in the study of female body image and have become leading experts in body image resilience and media literacy.

0:04:09

Today, Lindsay and Lexie continue to help girls and women recognize and reject the harmful effects of objectification in their lives through their new book, their online body image resilience course, social media activism (yes, it’s a thing), and regular speaking engagements for thousands of people of all ages.

Pay attention to a couple of terms Lindsay introduces us to: self-objectification and body resilience. These are the game-changers in how you can change your outlook and approach to body anxiety in yourself and in others. Listen to how she unpacks what gets in the way of how we see ourselves and how that impacts our courage and how we show up in work and life. And take note of her call (especially those with privilege) to challenge our bias around body size, personally and in our places of work. Now, please welcome Dr. Lindsay Kite to The Unburdened Leader podcast.

You're listening to The Unburdened Leader, and I am so, so thrilled to welcome Lindsay Kite to this episode. Lindsay, thank you for joining me on the show today. As I mentioned in our pre-conversation, I’ve been following your work for a while, and I am really excited to dig in and talk with you and learn from you today.

Lindsay Kite: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to talk to you!

Rebecca Ching: So, I’d like to start, really, just kind of helping everyone kind of get a sense of how you got interested in the work that you're known for (the intersection of media, wellness, and women’s bodies). I’m just really curious for you to talk about that. And then was there a time when you personally had an aha moment about how the media was encouraging you to see your own body?

Lindsay Kite: Yeah, that’s actually -- the answer to both those questions is the same.

0:06:02

This has really been a long-time process, but it all started when I was 18 years old, and I have an identical twin, as you know, Lexie, and we do this work together, and we started it at the same time with a very similar aha moment. It was actually on the same day or within the same two days because we had both signed up for this media studies class as freshmen in college in journalism. And this class was about how to deconstruct media messages, how to understand why media representations are engineered the way they are and how that affects our perceptions of ourselves and other people. And the section on gender, the way they described the ways women’s bodies have been shown to us in such a narrow and limited way with such a focus on beauty and thinness and sexual attractiveness, Lexie and I sat in different classrooms and had the same aha moment where we realized this was something that had deeply affected us because we never questioned the fact before that we were completely obsessed with weight loss, with beauty, with making sure we looked good, appeared attractive at all times, and just too much of a fixation on what other people thought when they looked at us. And of course, this is not an unusual thing. Most all the girls and women we knew and had grown up around have the exact same fixation, but it was a matter of realizing that we had kind of been duped and manipulated to think this way that pushed us down a road of, really, ten more years of higher education (Bachelors, Masters, and PhDs) non-stop to dig into this and understand how media messages do this, and most importantly, how women can see their way through it and make choices that can help them build their resilience to it rather than just succumbing to it.

Rebecca Ching: You've been duped by the media. I mean, that’s like waking up to realize that what you almost took for granted as truth or just as it just is --

Lindsay Kite: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: -- wasn't just the only way of seeing yourself and seeing others and seeing the world. That’s a pretty big statement.

0:08:03

Lindsay Kite: Yeah, I completely stand by it, and I feel like when more girls and women are able to develop a little bit of righteous anger over that feeling of being duped and being so just convinced that your worth depends so heavily on how you appear and having a body that looks one way as being key to health, happiness, desirability, and success, all of that righteous anger toward being duped can push you down a much better path. But you’ve got to recognize it first. That’s really the first step.

Rebecca Ching: Absolutely. So, talk a little bit about that righteous anger moment for you, what that looked like. If I were a fly on the wall seeing you and your sister kind of in the-curtain-being-pulled-back moment, [Laughs] what would I see in that moment as you were just kind of taking this in?

Lindsay Kite: I like the way you phrase that because I can actually tap back into how I felt emotionally and kind of physically at that moment sitting in that classroom. I remember at first I felt extremely self-conscious, extremely embarrassed that they were talking about something that was just kind of an academic principle, a critical way of looking at the world, and it is not something that I had ever done before, not on a conscious level at least. And so, I sat there feeling very self-conscious, not only that I had been duped, but that it’s something that had so deeply affected me. This fixation on needing to be smaller in order to gain access to health and happiness and love and all of that other stuff that I so deeply wanted and that everyone wants caused me to feel kind of a heart racing, I remember feeling a little bit of kind of an adrenaline rush, but it was a nervous adrenaline rush for me, and it was a sign to me that I needed to process it further and understand it better. I think that’s why it propelled so much more work that came after it, and it’s not like it was an immediate thing, you know?

I took a few years to even fully reconcile how deeply this stuff had impacted me and how I had held myself back in ways that I wouldn't have if I wasn't so hung up on how other people saw me.

0:10:04

And so, it was a long process, but as the academic work and the research unfolded, I began to learn, not only how to help other women walk out of this rut of self-objectification and fixation on appearance, but I learned how to walk myself out of it, too, and I think that’s where it’s made the biggest impact for me is because it’s both professional and personal, and I can speak to it with such passion because I know that it works and that it’s true.

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs] I love that, and I love that there’s that initial physiological response, and I appreciate how you talked about even unpacking that righteous anger, and to me, these are my words, but that sense of betrayal. It’s disorienting when you kind of wake up to what you thought was true, and then all of a sudden it’s like everything gets garbled, right? I feel like that’s part of growing up, but there’s something that when it’s about your being, your body, your essence, that’s huge, right? And so, it isn't something you just flip a switch on.

And I loved what you said earlier, too, how righteous anger, which, on its own that’s a whole nother conversation of anger and women and how we navigate that, but I love talking about righteous anger as something we’ve got to claim, how that can propel you towards good things, and it can be the fire towards good things, which I’m with you on that. Can you talk a little bit more about what that righteous anger and this awareness, the pulling back of the curtain, what that propelled you towards?

Lindsay Kite: Yeah, definitely. I like to think of this righteous anger as like a disidentification with what I used to fully identify with. It’s this kind of feminist notion of collective disidentification. I think it was Susan Bordo who wrote about that a long time ago, but it’s like this collective feeling and motivation when women start to recognize the ways we’ve gotten the short shrift, the ways that we have really been held back, not just from personal choices and this individual shame and embarrassment that we have about our bodies, but this very collective, this very universal, really, in our culture, way of thinking about bodies.

0:12:15

So, this righteous anger I think, for me, it was something that pushed me down a path of needing to reclaim my identity, to reclaim how I could find confidence, self-worth, my own personal value, how I could understand myself differently, and for me, that was learning to see my body differently, in a more holistic, a more positive way. And Lexie and I both started this process personally but also, like I said, from a research standpoint, where we were able to see all of the different messages that we and so many others had taken in through our entire lives that really presented women in such a one-dimensional way, and it’s usually through a sexualized perspective, like a heterosexual male perspective. And we, then, internalize that view of our bodies, and it showed up in our research.

So, the first question that we asked all of the women in our PhD studies was, “How do you feel about your body?” And these women didn't know that they were involved in a body image study. They thought they were just in some women’s health research, and overwhelmingly, like, 80% of these women described their feelings about their bodies in terms of what they hated about their appearance, specifically. And this is self-objectification. When you see your body through an outsider’s perspective, and a super-critical sexualized outsider’s perspective, that’s a result of growing up in an environment where women’s bodies are objects, they are up for evaluation and scrutiny. And that is something that should make everyone mad. That discomfort that we all have in our bodies and about our bodies should be a motivation for people to want to learn more, to feel better, to make change in really practical ways, and that’s really the foundation of all of our work in body image resilience.

0:14:00

Rebecca Ching: Okay, so, my brain’s exploding now with five different things I want to go down, but I want to slow it down. First, I want you to talk a little bit more about your research. I think it’s important to lay that foundation for those listening to this show because, as we talked about earlier, your research really was the first of its kind, I know that I could draw on, that really talked about a relationship with our bodies not as something to get rid of or something that was a problem. It’s just more of the state of so many other things. So, talk a little bit about your research, and, again, I want to make sure the listeners know you did gold-standard research. Now, a lot of people talk about research like, “I did my research,” which is not Googling. [Laughs] You did gold-standard research, which is the highest standard of research in the academia world and found a lot of things that actually proved what you and your sister were experiencing. So, talk a little about your profession or your focus and the research first.

Lindsay Kite: Yeah, so, our area of focus was really on how to understand the negative state of women’s body image, where those ideas come from, and then how to help women to counter those negative effects through their own personal choices. So, this is a mix of media studies, which is in the field of communication, and it’s also a mix of sociology, health promotion, health education, and psychology. A lot of different fields go into this. We kind of had to pave our own path. A lot of the work that was accessible at the time when we started this -- we started in ‘07 with our Masters degrees, and a lot of the work was focused on why women feel negatively or even just the simple fact that women feel negatively about their bodies. And so, it focuses on high-school-aged girls, undergraduate young women (especially in those age groups because they're easy to research). It was really largely about media affect. So, it’s like look at these images, and there are all kinds of different images and control groups, and then the ones who look at the images that are really idealized, they feel worse afterwards. They self-objectify more.

0:16:05

And there was also research about objectification, about how objectification is this real rut that people get in because you grow up in a world that objectifies women’s bodies and then you learn to view your body that way, AKA self-objectification, and this has negative effects. When people self-objectify, they go down a couple of different paths that keeps them further self-objectifying. And so, all of this research that was available at the time was really sad. It was really dark. It hit a wall. All of this body image stuff was just so hopeless, and especially at the time and continuing now, there are so many public campaigns trying to fight this problem of negative body image, and they do it by trying to convince girls and women that they're already beautiful just the way they are, and your flaws make you beautiful, and everyone has a bikini body. We’re all familiar with these phrases at this point. Really well-meaning people in organizations work with this. Our research was determined to find a way past this because that stuff isn't working. The really basic Dove message of “every body is beautiful,” that wasn't really fixing people's problems. Instead, what we identified as the missing puzzle piece in all of this is an understanding of self-objectification.

So, if your focus is on how your body appears, you're never going to feel positively towards your body because this standard is set by the outside world, this world that isn't going away, a culture that shapes women’s bodies as looking one way to be acceptable and normal and all of that. And so, we can't rely on this feeling of beautiful, which is so fleeting and so flimsy and defined by outside sources to cause us to feel positively toward our bodies. Instead, we have to recognize that imagining our bodies and valuing them from an outsider’s perspective is the problem and it is not the solution. The solution is to get back inside our own bodies, to look from the inside out at the world rather than taking the perspective of the world and looking from the outside in at our bodies.

0:18:07

Rebecca Ching: Okay, whoa, whoa.

Lindsay Kite: It’s important.

Rebecca Ching: You’ve got it. I’m like, okay, we’ve got to pause here because it is literally seeing ourselves from our bodies outside versus defining ourselves from the outside in.

Lindsay Kite: Yeah, it’s living inside our bodies rather than just looking at them from the outside. It’s this whole idea that your body is an instrument, not an ornament.

Rebecca Ching: Yes.

Lindsay Kite: It’s not decorative. It’s not something to be admired from the outside and judged, which is overwhelmingly how women see and feel about their own bodies. We have to get back inside our own bodies in order to value them in appropriate and accurate ways so that we can move on to bigger and better things, not holding ourselves back by self-objectifying. Really, a lot of women, what we’ve seen in our research and so many others’ research is that girls stop raising their hands in class, they stop going up for leadership positions. Women don't speak up. They won't walk to the front of the room. They won't go up for a promotion or engage in physical activity or sports that they want to do. We drop out of social situations. So many ways that women and girls are completely opting out of the best parts of their lives, including healthy relationships, because they are so hung up on how they might appear to others, and, of course, there are repercussions for not looking good enough, but some of these repercussions aren’t as big as what we imagine them to be.

Rebecca Ching: Ooh.

Lindsay Kite: And so, people are held back with just fear of what could happen if we don't look right.

Rebecca Ching: Okay, so, Lindsay, I hear a lot of people -- a lot of people that I maybe just in different communities outside of my bubble of the community that everyone’s like, “Amen! Yes!”

Lindsay Kite: [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: They're like, “Yeah, Rebecca, that all sounds well and good, but, yeah, no, I’m still gonna make sure that I fit in because the risk of losing my belonging --,” they won't say it that way, but they're just like, “Yeah, no.” But they're not willing.

0:20:03

It feels too scary to release the protector of caring what other people think and doing the work to make sure that others perceive you as enough.

Lindsay Kite: Yeah, and doesn't that make sense considering the world that we live in? Of course women have such a strong tie to this feeling of, “I will be accepted, validated, loved, and happy if I live up to these standards of just normal for women today.” Of course, we have this fear hanging over our heads that if we don't, we will be not accepted, not validated, not loved. We’ll be rejected, and that’s the deep-seated fear that everyone has. And so, then there’s this messaging built up in our world through advertising and through really subconscious messages throughout all of media and our culture that say, “If you want to be happy and healthy and accepted, you can use these products, you can lose this amount of weight because once I lost 50 pounds, then I got a great relationship,” or whatever, the success stories that we hear constantly.

And so, we grow up with this narrative about why we are so fearful of giving up this idea of fitting in through looking good. What I want to suggest is that it doesn't work. There are a couple of different sides to this story. Of course, there are people who will follow these ideals their whole lives or naturally live up to these thin ideals, white ideals, and all of the other ideals that go into our really specific idea for women today, and they may fit into those ideals naturally or with a lot of effort and time and money, but they're not necessarily always the happiest people or the most loved people. These are women who still get cheated on, who still get fired, who still get diseases and illnesses and disabilities and negative outcomes throughout their lives. They aren't necessarily guaranteed this love and acceptance and validation that we’re taught will come when we look right.

0:22:03

And on the other side of that, those who do receive the validation and acceptance and rewards that you can get in this society for looking better than other people can't hang onto it forever because we all age, we all grow, and our bodies change. And so, if we are tying our hopes for worthiness and love and acceptance to fitting these external beauty ideals, we are destined to fail. We are destined to have our self-worth and our confidence be determined by other people’s perceptions of us. We’re putting that power in other people’s hands, and that’s a real tragedy.

Rebecca Ching: Well, it’s trauma, too. It’s setting us up for an immense amount of pain, and this is a leadership issue, then, if people are not speaking up, are not creating, are not getting curious, are not pushing back, then we are missing out on immense talent, immense innovation, immense contribution that’s necessary. And then we’re seeing, gosh, what our culture’s reckoning with on such a huge level right now. I’m sitting here going the one key to really moving through negative body image -- because I’ll be honest with you, Lindsay, I often will say to people, “Listen, in the culture we live in, not having a bad body image day, week, month, even year is not necessarily realistic. It’s how we respond to it. But what I am challenged by now is to go, “Okay, if my energy’s trying change my outsides --,” and I’m not talking about I want to live a long life for my kids, and I want to be vital, and I want to live a vital life, and see my kids’ grandkids someday. That's not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the external.

And, again, I think there’s something to be said, like, I want to feel good about what I see, but I want to author that myself, and if I am spending a majority of my time thinking about how to change my outsides, my body image will stay tanked.

0:24:09

It will not improve, and that is what I’m gonna start assessing, not only checking in myself but in all those that I work with is, “What’s the majority of your focus? What are you trying to do? Let’s tease out the parts of you that are trying to change the outside, and what’s the fear if you don't, and let’s take a look at those fears and heal those fears and release those burdens that are contributing that you're only gonna be safe if you look a certain way, if you act a certain way. So, how’s that?

Lindsay Kite: That’s a great way to put it. Yes.

Rebecca Ching: Okay.

Lindsay Kite: Absolutely, and the leadership side of it I think is so important because, as leaders, as aspiring leaders, as people who want to have a positive influence and also be completely fulfilled and truest to ourselves, like reach out own maximum capacity in life, we have to be willing to push those boundaries and to test those lies that live in our minds about which bodies are acceptable and how important the appearance of your body is to the success of your life. We all have this idea in our minds that we will be happier when or we will be more desirable when --

Rebecca Ching: Yeah.

Lindsay Kite: -- we’ll be more successful when our bodies look this certain way. A lot of us, as women, our dreams and our minds are inseparably connected to our dream bodies and our minds. We picture ourselves being most successful and also looking a certain way that is probably different than we look now, and part of our minds are probably connecting the ability to reach those goals with the ability to have the self-control or the discipline to lose this amount of weight and to put in the effort and time necessary to be able to be confident about how your body looks, but in reality, we all need to be willing to challenge those ideas because a lot of them are simply myths. A lot of them are simply marketing myths that have led us to believe that the keys to these things can be bought in products and services that can literally be bought and are prescribed to us by the people who are not only diagnosing the solutions but also selling the supposed -- or they're diagnosing the problems but also selling the solution.

0:26:17

Rebecca Ching: It’s a racket. Yeah.

Lindsay Kite: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: Okay, so, let me throw a curveball here that just occurred to me that I’ve evolved on myself. So, early, especially in my clinical career, there was this sense of, you know, “Love your body as it is,” and super rejecting, almost like this counter-shame if you wanted to change your body, if you did get botox or plastic surgery or really just wanted to have more muscle mass, and that was important. There was almost this shaming current backlash towards people who said, “Well, this is important to me.” And I feel like there’s a sense of agency, too, where some women are saying, “This is where I’m at, and this is what I’ve want,” and I’ve kind of learned to say, “Hey. I think there has been an overstep in this movement, too, where we shame people who are,” I don’t want to say buying into these messages, but in their agency, in their autonomy, even if they're saying, “Some of these messages, this is how I will feel better,” what do you say to that? What do you say to that?

Lindsay Kite: Yeah, good question because we’ve got to be totally honest about the world that we live in.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah.

Lindsay Kite: And the world that we live in does value women who look a certain way more than it values women who don't. It values youth, and so, women spend a hundred billion dollars a year on anti-aging solutions that may or may not work, that may or may not help them look any better than they did the year before, but it’s still based on this idea that women’s youth is such a prized asset whereas we don't have that double standard for men. And so, we do need to be realistic about this world that we live in and acknowledge that.