Ep118- Body Shame Is a Business Model: And Your Body Was Never the Problem

Kat returns to Miles From Review after a July pause to talk about why women’s bodies get labeled and narrated, and how those “neutral” descriptors often carry judgment. Using her own experience of being called “thin,” “big,” and “big-boned,” she explores how certain bodies are treated as the default while others invite commentary, and how women across pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, and menopause are pushed to believe thinner would fix uncertainty. She argues this pressure is manufactured by transformation culture and a profitable fitness industry that sells “snap back” solutions, and shares how chasing her college-athlete body through restriction backfired. Referencing Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not an Apology and the concept of “body terrorism,” she offers practical steps: pause before body comments, audit your feed, name the shame voice, decline fix-it marketing, and compliment capability over appearance.

Check out My Bookshop to get The Body Is Not an Apology  by Sonya Renee Taylor

Curious about working with Kat? Visit KatFit

00:00 Bodies and Labels

01:06 Welcome and July Pause

02:20 Why Descriptors Matter

03:49 My Body Changed

06:59 Coaching and Identity

08:10 The Shame Business

09:27 Trying to Go Back

11:44 Body Terrorism Framework

13:57 Practical Ways to Opt Out

15:23 Keep Practicing and Closing

☎️ Schedule a Complimentary Call
See if KatFit Strength is a good fit for you: Book Here

📩 Join the KatFit Strength Weekly Newsletter
Get coaching tips, mindset insights, and updates: Sign Up Here

❓ Questions About Strength, Nutrition, or Cardio?
Submit them here: Ask Kat

Transcript

0:00

There's a word waiting for every woman's body, depending on the year, the stage of life, the 10 pounds, petite, the thick, the curvy, the big boned, the athletic, the before, the after. We hand these labels out so easily like they're just descriptions, neutral and harmless But nobody labels a body without deciding something about it first. And once you start noticing who gets narrated and who doesn't, you can't stop seeing it. Today's episode isn't about one comment. It's about the machine behind it. Why certain bodies get commented on and others just get to exist. Why a changing body gets treated like a problem to solve instead of a life being lived, and what it would actually take to opt out of that system that needs women distracted by their own reflection. This one's a little different, and we're gonna get into it. Welcome to MilesFromHerView, the podcast powered by KatFit Strength, where busy women like you find practical solutions to fuel your fitness journey with authenticity and resilience. I'm Kat, your host, a mom of two active boys, a business owner, and an ultramarathon runner, and a strength trainer in her 40s. With nearly two decades of experience, I'm here to help you cut through the noise of fads, hacks, and quick fixes. This is a space where we celebrate womanhood and motherhood, all while building strength and resilience and reconnecting with you from a place of self-compassion and worthiness. Whether you're lacing up your running shoes to go out for a run, driving your kids to practice, or squeezing in a moment for yourself, I'm right here in the trenches with you. Let's dive in Welcome back to Miles From Review. I am Kat, your host, and if you're a longtime listener to this show, welcome back. If you're new, welcome here. I have been on a bit of a pause this month. If you subscribe to the Strong Edit email newsletter, it goes out every week to my email list. If you're not on it, hop on it. The link is in the show notes. I hit pause on recording anything new, not because I was burnt out, not because I didn't have anything to talk about, but it just felt right, and I dove into being really present in the month of July and taking that time to pull back, again, not because I wasn't burnt out, but to just enjoy. My kids are getting bigger, and I wanted to spend that time with them without doing one more thing. They have a lighter schedule. My client training schedule is a little bit lighter, so I took advantage of this time. You have been enjoying best of episodes. Some of my favorite episodes that I've recorded throughout the year or the past couple years that I've had this podcast going. Today we are going to talk about bodies. And I'll say this up front, talking about body descriptors, who gets labeled and who doesn't, can feel a little uncomfortable, and that's okay. It's supposed to. This isn't a small topic, and I'm not the first person to think hard about it. There are entire books written by people much more brilliant than me who have spent years exactly on this. One of my favorites is The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor. And I'll link my bookshop.org page. In the show notes. And if you wanna go deeper on this, I highly recommend you check out these books and other books about this. And I'm gonna reference Sonya's work a little later in the episode, too, because it shaped how I think about this. As I go through this, you might be like, "Oh yeah, I've been labeled this," or maybe you have used these words. This is not an episode to cast judgment It is something to help expand how we talk about our own bodies or maybe somebody else's bodies, to acknowledge the systems and thinking around bodies and expand our horizons I will use myself as an example in this because I have had my body described multiple times. One of the things I have said on this podcast time and time again is the shortest sentence and the most true sentence that holds no positive or negative is bodies change So with my body, it has changed. I'm a 44-year-old woman who's had two children. I have lived different athletic lifestyles from being a sprinter jumper to now an endurance athlete, and I'm in a 44-year-old body My body when I was in high school was described as tall and lanky or thin as a rail. As I've progressed through adulthood, it is now multiple times been described as big or big-boned with weight, athletically weighted. And truth be told, yeah, I have more weight on my body than I did in my teens and my twenties. That's normal. I am still athletic. I still train. I'm still in a healthy body. Now, when these things are thrown out, it does catch me. It makes me pause. Individuals who might be stating these comments mean no malice in it, casually talking about it as if you would the weather. Some, if you're thinking about instances of people using descriptors for your body, may hold malice and not be so casually about it. But the thing is, with these terms is big-boned isn't really a measurement And it's a stand-in for a word nobody wants to say out loud, and there's a thing that I keep noticing. Nobody describes a smaller body that way. Nobody says small-boned as a neutral observation over coffee. Bigger bodies oftentimes get narrated, and that's a big tell because it's not about bone structure. It's about which bodies we've quietly decided are the default, and which ones we've decided need a comment. And I'm gonna be very careful here because it would be easy for me to take this and swing it in the other directions to say, "I'd rather be big than small, strong than frail," and leave it there. That's the fix. That does not... That does the exact same thing back to smaller bodies that was just done to bigger bodies. It puts value on judgment on the body type instead of taking the value judgment out of the conversation entirely. Small bodies are not the problem. Frailty as an aesthetic goal chased at the expense of health is the problem. Those are different things, and I don't want to blur them. I see this most clearly in my coaching work because I'm in it with the women every single day across every stage of an adult changing body: pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, and menopause. And what I hear underneath the training questions is rarely just about training. It's women trying to figure out who they are inside a body that doesn't look or move the way it used to. It's, "Am I still attractive to my partner?" It's, Do they still want me like this? Am I still sexy and still worthy of being desired or I'm just not in my 20s anymore. How do I get back there? Underneath almost all of it is the same undertow, this quiet belief that thinner would fix uncertainty, that if the body could just get smaller again, the identity crisis would resolve itself. And I don't think that confusion is a personal failing at all. I truly believe it's manufactured. Social media hands women a constant stream of transformation content before and after. Bounce back, snap back, get snatched, get your body back. Like the body that carried a pregnancy or crossed into menopause is a mistake to be corrected. And there's a multi-billion dollar health and fitness industry built entirely on that premise, that your changed body is the problem, and conveniently, they're selling the solution. It's profitable to keep women feeling like their changing body is their fault. It's profitable to keep women chasing a version of themselves from 15 years ago. That's not concern for women's health. That is a business model wrapped up in shame that gets attached to just living, to aging, to having carried a child, to going through a completely normal hormonal transition that shame is manufactured to, and it's not an accident that it shows up right when the market has a product to sell you. I'll tell you where I sit in all this, because I don't think I get to talk about this from the outside As I alluded to, in college, I was an athlete. I was a sprinter and jumper. I was fiercely strong. I was squatting close to double my body weight, benching close to my body weight. I wore clothes two sizes smaller than I do now. That body was powerful in a very specific, very visible way, and I was proud of it. My body, as I already stated earlier in the episode, has changed. It's not smaller. It's not doing the same lifts and the same numbers. It's doing different things in a different capacity at a different stage of life. And if I'm honest, and I want to be truly transparent here There's a part of me that wants to go back And trust me, I have tried. I have pushed myself so hard back toward that twenty-year-old something body. Fed into the industry terms, snap back, get your body back, persecute yourself, feel that guilt and shame because you chose to have a baby and you let yourself go. It is your duty to get your body back and look like you never had a baby. And when I push myself so hard in that, push myself to restriction, pushed myself to working out harder, it has ended badly every single time. More illnesses pop up, poor recovery, exhaustion, a body that stopped trusting me because I stopped trusting it, more insecurities. And what I've learned is restriction doesn't build strong bodies, and it will not build the one I had in college. It just breaks down the one I have now. That's the part nobody in the fitness industry wants to advertise because there's no product in the answer. The answer is that chasing a younger version of yourself is not a healthy strategy. It's a shame strategy wearing workout clothes. Let me pause here for a second I'm gonna be honest with you about something. If anything I've said has resonated with you so far, if you've been comparing your current body to the one you had 10 or 20 years ago, I'd like to offer a different way to think about training. Not to fix what you see as broken, just to work with the body you're living right now. That's why I built KatFit. It's not about shrinking, it's about growing stronger exactly where you are, whether that's in perimenopause, postpartum, or just exhausted from chasing the number that never actually made you feel better. If that sparks any curiosity, I'd love for you to check it out. There's a place for you, and the program is created around you, not for you to meet the program where it's at or keep up with the program. The program adjusts to you and is written for you. And design for your lifestyle. Pop into the show notes, click on the KatFit link to read over how you can work with me. And mostly, I just want you to know it's there. No pressure at all, just an open door. All right, let's get back to the episode. Sonya Renee Taylor writes about the roots of this in her book, The Body Is Not An Apology, and her framework goes further than most body positivity conversations do. Her argument isn't that we should just feel better about our bodies, it's that body shame was never accidental. It was built deliberity-- deliberately as a tool to control one that keeps people, and especially women, distracted, competing against each other, and disconnected from what their bodies can actually do. She has a name for this: body terrorism. The ongoing pressure of being taught that your body exactly as it is the problem that needs managing. And she's careful to point out this isn't only about size or thinness. The same system shows up around race, disability, gender expression, age. It's one machine, a lot of targets, and thinness happens to be the version most women get handed first. Here's the part of her argument I think about most. She's clear that self-love alone doesn't dismantle the system. Loving your own body is necessary, but on its own, it's not enough. Because shame just doesn't live in how we feel about ourselves privately. It lives in policy, in medicine, in advertising, in whose pain gets believed by a doctor and whose gets dismissed. So self-radical love in her framing isn't a feeling you arrive at and then you're done. It's a practice, and it's political, as much as it's personal. It means refusing to participate in shaming in either direction, not shaming a bigger body, not shaming a smaller one either. It means actively pushing back on the systems that profit from the shame, not just quietly opting out of them in your own head. So let's make this practical, because I don't want to leave you with just a feeling. I want to leave you with something to do. First, catch the comment before it lands, whether it's about somebody else's body or your own. Just pause for half a second and ask what job that comment is actually doing. Second, audit your feed this week. Go through your social media feeds. Unfollow or mute anything that's profiting from convincing you your body is a problem to solve. Pay attention to how you feel an hour after you scroll something. That's usually a tell. Third, name the voice when the shame thought shows up. Ask yourself, "Whose voice is this really? Is it mine? Is it somebody else's? Or is it an industry that needed me to feel this way so it could sell me something?" Fourth, practice saying no. The next time a product or a program crosses your feed built on the premise that your changed body needs fixing, practice declining it, even just internally. And fifth, when you're tempted to compliment someone, compliment capability instead of appearance. Tell a woman her body is strong. Tell her what it did instead of commenting how it looks smaller. This is a huge topic. It's one that I am not perfect at. I am in an industry that infuriates me, and I want to be a part of the change. I want to be the disruptor. I want to be here to support women in finding that incredible inner strength that they have and helping them achieve the things they want to do, no matter what stage of life they're in. I try to do it in a way that breaks down these systems, that tears apart only to be shrinking or frail or playing into this way of pitting each other against each other. Because you are so fiercely strong the way you are, and your body doesn't need to be changed. A plan should support everything about you. It should not come down to inches lost, weight pushed or pulled, and only that as a worth because there's so much more behind it. All of the things that I gave you is not gonna dismantle the whole system by tomorrow, but that's the point that Taylor makes too. This isn't the finish line you cross once. It's a practice that you're gonna keep returning to, and every time the system tries to run through you again, I catch myself daily, as I said. This is not an overnight, it's not a read one book. It's one that we need to wake up every day and do the work to rid the guilt and shame. I know this conversation is uncomfortable, and I appreciate you tuning in. If you have questions or celebrate with me, message the podcast. I read every single email and respond to each one. So please message the podcast, and if you would like me to talk on a topic, let me know. Until next time, keep moving forward. Thank you for tuning in to MilesFromHerView, powered by KatFit Strength. If this podcast inspires you, don't keep it for yourself. Hit follow or subscribe to stay updated on the new episodes and leave us a review to help more women and moms discover this space. Your feedback fuels this podcast, and I'd love to hear what's working for you or what topics you want to dive into next. You can connect with me on Instagram at KatFit Strength or share this episode with a friend who is ready to embrace her strength. Remember, fitness isn't about perfection. It's about showing up for yourself and finding strength in every step of your journey. Until next time, keep moving forward one mile at a time.