004 | The Intersection Of Diet, Hustle and Online Business Culture, Part 02

Melanie [she/her] (00:01)
Hello friends, welcome to episode four of The Culture of It All. How the hell are you? Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is part two along our journey of the intersection of diet culture, hustle culture, and online business. And what a journey it has been so far. Again, thank you so much for your continued support, whether you’re listening to the show, supporting on Instagram and social media, appreciate so much.

You may have seen I recently shared that we are now on Substack. Yay! I am going to share all the links on how you can join us on Substack. You can subscribe for free. That means you’ll get all of the regular episodes on your Substack feed. I will also be sharing some additional bonus content and I will be recording, starting to record bonus episodes. Actually by the time this airs in real life there may already be a bonus episode up.

But I’m going to be sharing things like book reviews, fat book reviews. I’m also going to be sharing fat fashion, products, things that basically make our fat lives more joyful and easier. And just having conversations that we don’t necessarily have. At least I certainly didn’t have them growing up about larger bodies. That’s going to be a whole episode on its own. And…

really making sure that we take some of the stigma out of personal hygiene when we’re in a larger body, um, fashion, yeah, I said that already. Anyway, so yeah, come check us out on Substack and I would love it if you would come over and give a little subscribe for free. You can also pay, as I said, for the bonus episodes. All the information, I’m gonna pop it in the show notes so you can check it all out there, but that’s very exciting.

We are now on sub stack. As you can tell, I’m feeling a little bit jazzy today. I am feeling a little bit jazzy. And that is because, as I said, we are continuing this beautiful journey. Well, I’m not sure if it’s beautiful, but very messy journey along the intersection of diet culture, hustle culture, and online business. If you haven’t listened to part one,

Go back and check that episode out. I think it’s pretty important to listen to part one before you head into this. In part one, I talk about all three of these cultures, give you some examples of them in action. It’s somewhat anecdotal, but most of it is talking about the, not only the intersection of all three, but also focusing on the intersection of hustle and diet culture. In particular things like the wellness trends that we have seen and the healthy hustle paradox and healthism.

and the ways in which we are told to continually strive to be the best and we are told to hustle and how our self -worth becomes attached to that and also how we’re told to do it thin. So to me, it’s very paradoxical. It’s very contradictory because when we talk about health, I think the general consensus is that…

Health should include all aspects of our health. It should include our mental health as well. But there seems to be this unfortunate trend at the moment that when we see a fat person or a person in a larger body online, everyone wants to kind of throw up their hands and kind of have this real issue with a person in a larger body’s health and what that means to them. And…

whilst I would like to, you know, essentially tell these people to fuck off. The truth is that if people care about our health, they need to care about our mental health as well. And in my experience, diet culture has done nothing positive for my mental health. So, yeah, just a little, little bit to start off with. Definitely go back and listen to part one if you haven’t already. So today, very much an anecdotal episode. I am going to be sharing with you my experience of online business and the online business.

culture that I kind of grew up in. That’s kind of the way I like, I talk about this. I talk about the fact that I like grew up in the last eight years in online business. I hired a business coach in 2015, the end of 2015. And at the time my business was in the health and fitness industry. I was very much part of the problem. I am going to do an entire episode talking about how I went from…

or how I became a personal trainer and then how I went from personal trainer to quitting that and how I got here. So I’m going to do a whole other episode about that specifically. But that is how I started in my business. I was a personal trainer. I was a fitness instructor. I was selling intentional weight loss. And as I said, I’m not going to get into all of that today, but that is kind of my

First foray into online business. I was very much doing diets. I was pursuing thinness and that of course it means that that’s kind of how who I surrounded myself with and also kind of how I ended up with this business coach. So yeah, not only was my business within this industry, but also…

Everyone I knew was also in this industry and my business coach was in that industry. So that was kind of my first introduction to online business. It was very much focused on health and fitness, very much focused on the gym and nutrition and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I became a personal trainer in 2014. I was qualified at that point.

I had just had my son, so I started my business kind of at the mid to 20 – mid 2015, right, around that time. And health and wellness culture was having a real moment at that point. It was like the first – it – in my experience it was kind of still the early days of online business, very much. I mean, online business is still very new, even though we kind of think it’s 10 years in, it was still very new.

But wellness culture and the fitness industry in particular was having a real moment at that time. And…

I found so much community in that place. Some of my friends now I met when I started my online business. One of the best things to come out of all of this is some of the friendships I have made. Absolutely. As someone who felt like I never fitted in it was amazing. And also I still never really fitted in. I was still in a larger body even during my time as a personal trainer.

And I…

threw myself in to learning everything there was to learn about online business. I followed every piece of advice. I did every module. I watched every video. I did it all. I worked. I did that very stereotypical. I worked my nine till five and then I came home and I worked from five till nine on my business. Every spare moment was focused on this. I wanted this to be successful. Not only…

because I unfortunately attached a huge amount of my self -worth to how successful I could be, but also because I’d invested a lot of money into this and I hated my corporate job. I really did not enjoy the job I was doing and I just saw this as my way out. This was, this was my reason for starting an online business. I didn’t enjoy my corporate job, I wanted out and so I did everything possible to try and

make this happen as quickly as possible. It’s one of the reasons why I hired a business coach because I believed I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t know what I was doing. I probably could have learned the things along the way but I just wanted to cut that curve. I wanted, you know, that’s the reason why we tend to hire coaches in this context is because we want to lessen the learning curve. We want to get quicker results.

So I very much…

drank the Kool -Aid. I was convinced that I just needed to keep going, keep investing, sleepless nights, working every moment of every day. Like when I look back at some of the ways in which some of the things I was very much focused on, things that I thought were going to really change results in my business or were gonna get me results, it’s wild because these things really didn’t matter.

there was such a lack of context in online business coaching. Um, again, I should caveat, not all coaching, but a lot of the coaching I’ve experienced, there was such a lack of context that I just followed the rules. I’m a rule follower. I don’t love that about myself, but I am a rule follower. Not breaking the rules freaks me out. I do it within the boundaries of the law, of course, and I will challenge…

things. It’s like this interesting part of my personality that I am definitely a rebel. I definitely want to fight for the things that I believe in. Also want to make sure that everyone’s okay. These are like the two sides to the kind of the personality of my business, the personality of how I approach business. I want to challenge the status quo. Also very anxious about doing so. So anyway.

I’ve never been very good at playing the game, right? Playing that kind of corporate game. I sucked at it in my corporate job. So I was really surprised that the game was even wilder online, right? The rules were even wilder. The game was wilder. It was, it was the same shit just wrapped up in a different thing. It was just the same shit wrapped up in a different bow. I followed every tactic.

I used all of the icky language. I tried to do the hard sell and I hated every fucking moment of it. It made me so miserable. And I understand that we would look at this, and I often look back at this time of my life and think, why would I do something that made me so miserable? But all I kept thinking was, what else is there?

What other option do I have? I don’t want to go back to my corporate job. And at the time I had made such a commitment and I felt like turning around and telling people that I couldn’t do it was terrifying. The idea of telling people that I couldn’t run an online business or that it wasn’t what I thought. I just, I wasn’t willing to do that. I wasn’t willing to say that this wasn’t…

what I had expected or it was harder. Which in and of itself has, you know, that’s his own thing that I needed to process but yeah, failing, the fear of failing was so much greater. And I was so convinced that my business not working out was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. Like, it really did feel that way. Which is such a fucking privilege.

that the worst thing that can happen to you is that your online business fails? It’s ridiculous. Within two years I had got myself into thousands of dollars of debt. I was very sleep deprived and I was chronically anxious. Going through this cycle of creating and launching and trying to sell coaching.

just felt like this constant anxiety spiral. It was, it was awful. Absolutely awful. And it was only when I left the industry, around the end of 2018, I couldn’t, I couldn’t hire a coach anymore because I couldn’t afford to do that. And I was forced into this, I was forced out, I guess, of the bubble, right.

I had no idea what this was going to look like. I had no idea whether I could do this on my own, even though I’d spent good two, two and a half years of learning. And what I discovered in that year of 2019 is that there were a lot of different ways to do things. Suddenly I was seeing all these other ways of doing business or these other ways of marketing. And I was so surprised because…

For two and a half years, everything had been done one way. I was in this bubble. I kind of call it the business coaching echo chamber that we can find ourselves in. And relatively speaking, the echo chamber I was in was actually quite small. Some of these echo chambers can be very vast. We talked about this a little bit in the first part, but in online business, there has been this trend to have coaches.

who coach coaches to coach coaches. And they’re all selling the same thing. It all trickles down. I’ve noticed this just recently on Instagram with the same constant Instagram strategies or Reels strategies. The same.

the same thing being sold over and over and over again by different people. I’m like, you’re all selling the same thing. Somebody needs to get a refund. Like it’s wild. And so there is this, there is this kind of cult. Maggie Patterson talks about this really, really well. This kind of cult within an online business where these coaches are coaching coaches and.

Not only do we find that it’s the same rhetoric within these industries, within these niches, what you find is…

Again, there’s a real lack of context and as I said, the one I was in was quite small, but there are much bigger coaching spaces with much bigger names, with much more money being invested and thrown around. And yeah, it can be a really, really toxic place to be. And when you are someone…

who, like myself, when I started, but didn’t believe that I could do this on my own. I didn’t believe that I knew what I was doing. I didn’t trust myself because, incidentally, I’d spent my entire life being told by diet culture that I couldn’t trust my body. I didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was because I couldn’t even lose weight. When you’re told your entire life these constant narratives, and also when you’ve lived in a larger body and had these experiences reinforced by the way people teach, by the way…

by the way people treat you, it’s really hard to believe that you can be successful in other ways. It’s really hard to believe that you can be successful as an online business owner or as a small business owner.

And the trouble with online business, at least again, the experience I had, and I know that many other people have told me similar experiences, is the level of spiritual bypassing that happens in these communities, the ways in which people are using popularised self -help books as a way to coach people. But these books, again, lack context.

and also bypass lived experiences and trauma. And so what you find is there are people like myself who’ve really struggled to make money in their business, really struggled to grow in the way they wanted to when within these coaching confinements, because every time you come up against a real struggle, you’re told that it’s your limiting beliefs.

You’re told that you’re, you don’t want it bad enough. You’re trying too hard. You’re doing it wrong.

And for me personally every time I would kind of leave these conversations feeling really shitty about myself I’d be like okay but what I do? Like I’m paying you like five hundred dollars a month. It’s all well and good telling me it’s just my limiting beliefs but like what does that mean and how do I get past that and like how do I fix this and how do I how do I work on that? And these were things that were…

Yeah, very much left untold, very much these phrases and buzzwords that I was just left to sit with and struggle with for two and a half years.

So when we look at online business, even if you approach online business in a different industry than the health and fitness industry, there are huge parallels between the way in which online business coaching and diet culture show up. And I wanna give you some examples of this because even if you are a consumer, if you don’t have a small business or you’re not content creator, you’re a consumer.

And I think it’s really important to understand the ways in which some of this marketing shows up, some of the things that we can look out for as consumers, because it is really, really prevalent. So some of the things I’ve seen, and I’ve been on the back end of this stuff as well, like I have been in amidst these conversations where people have talked about the way in which they do this and have, and use this unethical marketing and behavior and practices.

So the first thing we see is inflated testimonials. These testimonials that’s

give unrealistic results and tell you that that is like the norm. Or they use very manipulative language to, or vague language, to tell you that this is like a normal result, right? This, this is what you can expect without giving you context. You’re gonna hear me say context a thousand times today.

They don’t give you context, there’s a lack of context. And also these results are often the exception and not the rule.

But it’s portrayed as this is what you can expect from the program. These are the kind of results you can have. This is like, in reality, best case scenario, but it’s probably the scenario that you want. It’s probably the result that you’re looking for. One of the ones I remember is seeing a testimonial on a sales page.

And I’m pretty sure it was ended up being the reason I invested was somebody had said that in those first 90 days that she worked with this coach, she booked enough clients and made enough income that she was able to pay back her investment and some.

It was telling me everything I wanted to hear because I was terrified. I didn’t really have this money to be investing, but I wanted to invest. And this was a testimonial that told me that in these 90 days these are the kind of results I could expect. This is amazing, right? The reality is when I look at that, when I actually strip it back, I don’t know how much she invested in the first place. I don’t know how successful her business already was.

I don’t know what she was struggling with and what she needed to do in order to book those clients. How much was she charging? I don’t know any of those things.

And whilst, okay, maybe you don’t have to give every bit of information out,

What I will say is context is important. So if you don’t have the context you actually need to make a purchasing decision, I would ask questions.

or consider whether this is something you can trust. I’m not saying that it was a lie. I’m saying that it didn’t give me all the information I actually needed had I really slowed down and looked at that investment. I’m not denying that I made mistakes here. Absolutely. I also know that…

I just wanted success so badly. I didn’t know that I should be looking for other arts. I trusted these people.

And I really shouldn’t have. That’s the truth. So, yeah, these kind of these results, right, we see it in diet culture as well. And maintenance phase, the podcast maintenance phase, they do some great episodes where they talk about some of these very trendy diets from like the 90s and some of these wellness trends and the ways in which these

diets will talk about the results or things you can expect. Again, with a lack of context, which we see a lot in data, you know, we can talk about something, somebody losing an average of, you know, four pounds or something like that. But what’s the context behind that? And like, who is this person? And like, it’s just this, this, this understanding that sometimes these testimonials.

are being manipulated in order to make us perceive these results as normal and as the results we’re gonna get. And in my experience most of the time that’s not the reality.

So they also sell you on the secret. Whatever that secret might be, right? This is very common in online business that this is the, this is the thing. This is the thing that’s gonna get you the success you’re looking for. It’s going to be that secret source. It’s gonna do this. It’s gonna do that. It’s no different to this is the only diet you’ll ever need.

Right, it’s this idea that this thing, this is the thing you’ve been looking for. This is the thing.

And usually there’s some great, what they call them in marketing, pain points, right? Triggering those pain points, which is incredibly gross. But this is a very common thing that’s done in online business is like using these pain points to really like dig in and kind of make you feel really shit. Only to then sell you on the solution, right?

I had a coach who used to talk about going from Pain Island to like, I don’t know what the other place was. I can’t remember. But there was Pain Island, which is where we were, and we wanted to come over to like, Happy Island. I don’t know. That’s, that’s… gives you a good visual. You can kind of see the point, but it’s kind of gross. It is really gross. It’s really unethical. Um, I understand.

how marketing works. I’ve worked in marketing for years. I’ve been, I’ve had my own agency, I’ve freelanced, I’ve done it on my own. I’ve done the whole, everything from services through to done for you content. The reality is that we can market our businesses and products and we can sell things without really causing harm.

And without really like putting pressure on these pain points, right, these so -called pain points. I mean they are pain points but I just think again when we don’t know what the consumer is thinking, exasperating these things that they struggle with, it’s really not cool. Really not cool.

really common phrase. My friend and I often talk about this. We used to hear it all the time which is to sell people on what they want and then sell them on what they need.

I’m rolling my eyes. I don’t know if you could hear that through. I’m rolling my eyes. Yeah, this was a really, really common tactic that we were taught, which is to tell people or to sell them, sorry, what they want and then actually give them what they need. So basically, charge them for this thing that you know isn’t going to work because this is actually the thing that works. I mean, none of it actually works, but just bear with me. So…

So sell them on this product, this thing, whatever it is, because that’s what they want. That’s what they want, they want the quick solution. But you know the quick solution isn’t going to work, so once you’ve already got them hooked, then you’re going to tell them actually what you actually need is this. Like this is what you wanted, but this is what you actually need.

It is so disgusting. It’s so disgusting. And this is… this was a really common tactic used by business coaches I worked with. Not only that, I was also working in the health and fitness industry at the time. So you can imagine this was very commonly used when selling health and fitness products and coaching.

Some of the other ways that online business and diet culture intersect are less about the marketing and the selling and more about things like goal setting, right? What your version of success might look like. I remember very early on realizing that similar to dieting and pursuing weight loss, no matter what goal I set, it was never enough. And every time I got close to that goal,

I would move it.

I would move the goalpost consistently because it wasn’t actually about the goal. It wasn’t about the financial goal. It wasn’t about the number on the scale. It was so much more than that. It was so much deeper. But the goal was this thing that I could see, this thing that I was working towards. And so it was never good enough because I was never good enough. And so I would constantly move it. I would constantly move that goalpost.

And that was a really interesting…

moment of clarity because I didn’t realise this until after I was out of the online business coaching space. What I recognised is that it kept me invested. In both cultures I was just constantly invested. I was constantly focused on chasing this goal and so I would keep on investing time and energy and resources, money into the pursuit of this thing that was never enough.

And at the same time, these goals were conditional. There was so much condition on whether or not I was successful, whether or not I was worthy of this. And my entire identity became the pursuit of these goals. The pursuit of thinness, the pursuit of success in my online business. And I was never going to be successful unless I achieved these things. Which is why I became so afraid to stop investing.

in my online business and why the fear of failure became so overwhelming. Because it was my entire identity at that point. I had created this identity around being successful and I had attached my value and worth to this success.

Again, one of the ways in which we see these two cultures intersect.

is when you don’t get results. When it doesn’t.

when you don’t get those results that are promised in that inflated testimonial.

It’s your fault. We are told that it’s our fault.

We’re told that we did it wrong, that we don’t have enough motivation or willpower.

And oftentimes we’ve seen this in online business or I’ve seen this in online business and we also see it in the wellness industry in particular, is that you’re not allowed to question the product, you’re not allowed to question the formula, the way in which this thing is supposed to be created or working or the method I should say. What you’re supposed to question is your motivation, your willpower, your desire for results.

And it’s a really easy way to take no responsibility for the fact that this product, program, or method didn’t work. Because it passes blame onto the consumer or the – the coachee.

In diet and wellness this often looks like strict rules and specific ingredients. Again, there was an episode of maintenance phase where they did a whole celery juice episode. You wouldn’t think that you could sit and listen to an entire episode, like an hour, about celery juice. You could and it was really interesting. And in that episode they were talking about all the strict rules around how you’re supposed to prepare this celery juice and like when it doesn’t work.

it’s because your celery juice wasn’t clean enough or whatever other bullshit they were, you know, the celery juice people want us to believe. In online business this looks a lot like shame and blame. You don’t want this bad enough, you’re just self -sabotaging, it’s just you’re limiting beliefs. Like yeah sure okay maybe I am sabotaging but like maybe this is for some real reasons?

Maybe this is again, because for some folks, our imposter syndrome, our limiting beliefs, they are reinforced by actual lived experiences, ways in which people would treat us in the real world. This is not just a belief about ourself or our body. It’s been reinforced in that way. And that takes a little bit more than just reading a self -help book.

Spiritual bypassing is really, really common in online business coaching. It’s really common that there are communities where conversations around trauma is shut down. You’ve seen this a lot in the last few years. Psychologist John Wellwood coined the term spiritual bypassing and defines it as the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings.

unresolved wounds at developmental needs. And what we find is that in online coaching, it can be really contradictory.

Coaches often want to highlight, again, our pain points, right? They want to highlight our limiting beliefs. They want to talk about self -sabotage. But it’s always looked at through the lens of everything is an opportunity. Sure, okay, fine. But like, without understanding someone’s lived experience and that everyone in that room has various lived experiences.

there is this kind of toxic positivity, right, using positive thinking to bypass systemic oppression, social economic differences, and often done without actually acknowledging our own privilege.

Both spaces tell us that we can’t trust ourselves. That we don’t know what is right.

They undermine our intuition and destroy our autonomy.

These cultures condition us to not listen to ourselves. They…

condition us to not trust our values and then they create a situation where we overthink every decision that we make except for the one that asks us to spend money on them. Those decisions should be a no -brainer.

They ask us to measure success with numbers and in a very particular way. They put conditions on our success, both diet and online business coaching cultures ignore what people actually need, right? I had coaches that taught us to sell people just like diets on what they think they want and then sell them what they need.

It also…

doesn’t look beyond the “it’s easy everyone can do it” narrative. It doesn’t look at social economics, wealth, race.

Why? Because they tend to be white dominated spaces. And because…

bringing it right back to the beginning, because so much of society still believes that health looks a certain way. And because diet culture tells us, or diet culture sells us, on the pursuit of thinness and the pursuit of health, but that health looks like a…

generally a white, cisgender, able -bodied, stereotypical and kind of feminine person.

that so many of these spaces tend to be dominated.

with this ideal?

And what’s really interesting when I look back at my own experience of this is that I left the kind of coaching bubble I was in at the end of 2018. During 2019, when I was kind of on my own figuring this out for myself, so much changed, so much happened. And it was also my first…

I guess my first experience of ditching diets, that was the year that I started to accept my body for what it was. I started to think about, well, if this is my body and this is going to be my body for the rest of my life, how do I want to have that relationship go? Like, do I, do I want to be

battling this for the rest of my life or would I rather be accepting and find ways in which I can enjoy my life even if I’m in a larger body, right, challenging that norm, that rhetoric.

And I really started to…

kind of reclaim parts of myself I’ve lost over the years as an adult. Things that I really loved when I was in my teens. Um, that was a big year for me in terms of the changing the way I, which I approached clothing and.

the way I took care of myself.

What I now realise, looking back at that, is it’s not a coincidence that when I ditched this online business coaching culture and came out of this, the same year I started to look at my own life in a different way and look at what I was really trying to pursue, personally and professionally, and…

big question I was left with is who am I? Who am I if I am not in pursuit of thinness? Who am I without diet cycling? Because it was my entire identity for my teens, my 20s.

and into my 30s.

And so I’ll leave you with those questions, right? I want to finish this two -parter with those questions. They’re really big questions to explore and sometimes I find that writing them down and exploring them in my journal is wonderful but sometimes I just have to sit with them because it fucking sucks. It sucks to…

look back at my life and see that so much time was spent in pursuit of these things that weren’t mine. These weren’t my rules, these weren’t my beliefs. You know, I…

I don’t need to be thin, I didn’t need to pursue thinness. It was like handed down to me like some family heirloom. And…

It sucks. It sucks to know that that wasn’t mine. It wasn’t mine to carry. It’s not mine to carry.

But that big question of like, who am I? And especially who am I without diet cycling? Who am I if I’m not pursuing thinness?

I encourage you with love and compassion to explore that question because it is scary, but it is so, so loving. And you might just be surprised by some of the things that you discover.

as you explore this whether it’s written down or just sitting and thinking about it.

Thank you so much for joining me for these last two episodes. This has been a big one. I was really nervous putting these episodes out into the world because it does feel very much anecdotal. These are my own experiences over the last eight years. And so much of that time has been this kind of messy intersection of all three of these cultures for so many years. So much of my adult life has been percent – been –

spent there.

And the last couple of years, last three or four years coming out of that, wanting to slow down, healing burnout because I was very burned out. Burnout multiple times. And –

also ditching diet culture. So yeah, I mean, how do we navigate this, right? How do we navigate this as a consumer, as a business owner, as a person in a larger body? I often call it keeping our bullshit lens squeaky clean. You may have heard me say that before because at this point it’s how…

I have to navigate the online space in particular because I’ve been caught out by content and people who just weren’t who I thought they were.

So one of the questions I’ve been asking myself more often these past few years is does this person, this content, this program, this strategy, does it align with my values?

Does the pursuit of thinness align with my values? Does my presence on social media platforms align with my values? Are there other ways to market my business, my content, connect with my community that are not on social media?

lots to think about, lots to leave you with today. If you have any questions I would absolutely love to hear from you. Please feel free to come over to Instagram where you can find me at cultureofitallpod. Thank you so much for continuing to support the show and I will see you next time.