Why We’re DONE Apologizing for Stretch Marks, Weight Gain & Confidence: The Birds Papaya’s Sarah Nicole Landry’s Critical Mindset Shift

Here’s a run down of what we discussed in today’s episode: From Viral Weight Loss to Real Healing The Mindset Shift That Sparked Body Neutrality Unlearning Diet Culture’s Deepest Messages Navigating Body Compliments, Triggers, and Fear Rituals for Reconnecting With Your Body and Self-Worth Raising Body-Confident Kids Through Everyday Actions Facing Trolls and Fat-Phobic Criticism Online Setting Boundaries With Followers, Friends, and Your Own Content The Hidden Costs of Being a Full-Time Creator Redefining Authenticity and Setting Boundaries Online Check in with today’s amazing guest: Sarah Nicole Landry aka The Birds Papaya Website: thebirdspapaya.com Podcast: The Papaya Podcast Instagram:@thebirdspapaya Tiktok: @the.birds.papaya Disclaimer: The content in this episode is for educational and entertainment purposes only and is never a substitute for medical advice. If you’re struggling with with your mental or physical health, please work one on one with a health care provider. If you have heard yourself in our discussion today, and are looking for support, contact the free NEDIC helpline at 1-866-NEDIC-20 or go to eatingdisorderhope.com. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •✨ Reach Your Weight & Health Goals — Without Dieting! Pre-order The Hunger Crushing Combo Method, Abbey’s revolutionary additive approach to eating well. Learn how to boost satiety, stabilize blood sugars, reduce disease risk, and improve your relationship with food — all while getting the best nutrient bang for your caloric buck. With 400+ research citations, cheat sheets, evidence-based actionable tips, meal plans, and adaptable recipes, The Hunger Crushing Combo Method is the only nutrition bible you’ll ever need. 👉 Pre-order today! 🛒 Where to Purchase: Amazon Barnes & Noble Amazon Kindle Apple Books Google Play Kobo Apple Books (Audiobook) Audible abbeyskitchen.com/hunger-crushing-combo • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •✉️ Subscribe to My Newsletters: Abbey’s Kitchen Newsletter 📘 Check out my FREE E-Books: Hunger Crushing Combo™ E-Book Protein 101 E-Book 👋 Follow me! Instagram: @abbeyskitchen TikTok: @abbeyskitchen YouTube: @AbbeysKitchen Blog: abbeyskitchen.com Book: The Mindful Glow Cookbook • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 🎧 Don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — and leave us a review! It really helps support the show ❤️ 💬 If you liked this podcast, please like, follow, and leave a review — and let me know who you’d love to hear about next! ⭐ ⭐ ⭐⭐ ⭐ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  My message has been consistent. I want us all to show up in our lives. And I want that to not be conditional on what we weigh.

• 0:15Abbey Sharp?

  Welcome to another episode of Bite Back with Abbey Sharp, where I dismantle diet culture rules, call out the charlatans spinning the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good. I am so excited about today's conversation because my guest today is someone who has completely redefined what it means to live and share with honesty online. Sarah Nicole Landry, known to most as The Bird's Papaya, is a writer, creator, and podcast host whose work has resonated with millions for her raw, unfiltered look at body image, motherhood, and self-worth.

• 0:56Abbey Sharp?

  She first gained viral attention years ago for a major weight loss transformation. But what makes her story powerful isn't the before and after. It's actually everything that came next. Today, Sarah is a mother of four, a fierce advocate for body acceptance, and a storyteller who has made vulnerability feel less like a buzzword and more like a bridge, connecting people through shared humanity. In this conversation, we're going to explore tools and rituals for reconnecting with body respect and neutrality, navigating criticism and fatphobic trolls,

• 1:36Abbey Sharp?

  setting boundaries both online and off, raising body-confident kids, and so much more. Also, a quick reminder that we are weeks away from the launch of the Hunger Crushing Combo Method. And if you preorder now, you will get a free Hunger Crushing Combo Holiday Survival Guide. So I would love if you would check out the links in the show notes on how to redeem that. All right, friends, let's get into it.

• 2:08Abbey Sharp?

  Sarah, thank you so much for joining me. I'm so excited to chat again. This is so great.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, we had a little podcast sesh on my podcast and it was great. After following each other for years online, I think it's so nice to sit down and like have a real honest conversation without a comment section, ready to pounce on everything we say and do.

• 2:25Abbey Sharp?

  Mm hmm. That's why I love podcasting. It's like, it's far less vicious out there.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's so true.

• 2:30Abbey Sharp?

  Love it. Okay, so I feel like, you know, I didn't really know this. A lot of your newer followers and fans might not realize this, but what you initially went viral, not necessarily for like showing your beautiful stretch marks and national modeling campaigns, but for your dramatic 100-pound weight loss transformation story.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:51Abbey Sharp?

  And, and you know, I've read a lot about this and you talked about the fact that despite kind of winning the weight loss lottery.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:58Abbey Sharp?

  You didn't feel better. Can you talk a bit about, you know, what you mean by that?

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, I mean, if you look at every single before and after transformation photo, it's like a sad person and then a happy person. And so I was like, I'm ready for the happy person. I had had three kids. I, you know, I had never been in a small body. I was always the largest of my friends. I always had to not shop in the same stores as them and go and do all these different things. And I just, I thought, you know what, this has been, it's been limiting my life in the way that I want to show up in the world. And I want to change it. And I didn't, again, I'm a stay-at-home mom. I've got three kids and I'm like, I want that. I want to, I want to show up in my kids' lives. I want to do all the things with them. I'm going to lose weight. And I was very determined by that. I didn't share

• 3:46Speaker 00

  it online. I didn't initially say anything about it. But I had been an online creator at that point, like a blogger and stuff for several years. And so going through a weight loss transformation, people started to notice at around 40 pounds when I had lost weight and it started to pick up a lot of comments and commentary and follows and I started posting more and more about it because the part about this that I took so much pride in is I did it without any help. I didn't go to a trainer. I didn't go to a nutritionist. I didn't go to a dietitian. I did this all by myself with an app that told me how much to eat in a day and I just worked out like two to three times a day and I'm thinking this is my health journey. So you can sort of like one, two, skip a few to the end of this story where you know, it has

• 4:31Speaker 00

  become extremely disordered. I now have a huge fan base that follows me for weight loss advice. I am not the person that should be giving it, but here I am doing it and showing my story and the big, big cloud that is over my head is no matter how much weight I lost, I wasn't feeling that after photo feeling, even if I was posting before and afters and they did mimic that, it wasn't what I was feeling inside. My anxiety around my body was actually increasing. My panic over how I looked was increasing. I was editing my photos. I was editing, I was posing in certain ways that you would never see anything. I wanted to appear flawless because that is what we are

• 5:11Speaker 00

  selling in the, in the weight loss category. Like that's what was the message. And I'll be honest, the whole why for me was like, I want to show up in my world and be able to like interact with my kids more and do all these things. And I was getting more anxiety around going out in the world because I was so scared of people seeing me in real life. I was so scared about what I looked like all the time. I projected this perfect body, but like when I sat down, I had rolls, things that are absolutely normal. But when your brain is so disordered around these thoughts and ideas and Instagram is really, truly at that point in time, not video, it was just stills. And I felt like if I didn't look like the statuesque version of myself that I had

• 5:50Speaker 00

  put online, I couldn't do it. So it was such a huge moment of light bulb. I'm now a size zero. I've lost over a hundred pounds at this point and everyone is complimenting me and congratulating me. And in the background of my life, I was going through absolute chaos. I was going through a divorce. I was living at my parents' house. I am now a single mom with three kids and working double jobs and everyone's like, oh my God, congratulations. You look amazing. And I was like, oh my God, how am I gonna, how am I gonna do after the after photo? What am I, when am I gonna face the fact that like it's gone too far? I'm not happy. I am struggling. I'm at my rock bottom and the only way out of this is up.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  So that sort of is what I mean when the before and after really wasn't genuine. But I also didn't know that it was. I don't think I meant to be like projecting a false reality. It's just what was happening in my brain in that time and then coming out of that and sort of dissecting what diet culture and weight loss culture had really embedded in me is that, you know, as long as I looked smaller and looked quote unquote, better, then I would be rewarded. And the, what I actually wanted the reward to be was me living my life and I was doing less of that. So that was the big, that was the big light bulb moment. That

• 7:09Speaker 00

  was the big aha. And that began the beginning of me shifting my content. I never saw this as, at this point, I've been doing online stuff for so long. I wasn't making money doing it. So I was like, there's, I really just have to shift and change and be honest about some of these things. And it, it really was a tiptoe into, okay, let's dissect loose skin, stretch marks, cellulite, all these things that kept making me feel like it was holding me back from life. And the more I exposed and talked about them, the more I was like, oh, nothing's changed. I can go wear a bikini. I can wear shorts. I can't, like, wearing shorts now is such like a non thought. I cannot tell you what a big deal it was the first time I wore shorts. It's just, it's a really, it's a really interesting thing to look back on. But yeah, to answer your question in the longest form possible, that's my answer.

• 7:55Abbey Sharp?

  Wow. Yeah. What a story, honestly. And I think it really just speaks to the fact that so much of diet culture and the before and after narratives we see online, they look glossy, they look exciting. That's their purpose. They're there to sell you something.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:10Abbey Sharp?

  When the experience itself may like be very hollow underneath, as yours certainly was. I mean, even in my own experience, you know, I, I struggled with orthorexia. So my goal necessarily wasn't not to lose weight. My goal was just to eat clean and, you know, eat. Perfect. And of course, weight loss happened as part of that.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 8:29Abbey Sharp?

  But the experience, the anxiety I had, once those compliments started to roll in, oh, what are you doing? You look so great. The anxiety I had was like, what is gonna happen if those compliments cease? What is gonna happen? Then I got into my head about my body. Like, what if I gained the weight back? What if I slip up? Then I'm not gonna be accepted. What if I, and then, of course, like, what if I take it too far? There's like this razor thin where like, you know, you are on one side of it where everybody's complimenting you for being so, you know, hot and thin and fit and stuff. And then literally you lose like two more panels and everyone's like, oh, my God, you look sick and disgusting.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:06Abbey Sharp?

  Then they're criticized. And it's that anxiety of body surveillance is so overwhelming.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  So well said. The body surveillance is everything. And this is why, to this day, I'm very cautious. People always want me to comment on somebody's weight loss or weight gain or like body change. And I was like, no, because we actually don't know what's going on. And as somebody who's lived for it, you don't, through it, like, you don't know what's going on. And also, I don't want to compliment somebody on their weight loss because I know it may come across with very, very good intentions, with so much love and affection for like, how hard somebody worked for that potentially, but also holds them to a, you look better now? And I feel this for myself. I have, uh, my body ebbs and flows a lot. I've lost weight in the last year, not intentionally, um, but I did. And the comments in, people are like, why aren't

• 9:55Speaker 00

  you commenting on your weight loss? Why aren't you commenting on your weight loss? Why aren't you saying something? What are you doing? And I'm like, I actually don't want to comment on this because I actually don't know if this is gonna stick or if it's not. So I would like to let my body do what it needs to do. It's gonna ebb and flow, it's gonna go up and down. And I don't want my value to be hinged on how people feel about me in that. I need to really, so I I know for a lot of people, it's very frustrating. Why won't you just talk about it? Well, one, a lot of it's my mental health. So sucks to suck. It's actually not been a great time. And two, because of my mental health, yes, I have picked up more movement and I have been eating more intentionally for my mental health. Uh, these, these are not inherently bad things. My body has changed. I could not.

• 10:35Speaker 00

  Tell you if it's the good or the bad that has caused that. So with that said, I do not want to make this part of who I am and like a conversation them having around other people's bodies or my own. Because we are likely going to actually guaranteed, we are going to change. And so I don't want my validation to or even a compliment to stick with me in a sense of like, you are better now. Because that makes me feel like I can't change and still live my life the same way that I am right in this very moment. I want to be able to keep living my life. Regardless of my size, I want to keep showing up. And I've done that over the last, you know, five years, going through another pregnancy and another postpartum. I've done that.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  But I watch and witness far too often how much these conversations. And I think now with the GLP ones, it has given people. Almost like they now have the ability to comment and speculate and ask, and we would never. I saw somebody's, I'm gonna tell, I'm just gonna be straight with you. I saw a video the other day that was like, all these people that used to be very body positive, they're all now losing weight. Talking about like Lizzo and Meghan Trainor and all the stuff. And I was like, did we forget that like pre all of the injectables, like. Adele also went through this, Kirstie Alley also went through this, Oprah. We've seen all of these celebrities that have ever been of one size, the second they change.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  It's a huge conversation and it is, that is not changed because there's injectables now. This is, this has been a constant, women's bodies are a constant. Like you said, like that, uh, what did you, what, where did you use surveillance? Like, we're obsessed with it. We're obsessed with it. And so while I also work to expose norm, normalcies and like create saturation of content. That looks a little different than just what we see in fitness culture and online all the time. I also acknowledge that like the comments that we make about each other really fucking matters. And I will not, even if I think somebody has like lost weight and it's like for the best reasons, I'm never going to say something.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  I'm just gonna be like, it's so lovely to see you. You look great. And I will say the exact fucking thing to them if they gain 20 pounds. I am exhausted by the fact that women just can't move through the world and have babies or change their bodies or have these up and downs or even have the, I mean, let's be honest, plus size models and plus size creators and plus size celebrities, they are mocked, they are made fun of, they are run through every frigging tabloid, they are exposed for every little flaw they have. And then if they change that, they're like, mm, so you never loved yourself in the first place? You fell into the, can they actually win? No. So guess who's not going to comment on it? Me. I'm just not going to do it. I'm, I just don't want to be a participant in it. I want to talk about my own experiences in

• 13:24Speaker 00

  my body. And I know that that welcomes comments, but I just, I'm so, I'm too tired of it. And I know too well that these compliments can actually sit, when I had to gain weight, I can't tell you how hard it was, how quiet it was. Joe, like when you, you would know this, when it all gets really quiet, now nobody's telling you how good you look? Nobody wants to bring up that you've gained weight. It's so quiet. So you have to get so loud for yourself. And I want people to get loud for themselves and stop the high and the drug of this external validation and start figuring out what that like daily multivitamin is, whatever that form might be, that makes you lock into like just living

• 14:06Speaker 00

  your life. Because if we keep hinging how happy we are in relationships or like what relationships we choose and how we advocate for ourselves in the workplace and how we show up for our families and all this, if we go on vacation or not, or if we wear the swimsuit or not, based on our body, we are doing something very, very wrong. Yeah, I want to be 80 and whatever that looks like. And I want to be doing whatever it is that I want to be doing. And I want to rock it. And I don't want to think about what everybody else is thinking about it. That's my goal.

• 14:35Abbey Sharp?

  I love this. That is my goal too. And I can relate to just so much that you just shared there. Cause I also unintentionally lost weight earlier this year solely from stress and IBS.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:47Abbey Sharp?

  And in my, right.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  That's also mine.

• 14:51Abbey Sharp?

  Right. They go hand in hand. So, and it didn't matter, you know, I was force feeding myself because I was getting comments being like, you look disgusting. You know, are you on GLP one? You know, like you're looking scary, things like that. And those things were, those comments were so triggering to me because it brought me back to my like, my like bottom of my ED days where I was getting those kind of snickers and comments, but now obviously on a much, like much more grand scale because it's public. And I had created this response video where I was trying to, I was going to explain to everybody what's going on in my mental health, what's going on in my life, what I'm, what I'm trying to do, how I'm trying to gain back weight.

• 15:33Abbey Sharp?

  And it was in my drafts. And then, you know, literally like the next day, the next week, my things changed and I got my appetite back and I gained, like gained weight back. So I was like, okay, I'm not going to post it now because they're going to be like, well, what the fuck? You're, you're not skinny. Like you're not, you're not as skinny as you were in that picture. But I, I just also came to this realization that, you know, we as creators, I know that the public likes to think that they, they are owed everything from us. They like, they don't, they don't necessarily, they're not owed, you know, our entire life story. We're allowed to kind of own our own body and, and our bodies are not our business card. And that's really what kind of came down for, down to for me.

• 16:15Abbey Sharp?

  I don't want my body to be my business card. I don't want my body to be the most interesting thing about me. I don't want it to be the biggest topic of every conversation online. You know, how did you lose that weight? You know, what are you doing? Is it too far? Is it just right? Like, you know, everyone's going to have an opinion and my role here online is not to give people kind of insight into why my body looks the way it does. It is to, you know, teach nutrition, basically, you know?

• 16:45Speaker 00

  And the more we talk about it and the more we explain it, the more we justify the questions. Like it's, it really just continues to perpetuate. So like, what if we had intentionally lost it and we're like, these are the things we did. It, it actually welcomes like two different types of conversation, positive and negative, but it also keeps you in that box of like, you have to constantly explain why your body. Looks the way it does. And for me, my message, regardless of my size over the last five years, or the last 17 years that I've shown up online, or I guess since post weight loss, when I started shifting my content, um, my message has been consistent. I want us all to show up in our lives. And I want that to not be conditional on what

• 17:27Speaker 00

  we weigh, or how our bodies have shifted and changed, whether that's like loose skin, stretch marks, cellulite, all of these different things that are inherently just a genetic thing. And also miraculous that our bodies know how to adapt to things like stretching without ripping open. I, I, I'm not going to get mad about that. But it is, um, my message remains the same just to keep, I want to keep living my life. And so if I showed up 40 pounds heavier than I am now, doing the exact same things that I'm doing now, uh, there's no change in the message. There might be a change in my body. And that is the, my variable on whether or not I do it is not my size. So I really do think like, and the same as you, like the, the way that we're,

• 18:12Speaker 00

  what we're doing in the core message has remained the same, even if the body has changed. So it's interesting that people will be like, oh, now you're like rocking bikini, like no, I was rocking bikinis like a week postpartum. Like, don't even try. Like, I've been doing the same things. I've been showing up the same way. And let's be honest, like, people are just upset at anything that doesn't fit the exact mold, because I say this to people all the time, when they're like, I get it, but like, why do you have to show it? Go comment that on a Jim Bros ab photos. Like, go say that to him. Why, the, why is that okay? And mine is not. We both have bodies that have changed from our lives and from our lifestyles. So why is his okay? And mine is not. Because we have so normalized and oversaturated, just the mold of a human

• 18:57Speaker 00

  being. And anybody that goes against that, it's like, ugh, I don't need to see it. Yeah, actually you do. Otherwise, we all just live this life thinking we have a very small window of time, if we ever get that window at all, where we look like socially acceptable and everything else in your life is irrelevant. Everything else doesn't matter.

• 19:13Abbey Sharp?

  You have to hide.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, you hide it away, tuck it away. Unless you are and and the it's not attractive is the most infuriating thing that somebody can say because why do you think that I am coming on here to attract you? I'm not looking to fuck you. I am looking to live my life. It is not about whether or not you want to fuck me. This is like an ongoing. I can't when you actually take a step back like because I know a lot of women get these comments and it can really tank your emotional health and like how you feel about yourself. But like take a step back and you're like, wait, would I ever date this man? Would I ever put myself in a room with this? Would I invite them to a party? No. So guess what? I want to repel you. If this is what's repelling you, I'm doing a really

• 19:59Speaker 00

  great job and I will keep doing it.

• 20:01Abbey Sharp?

  I love that.

• 20:15Abbey Sharp?

  Okay. And I'm like building on this new mindset, you know, when you you're kind of looking back at that viral weight loss sensation version of yourself. What was like the biggest mindset shift that allowed you to embrace this different way of thinking about your body?

• 20:31Speaker 00

  I think it really helped to find community online. And this is why I love online spaces so much because like, for instance, when I was going through divorce, there was nobody in my personal world that was going through divorce, but I could find people online that were. And so similar to that, I found a couple of different creators that had also experienced like extreme weight loss and then were talking about what their life was afterwards. A key one for me was Kenzie Brenna. She is, she had done, I remember when I found her and I actually, she would come up in my explore feed a lot and I would just like, I would like very, I would be very, I'd like side eye it. I was like, oh, like you can't possibly be happier gaining weight. You can't

• 21:12Speaker 00

  possibly be. And I just, I was so skeptical of the message. But then, like I said, I tiptoed into it. I didn't just suddenly show up and like I was like a body confidence creator. I was tiptoeing into The spaces of, okay, there is something here that a lot of people are experiencing and there's, it's, it's not hitting our explore feeds as much as like the weight loss before and after, to see somebody who experiences healing from, like, I never got diagnosed with an eniac disorder because I never sought help. I didn't know there was a problem. So when you didn't know, I can't ever say that I had an eniac disorder. I think we can all very much assume, but I have never been diagnosed. But after that, when people, like, you do need to gain weight,

• 21:56Speaker 00

  there's not a lot of spaces to find that. So finding people online that were doing that and realizing how much it was helping me, helped me start to do that as well. And I, and I essentially, this is before we did long form captions. I used to, I used to use it as a journal. And I used to be so scared to post these things that I would hit post, I would throw my phone across the room because I had to not think about what everybody was going to say about it. And I would have to leave it. And guess what? I lost a lot of the initial followers that followed me for weight loss advice because they were like, this is like bad for me, quote unquote, bad. I had no idea what was going to come next. There was no bone in my body that would have expected millions of followers to start to come and tap in for a very different type of messaging.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  But it, I would never have been able to do that if it wasn't for other people and other creators that I was watching who'd already taken those steps, those very essential steps, and shared their journeys to make me not feel so alone. And, and that often remains my why. Even in the face of skinny talks and, and everything changing, I want to be consistent in the fact that my message stays the same. I want us to live our lives, no matter what you choose for yourself, the surgeries, the diets, the weight loss, the, the weight gain, the children, the not children, I just, I so desperately want us to wake up to the fact that we only get one shot at this. And so much, so much of our decision making is, is hindered on what we look

• 23:23Speaker 00

  like while we do them. And I just, I, I say this often, and I will repeat it again here, I want my 80 year old self to have like some really fucking great stories. And so when I find my current 40 Year old self having a really hard time choosing something, I think about her. And I know that she probably thinks I am in the best spot of my life and she wants me to live it. And I've never looked better. So why am I not doing it? And like you, your bones are hurting more as you get older, like all these different things. I, I take her perspective on what stories she wants to tell and the life she would want me to live. And everything changes. And my, my whole decision making changes in that moment. So that's what I often do when I can't pull it out of myself.

• 24:05Abbey Sharp?

  I love that. That's a really great kind of tip that I think a lot of people can, myself included, can, can learn from. Um, and I want to kind of talk about some actionable strategies here. Um, because you know, even the biggest like body confident baddies have insecurities. Or intrusive thoughts sometimes, right? So I, I want to normalize that not all of us, even though we feel like we've done some important work here. We, we don't all have it figured out every single moment of the day. Um, what is something that diet culture taught you early on that you feel that you're kind of still constantly having to work to unlearn? That's still kind of that, that a thought that always still pops up into your head and you're kind of like, ooh, I need to fight that quickly.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  Uh, I think just that being smaller will make you feel better. Like smaller is better. You feel better. Um, and I think also that it will bring you confidence. I, it took me being a size zero before I figured out that like confidence wasn't coming for me in the way that I thought it would. Uh, I get a lot of messages every single day of people saying, I wish I had your confidence. And I'm also like, I wish I had the confidence you think I have as well. Like I wish I had that too. Because I choose it every single day. I am, I don't, I don't look at my body and go, oh my God, you're so hot. Like some days I do, but that's a very, that's a very like blip.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  The consistent thing is that I'm trying to respect my body, but mostly respect my life and the time that I have here. So that is my core wise, and that's where my confidence comes from. But like, my confidence is a choice. It is often done with knees shaking. It is not something I do because I think I've figured it all out. And I think a lot of people, they're sitting and waiting for the feeling. So they do the weight loss or they do the changes and they do all this stuff and they're like, ugh, why am I still not feeling confident? Or they feel those blips of it. Like a really good example is when you get your hair done. You feel so confident after getting your hair done. But then you think about it and you take a step back and you go, okay, hang on a second.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  I just gave time, money, energy to myself. I, somebody had hands on me and I feel so good that I took a photo of myself and I feel really confident. And you remove the, if you remove, if you make it just about the hair, your hair didn't make you confident. All of these things that you chose for yourself and these investments in yourself is like what made you feel confident. There are so many, like I will often do the thing and I'm not feeling confident, but as I'm doing it, like it starts to feel that way. So when I get really, in terms of like giving a tip or a life advice, if I look in the mirror and I'm feeling really finicky and I'm like bothering at my clothes and I'm changing a million times, I can tell.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  It's like a festering lack of confidence. I do whatever I can to step away from the mirror as fast as possible and go do the thing that I wanted to do. Because then when I go and do the thing that I wanted to do, the confidence follows it because the confidence is actually just doing it scared. It's not doing it, figuring it, figuring it all out. Like I don't know people, I did Sports Illustrated Runway and I'm backstage with some of the most beautiful women, quote unquote, perfect in the world. And they're stressed about what they look like. They're stressed about stepping out. They're nervous. They're lacking confidence, but they're doing the damn thing. And that clicked something for me that I was like, oh my God, everyone's making these choices.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  I don't know anybody who's like, oh, I just inherently am confident and so I move through the world that way. You can just choose it and you can hope that the, the thing follows and often it, almost always it does, almost always it does.

• 27:47Abbey Sharp?

  That is fantastic. I love the idea of choosing confidence, being intentional in, in those self beliefs is so important. And it kind of brings me to this other question that I have because you know, you and I both know that working in social media is not for the faint of heart.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  I know and I'm so faint of heart. It brews like a peach. It's terrible out here.

• 28:06Abbey Sharp?

  Same, same. And you know, like just being transparent and vulnerable, like your day to day experiences in this world of like filters and I I.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:15Abbey Sharp?

  That is that that kind of authenticity is such currency like we we crave that in this kind of weird doctored up world, but it really can take a toll on us creators as well because and I think that people like you said earlier, saying that like, oh, I don't need to see that like, oh, what are you doing? Like, put that away, kind of thing like, that's not nice to look at like, what do you think? Because you probably have troll comments being like, you're glorifying obesity or like, you know, like, why are you so body confident when you know, you've got stretch marks? What do you think people misunderstand about body confidence that triggers them to like, have like, to post these critical comments in the first place?

• 28:56Speaker 00

  Well, I really think it does come down to the original messaging of like, the before and afters, and the fact that like, oh, you can do something to change this, you can get the surgeries, you can alter your body, can you just pause your life and how you show up until you've done that? There is this like, and I hear it, I'm gonna be honest with you, the men don't bother me as much as the women. The women are often looking for the cracks in your story, they're looking for how, why you're wrong. The men are just concerned about if you're attractive or not. So, or like, if you find, because I'm gonna be honest, as much as I get like, the barf emojis, I also get the guys being like, I want to lick your stomach. Like, neither one of these comments do I want to be having right now. Not both of them, both of them are about whether or not you're getting a

• 29:41Speaker 00

  fucking boner for me. Like, I do not care about that. The women, it breaks my heart because I'm doing it for them. Like, I'm doing it for myself, but I'm also doing it for our collective good. And the fact that we cannot move through this world, feeling like, whether or not men are attracted to us or not, is our value in this world. Or whether or not we provide them children is our value in this world. So, my, yeah, so the way I show up, I find it really, really difficult, dealing with the women's comments, and oftentimes reflective of their own, like, I've had six kids, and I don't look like that. Babe, I'm gonna hold your hand while I say this, we do not have the same genetic makeup. My own sister has six kids, and we do not look anything alike. She doesn't have a stretch mark on her stomach. I have them up to my rib cage,

• 30:24Speaker 00

  just like my aunt does, just like my mother does. We are the same genetic makeup, and yet we are different. But like, of course, I don't look the same as you. Of course, our life hasn't responded the same as you. And we really have to get out of this.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  Box like thinking, uh, but yeah, the women break my heart. I'm not gonna lie. I think they're often very vicious. They're often very cruel and the way they, they come for your character. And they come for whether or not, like they come for like, you don't care enough about yourself and you are a bad mother for not doing more. And the men are just worried about whether or not they want to fuck you. And I, I think that's just where as much as I even like, I follow like some reality stars. I commented on somebody's page this week and they're like, I can't believe you support this person. And I was like, we are so, we're such in a weird world right now where people are women, especially we're just in this cycle of attacking each other.

• 31:20Abbey Sharp?

  Yep.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  We've normalized it so much that it has become our commonplace that we can just tear each other down. Uh, and then we love when they've fallen and then they get back up and then we cheer, we cheer them on. Go you. You came out of the pits that we put you in, but let's talk about that later. We put them in. We see it over and over again. It's been normalized in celebrity culture, not for the men, just for the women. And now we've done it in online spaces and with our neighbors and with our peers and it is, it, it does take a bit of a thick skin, but I think more so it takes just being allowing yourself to have the feelings of those comments, but, but then taking a step back to analyze them and realize how much it has less to do with us and more to do what diet

• 32:04Speaker 00

  culture has inherently taught our world and like how women are valued in this world. And the more that we look at it through that lens, you get a little bit of a fire in your belly and you know, like I got comments this week being like, I don't need to see it. And the same thing I said about like, well, if we're okay seeing it on a fucking Jim Bros abs all over his Instagram page, why is am I not okay that I show my stretch marks? I'm gonna post it more. I'm gonna post a 20 photo carousel.

• 32:29Abbey Sharp?

  Love it.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  This is, this is where my mindset is because I'm like, I need women that when they see these comments to not shrink away and go, you're right. I don't want to, I don't want to feel this feeling anymore. Get mad. Get mad. Show up more. Expose it more. Like do more. Everybody is telling you to get in a box and not live your life. Do it more. Live more. So it, I want it to, when people experience these things, including us, I want it to fuel the message, not snuff it out.

• 32:59Abbey Sharp?

  That's so powerful. So powerful.

• 33:14Abbey Sharp?

  And you know, do you have any like kind of tangible boundaries that you've set, whether online or in folks with folks that are in your, you know, circle in real life?

• 33:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:24Abbey Sharp?

  That has just like helped guide you on this journey, like good for your mental health?

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:29Abbey Sharp?

  Good for just like, you know, maintaining this, um, this sense of confidence that you have?

• 33:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. I used to, for the longest time, feel that if you were going to show up online, you had to welcome all comments and you had to talk through them all and you had to, and I cannot tell you how low my mental health got, the more I allowed people to talk to me the way that they wanted to talk to me. And I know that for a lot of people, they're like, oh, she just deletes the negative comments. Hmm. Yeah, now I am actually. I'm not deleting all of them, but like I am because I find it not harmful just for myself, but for everybody else in the room. Somebody once said to me, if your social media is your house, you have the door open and people are flooding in, but if somebody starts acting out, you actually can show them the door. So bless them and block them. Out they go. Like you lost the privilege to be in this space because you not only spoke ill of me and my body, but

• 34:16Speaker 00

  all the women that look like me as well. And I'm thinking more about them than I'm thinking about you. I'm thinking more about, you know what I mean? Like I just, I used to really think you just had to leave it all up and you had to let it all go. Uh, no, I don't. And, and also if people want to make comments about my weight or the way I look or like I, I do not have to respond. They are, I actually, especially if I don't feel like it is a good, I've responded a couple of times when people are like, why aren't you talking about why you've lost weight? And I was like, oh, because I had like a full mental breakdown. Do you want to go into this a little bit deeper, Brenda? Or do you want to leave it at that? Uh, I, I don't want to entertain it. So I just, I'm trying to walk away from it a little bit more. Um, if people are in my DMs, I actually have

• 34:59Speaker 00

  very constructive conversations with them about it. Uh, but the public comments that are just looking to rip you down and to take you down a notch and to invalidate you or to criticize. I just, why? Why? Do we actually have to engage with that? You know, the online platforms would say, this is good for you. This is great. All engagement is good engagement. No, not if. Not if a girl who's just given birth for the first time and has looked in the mirror and seen the changes in her body and then looks and sees somebody down the road a little bit who looks like she likely will in the future, if her comment section is just ripping her apart and saying how terrible she looks and how she doesn't, I care more about that freshly

• 35:41Speaker 00

  posed part of mom than I do about your right that you feel you have to shit talk on me and my body. I just, I, I think of the bigger picture. Um, and I think it's too important. So yeah, I've created more boundaries. I also almost quit last year. So all of this feels like a little bit of a, like a little bit of like a, oh, I'm like in the bonus chapter of life. Uh, when I say my mental health was low, I mean, like I almost took my life and I don't say that lightly. It was very, very, very low. So everything feels like a bonus track. Everything feels like a bonus chapter and I'm showing up that way. I'm showing up with a lot more like, I don't need this. I don't need to deal with this. So, uh, if all of this is, and I think a lot of us need to operate that way, not being so afraid of

• 36:25Speaker 00

  the consequences of just what people might say, because it actually isn't going to do anything but, uh, hinder your own self. So I just, I just, yeah, better boundaries have, have made a world of difference for me, for sure.

• 36:39Abbey Sharp?

  That's amazing. And yeah, cause I was, I was actually just going to ask you about knowing that, you know, being a content creator, it's so glamorized. People think, oh, we're just like kind of having fun, um, and are, you know, showing off our body in swimsuits, making money, but there's a trade off with every choice that we make, including one to show up here on the internet every single day. Um, and so yeah, is there anything that like it, it, you feel that having this amazing, vibrant, impressive platform has perhaps taken away from you, has stolen from you that you've tried to reclaim over the years?

• 37:13Speaker 00

  I, I think you lose a little bit of the ability to move through the world, uh, fully with your own choices for yourself and autonomy. Yeah. Like if somebody is like a plus size creator and then they lose weight, they're like not allowed to. It's like, I find it very bizarre that we have put people in these boxes. Um, and we forget we're watching, now we're at the point where we've been watching people online for like a decade, if not more. So you are going to see different versions of them and like, we need to, even if they're doing the wrong thing, and I say this, knowing that I was the person doing the wrong thing. You, I would rather be on the side of support than the teardown. Like, I would rather be there because I know how it feels to get to the other side and find out that all these things didn't actually make you feel better.

• 37:58Speaker 00

  And I think that you need more community than you need people just trashing you all the time. And so, and if for you, you're following somebody and you're like, oh, watching them lose weight or watching them have these changes or these surgeries are really hard for me. That's a you thing. Go take a break, mute them, unfollow. Like, these are things that we all can choose to have. Nobody is, nobody is holding your hand and forcing you to look at these things or forcing you to look at us. So I do think like, I do wonder, I don't think I would be doing anything different. I think I, I think I'm pretty clear headed about it, but I know over the years I felt like, am I allowed? Am I allowed to do these things? Cannot, like, I used to get my lips injected and I remember at one point I got them done again, maybe like five years ago.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  And I remember feeling like everyone was telling me what to do and how to live. And that's why I went and got them done. It wasn't about that I wanted to go, like, I, I actually did want to get them done. I wanted to do it, but I was so mad that people were telling, saying how good or bad of a woman I was based on like these choices that I had to go do it for myself. And you know what? I actually didn't like them afterwards. I ended up like never doing it again. And that's also valid. Like, I, I, okay, I made the wrong decision. Are you, am I just also supposed to shit on myself? Like, where's the room to just be human and make choices for ourselves, even if it's sometimes the wrong choice so that we can move through that as humans?

• 39:20Abbey Sharp?

  Yeah, I, I think that the bottom line is, is that, and, and I hope what's something that people listening can take away is that I, I know from a business sense, we are seen as brands and brands have a very specific, you know, if you had a brand book, you were trying to sell your, you know, your, your snack for kids, you would have a target market, someone named Sally who's going to buy your things. You have like a whole brand bible of what your characteristics are. So they see us as that brand bible. They see you as the body positive spokesperson, which means that like anything that even

• 39:56Abbey Sharp?

  Even like as a potential changing of your aesthetic means that somehow you have broken that perfect body positive image.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 40:05Abbey Sharp?

  We are not, we are not brands. We're not products.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:10Abbey Sharp?

  We are people. We are people and we have our own needs. We have our own goals and choosing, like choosing to dye our hair or get botox or, you know, get surgery, whatever it may mean. None of those things detract from the messages that we put out there. It doesn't detract from the way we feel about ourselves. It doesn't mean that we hate ourselves.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  No.

• 40:31Abbey Sharp?

  Doesn't mean that we're giving into the patriarchy. It doesn't mean any of those things.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:35Abbey Sharp?

  People, when they say that, that's their projection.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:38Abbey Sharp?

  That's the way that, that, that's their um, kind of uh, way of, of evaluating those choices. And it says a lot more about them than it does about us. Um, and so when I saw, for example, like Lizzo, who, you know, was forever just seen as the body positive uh, kind of poster child. She didn't choose that. She did not choose that title. She didn't walk around like labeling herself.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  But she showed up for herself and, and every size that she's been. And I, and I think that that's something that was really incredible.

• 41:07Abbey Sharp?

  Exactly. But she got torn apart when she did lose weight because again.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  She got torn apart for being big and small.

• 41:13Abbey Sharp?

  And small, right. She, she kind of broke that, that image, that brand, uh, kind of a um, promise that she made. And, and I've seen so many other creators um, really do their own life damage because for example, uh, there was a blogger that I interviewed a while ago, who was vegan for very long, even though built a whole following on being vegan, even though it was like literally killing her, like physically, it was not good for her body. But she was terrified of introducing meat into her diet because that would be co- counter to the brand that she had built for all these people.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  She's killing herself just to protect, yeah.

• 41:49Abbey Sharp?

  To protect a brand that doesn't actually align with her. And so I just want people to to know and to be more, you know, just a little more kind to creators who are going through their own changes and changing their opinions and their perspectives and their, you know, own, you know, learning, basically trying to learn as they go, both about the world, but also about themselves and their own needs, because it is ever changing. So just to have a little bit of grace as you move through the world and and and kind of watch and speak to and interact with creators online. This honestly, Sarah, this was such a fantastic conversation. I really appreciated this.

• 42:32Abbey Sharp?

  And of course, you had me over on your podcast, so I'll definitely be leaving a link to that in the show notes. And also we'll be linking to where everybody else can find you at The Burns Papaya. So thank you so much again, Sarah. I loved this discussion and really I love all of Sarah's content. I mean, her willingness to step outside like social skinny talk norms and own her truth has been so healing for me and I'm sure for so many others. I just really admire how Sarah has opened her journal to let people in. And this conversation really got me thinking about my own relationship with vulnerability online.

• 43:14Abbey Sharp?

  You know, we live in a time where authenticity is currency. The internet tells us to just be real, but it rarely acknowledges that realness can actually be transactional and that vulnerability has in many ways become a performance metric. And that is very complicated, especially for those of us who work in spaces that are built on transparency and trust. You know, I think a lot about what it means to show up authentically without turning my whole life into an exhibit. And it is really a hard set of values to juggle. I have been very honest online about a lot of my own personal experiences with orthorexia.

• 43:59Abbey Sharp?

  IVF and infertility and breastfeeding struggles, anxiety, ADHD, SIBO, IBS, hair loss, all the things. I mean, it's kind of depressing shit. But you know, over the years, I have been asked tirelessly by brands and managers, agencies, collaborators, and of course, you, to share more of my life. I have been told to film like all of my meals before I eat them so that people can see what a dietitian actually eats and to whip out a camera when I'm like managing a major business crisis because founder content is just like so in right now and to vlog all my trips with my kids to make me more relatable, more likable to all the moms, et cetera.

• 44:40Abbey Sharp?

  But the truth is, the thought of my real life and work life becoming any more intimately intermeshed is so anxiety provoking to me. It is overwhelming, especially when it comes to my family. Like, I don't want my children's lives to become part of my professional story. I don't want to feel pressure to like prune or manipulate genuine experiences and stories to try to like fit them into some kind of neat and tidy TikTok clip. So, as Sarah described, creating boundaries to protect, you know, her mental health in this space, this has just become

• 45:24Abbey Sharp?

  a boundary that I have made that has allowed me to keep showing up online. And yes, it is meant that I've had to say no to a lot of opportunities and lots of reach and growth that may come with them. But it's also meant saying yes to quiet mornings without cameras and to conversations that don't become captions and really just to preserving a part of my life that belongs only to us. And that is invaluable to me. I feel like there's this myth that authenticity means like putting all of your cards on the table to just like showing everything in excruciating detail. But to me, I really think that too.

• 46:09Abbey Sharp?

  Authenticity comes from discernment, from recognizing where your story ends and where someone else's begins. And I think that's what makes conversations like this so valuable, is that they remind us that there isn't one right way to be authentic. Whether you choose to share everything or keep certain parts sacred, both choices can come from a place of self-care. But on that note, that is all that I have for you guys today. A huge thank you again to Sarah Nicole for this incredible conversation. I really, really, really loved it. And a reminder that we are weeks away from the launch of the Hunger Crushing Combo Method. And if you preorder now, you're going to get my free

• 46:54Abbey Sharp?

  Hunger Crushing Combo Holiday Survival Guide. So definitely check out the links in the show notes on How to Redeem. Signing off with Science and SaaS, I'm Abbey Sharp. Thanks for listening.