Wellness Equals #Empowerment.. Right? - with Kaila Tova

You'd assume that the trend of women dropping out of the workforce to pursue online brands is a good thing. After all, what's more inspiring than a person taking charge of their own path?

But as Kaila Tova tells us, this trend is not always necessarily positive. In fact, it's demonstrative of issues that are much bigger than any individual. Plus when online brands are related to health or wellness - things can get a little scary.

Topics include: neoliberalism, feminism, self branding, collectivism, #empowerment and more.

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Show-notes:

To find out more about Kaila's (amazing) podcast, visit the Your Body, Your Brand website and follow on Instagram

Connect with Kaila directly on Twitter, Instagram or by visiting her website.

Learn about fat acceptance and health at every size:

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Podcast Transcription:

Lucy O’Connor: Hey, it’s me Lucy and I’ve just finished my second coffee, so I’m feeling very energized and excited, but I wanted to jump in and say that after months of production it’s so cool to be sharing the first episode of Selfie Reflective that features an interview! Today’s conversation is with a person who launched a 15 episode podcast that I listened to in under a week because, in light of Monday Hustle but also as someone who identifies as a woman, the content of this podcast challenged and resonated with me so much. 

    Regardless of your gender identity, however, I know that you’re going to find some value in this podcast because wellness and wellness culture is something that affects us all. And the more that we can identify the issues, the better the chance we have of improving the landscape. 

    When the host of this podcast agreed to be interviewed I shat myself because after discovering her work she had quickly become an idol of mine and it’s a very scary thing to be sitting down to chat with one of your idols. Imposter Syndrome galore! However, I love how this interview has turned out. Are you ready to uncover some uncomfortable truths about health and wellness entrepreneurship and online brands? Then strap yourself in because we’re about to get Selfie Reflective and episode one is just the beginning. 

[Music plays] [Introduction]

    Trigger warning: This episode of Selfie Reflective discusses eating disorders. 

    You don’t have to look too far in your network to find that person who quit their job to start an online brand. In fact, if you’re listening to this podcast then, hi, you know someone who did exactly that! Today’s guest is multifaceted creative Kaila Tova. Kaila is a PhD student at Wisconsin-Madison’s Communication Arts department, whose work is focused on the topics of rhetoric, politics and culture. 

    She’s an award winning burlesque dancer and drag artist and she’s also the host of Your Body, Your Brand. And it’s this work that brought Kaila and I into the same sphere. The Your Body, Your Brand podcast is a 15 part audio documentary hosted by Kaila that unpacks marketing literacy, neoliberal feminism and identity economics in the context of health and fitness entrepreneurship. 

    Let’s break that down a little. You know that influencer, coach or personal trainer you follow on social media? The one who quit their job to pursue their online brand in the area of health, wellness or fitness? That one who swears by the latest diet or exercise trend? The one who showcases their skin, their body or their transformation as a way to try to get you on the bandwagon as well?

    Your Body, Your Brand explores and unpacks the social, societal and economic influences that encourage people who identify as women to not just choose this path for themselves, but compel other women to follow, like and envy that lifestyle. And sometimes even pay for the right to be on a similar path. Why is Kaila so interested in this topic? Well, Kaila has recovered from anorexia, exercise addiction and orthorexia, which is obsessive behaviour in relation to the pursuit of a ‘healthy’ diet. 

    She has been a body builder, pursued personal training and after recovering from her disordered eating behaviours, ran her own coaching practice as a body image coach for women recovering from disordered eating. In the last decade Kaila started to notice this trend of women dropping out of the workforce to pursue brands and coaching practices of their own, a lot of which were also related to health, wellness, body image and fitness. 

    She started asking questions. Why are women, a lot of whom are already on admirable career trajectories compelled to start online brands that involve striving for a certain body image? Why are these women conflating their worth with how their bodies look? Why are women leaving careers to package and sell sometimes quite backwards ideas of health and wellness to other women? 

    On this episode Kaila shares her professional and personal experiences and some of the things she’s learnt through Your Body, Your Brand. We cover why self-branding is something that women have always felt pressured to do, even before Instagram. Why the wellness world is kind of broken. Why marketing wellness and dieting can be a form of violence. Why hashtag empowerment is problematic, and more. Enjoy the show.   

[Interview begins]

Kaila Tova, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. 

Kaila Tova:    Thank you so much, thank you for having me. 

Lucy:     So, what are some of the elements that persuade women to drop out of the workforce and pursue online brands? 

Kaila:    So, there’s a couple of different trajectories that lead towards, you know, flipping a table and starting your own brand, right? There’s the part of it where I think just the business world in general was not built by or for women.. And it’s not always friendly to things that people who are socialised as women, necessarily thrive in or care about. Which is not to say that only women, you know, care about care work and only men care about like finance or whatever, that’s, I don’t mean to be essentialist in any of my answers. 

    However, there are certain kinds of people who don’t thrive in offices and those people are also probably the same kind of like Type A, you know, entrepreneurial people who have spent their whole lives being told that they’re gonna be something special and they have some kind of purpose in the world and all they need is like the right job and they’re gonna make an impact and then they get, and they sit and they’re answering emails and then the boss is mean and the co-workers are boring and there’s no purpose to their day. 

    And they just go, why am I here? Right? I went through this myself. So yeah, so there’s that, right, there’s the purposelessness, there’s the sense of like, I could be doing bigger things.

And then.. So there’s this thing called neoliberalism. Essentially there is a mindset that we, probably like from Gen X all the way down to whoever is coming up now, right. Like we have grown up in this world that is like you know, entrepreneurial, every man for himself and I use that phrase very specifically, right? {Laughter]

    And it’s only accelerated itself in the last few years, right? This sense that like we’re all accountable and we are countable as well, right? Like every single person is some kind of self-entrepreneur and the internet has completely exploded that and expanded it and made it into almost an imperative. 

Lucy (thinks aloud):    I remember totally feeling these things at my workplace. That sense of purposelessness, that there’s got to be something more. And after I launched my first blog post, the feedback told me that people were listening. That this dissatisfaction was widely felt, mostly by other women and that complete strangers were supportive of my decision. Here’s one of the messages I received after launching my first blog post. 

    ‘I love what you’re doing here, just wanted to let you know that I’ve also quit my job and am facing fun-employment. I find this blog so utterly inspiring and uplifting.’ 

    These types of messages gave me a sense of purpose, like what I was doing mattered in a way that I’d never felt in any workplace. It also made me feel immediately accountable for continuing to document my journey because the messages seemed to be impacting people in the real world. As for the money aspect, I can’t say I had a huge amount of business savvy when I left my job. 

    I was looking for opportunities, not for money to come directly through Monday Hustle. But the further along the journey I got, the more I felt the pressure to monetise. All the popular marketing rhetoric told me that to be considered successful, my platform needed to operate as a business. Those close to me would ask about how Monday Hustle makes money, which made me feel embarrassed and that it wasn’t. 

    I also followed a bunch of women who were making money through a combination of the self-branded products and service offerings and seeing this made me feel less than. I felt a deep shame that I hadn’t considered how my passion project could be monetised. And as this individual entitled mindset festered, I started to believe that it had to make money in order to be worth my time. 

    I considered selling tote bags and branded clothing. I considered packing up some courses. I even went as far as becoming a qualified life coach! Didn’t know that did you? [Laughs] But pursuing these things just never felt right for me. 

    As you’ll know from the introduction, Kaila has spent a lot of time building her brands on the internet. But even before she had an official brand it felt like she was operating as one and this is something I feel we can all relate to. 

Kaila:    I’ve been on Facebook since the year after Facebook came out, for example, right? So I have been engaging in this process of iteration, of branding, of self-making, of self-presenting. Before that I was on Myspace, before that I was on LiveJournal and the entire time I was being asked to choose user names and to think about myself as this distinct, quantifiable being that could be consumed by other people. 

    And to make specific, deliberate choices about the photos that I share or the captions that I share, or the way in which I speak or write, or present myself. 

Lucy (thinks aloud):     Kaila’s podcast introduced me to an idea that the female gendered body has always been a brand. Something that can be bought, sold, used and valued, and that we kind of still suffer a hangover from the days when women were only worth as much as our bodies. 

Kaila:    Thinking about women in a patriarchal society, and again, this is referring mostly to cisgender women but, you know, women are valued for their ability to either do reproductive labour, right, to raise the children of the world. They’re valued for their sexual abilities, so from prostitute all the way up to princess, right? But women are usually collateral, right? It’s really only in recent history that we see women finding value outside of their body, as a part of the ‘workforce,’ as a part of the productive workforce, right? 

    When we’re talking about women as brands.. Women have had to, in order to attain any kind of middle-class comfort, or prior to 20th century America, in order to obtain, you know, gentrified life, if you will, have had to present themselves in a certain way in order to be valued. 

    So essentially what happens when women are then presented with the opportunity to brand themselves on social media, it’s something that.. It’s not that it comes naturally because again, not essential, but it is something that we have been socialised to do for so long that when a person identifies as a woman, and this is their reference point for what a woman is, right, it’s presenting the best version of themself for validation from potential sexual mates, or potential bosses, or potential whatever, it’s just, it’s a natural kind of fit. 

Lucy (thinks aloud):    Kaila’s professional reference point and the main focus in her podcast, Your Body, Your Brand, is health and wellness. Despite being exposed to a lot of this type of material, that’s not an area that I’m overly familiar with. So how has branding yourself and building a business in the health and wellness space different from others? 

Kaila:    Oh, it’s interesting though, is that this kind of self-valuing isn’t about mating. It’s about presenting one’s self to be seen by other women, which is what I find interesting about the turn to social media. And about this brand as a person who was marketing specifically to women about like, eating disorder recovery and Paleo diets and lord only knows what else. 

    But you know, the whole purpose was to be seen and valued by other women. But at the same time it was also exploitative of other women, which I don’t think I realised, right? Even as I was attempting to help and inspire and change and you know, build this army of strong, bad-ass babes or whatever, I was also asking them to pay for my lifestyle, often at prices much higher than they would have gotten if they’d gone to a therapist on their insurance plan, in order to help them get to a place where they could kind of like self-brand as well. 

Lucy:     Yeah. 

Kaila:    And then there’s the health and wellness side of things, right? Like I believe that a lot of people care about caring. Um, I believe that genuinely a lot of people who into like the health and wellness world, or even in like, into any kind of job where they feel like they’re inspiring, uplifting, empowering, whatever, I believe that people genuinely care about caring. And care work in our society doesn’t make money. 

    It does not. If you want to be a therapist or a social worker or a teacher, if you wanna do any kind of job where you have to like hands on care about other people, society is like, yeah, but what does that do for the stock market? [Laughs] You know? 

Lucy:    Ooh, ouch!

Kaila:    [Laughter] Yeah, so then you’re presented with the opportunity that make millions quickly online or whatever, monetise your brand, and you go, well, you know, I could go back to school and get my certificate in teaching, or I could become a therapist, or I could go on Instagram today, pick a palette and start inspiring like two minutes later. 

And then I can just put up a Patreon link, or I can, you know, joint a coaching program to build a coaching program, which, fun fact, when you join a coaching program to build a coaching program, the reason those coaches are making money is not because they’ve actually like figured out the thing they’re coaching, they’re just coaching coaches. 

Lucy:     Wow! 

Kaila:    Yeah, if you’re selling business, you make money. If you’re selling anything else, you don’t, but anyway. So the wellness world is so broken, um, because it really is not about being well, at all. Um, for the kind of person who has the resources to access the wellness world, right, um, which is a very specific lifestyle in which one purchases uh, everything from coaching programs and like you know, you can get to the spin class or you can do the, you can do the juice cleanse or whatever, right. 

    To have that kind of privilege um, it’s all more about, I think, class really, than it is about actual health or wellness [laughs], to be honest. Um, and so the problem with marketing that, especially if you, first and foremost, if you yourself are going down that rabbit hole in order to be that brand, right, um, it becomes uh, obsessive, aspirational, um, almost like a prison. 

    In the podcast I actually interviewed this incredible woman named Brenda Swan, with whom I actually did a coaching course. Now, we did the Institute for Integrated Nutrition together and we met on one of the coaching calls. And we stayed in touch and then a couple of years later she told me this story of what happened when she tried to brand herself, right? 

    She ended up beyond spending hundreds of thousands or, I guess, thousands of dollars, I don’t know if it was hundreds of thousands, but she spent thousands of dollars. She um, ate into her own actual business that she was running. She destroyed a relationship because she couldn’t be seen in public eating the wrong foods or, you know, she had to always be on brand in case people were watching. 

    Um, there was like a sense of like self-hypervigilance, right, that was happening. She was constantly um, monitoring herself to make sure that she was saleable, um, at all times. Um, and it became almost like an addiction, um, where she was seeking validation and asking for more and more, um, people to like her and subscribe and comment, and not getting anywhere. 

    So she was digging herself into a hole in order to prove that she was this person that she wanted to sell and all it was doing was ruining her life [laughs], you know? Now everyone is not gonna have the same experience as Brenda, of course, right? I can say personally I lost uh, almost $20,000 trying to become a coach. I know that my business transitioned into a hobby because I lost a lot of money. 

    For the people who are watching, they are also only seeing the part that looks good, right? The part that looks aspirational. And what they’re being told, what the rhetoric, the visual rhetoric, the actual comments and you know, the text that you share, all of that rhetoric, what that’s doing is painting a picture of a world that doesn’t actually exist. That all you can do is continue to aspire to and never actually reach. 

    Beyond being a huge drain on one’s bank account, it can be anxiety producing. It can lead to incredibly damaging behaviours. And it can actually eat into your actual health and wellness. 

Lucy (thinks aloud):    As I said, I wasn’t in the health and wellness world directly, but being online in itself definitely ate into my health and wellness. I was thinking in content about how my life could be packaged into something shareable and while I’m sure that some people can genuinely separate their actual lives from social media, the lines for me became too blurred and my mental health suffered. 

    But my content wasn’t tied to a body ideal, or a diet plan and this might have been lucky for me. Kaila shed some light as to why. And trigger warning, this is the part where we talk about eating disorders. 

Kaila:    You know, I can say, for example, I know in the health and wellness world there is a huge, huge, huge unspoken about prevalence of people with eating disorders who are not fully recovered, or who are not recovered at all, who are marketing health and wellness to people who don’t have eating disorders. And they’re teaching people how to be disordered eaters. But, because they look a certain way or they have the right brand or they’ve got into the game early enough or their blog is interesting, people follow them and treat them like experts, and treat them like people to aspire to become. 

    Which is not to say that disordered eating and eating disorders are the same thing, however, there’s a huge preponderance of body image coaches who are now teaching people how to not have disordered relationships with food. So there’s clearly something going on, right? Like we don’t learn all of this in a bubble and it’s not just because everyone read Cosmopolitan in 2004.

    I do believe that there is something like serious that’s happening when we try to mirror this aspirational thing that looks really great, but we don’t actually know what that rhetoric is saying. Or what is underneath it, where the motivation is. 

Lucy:     I kind of worry about the fact that this is so prevalent across social media for young girls who are not just confined to one Cosmopolitan magazine every month. They see it all day, every day, from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep. It’s the last thing they look at, are these really potent images of lifestyle and body and that in turn being valued. And I am hugely worried about youth in that space. 

Kaila:    You know, I know they keep saying that kids are all right, but I’ve seen some TikTok videos, and I’m not sure they are. You know, I really worry, not just about the kids, but about the people who are raising them or the people who are uh, around them, myself included, right. Because we exist in this neoliberal mindset that does value attention and visibility and entrepreneurship and constantly having to self-brand, I don’t think there’s anybody out there who is willing to say this is maybe bad, in general. 

    Not just for women, I’m thinking for people of all genders, right, um, not just for middle-class people, but for people across all classes, right? I don’t think this mindset is very healthy. So, the problem is, they’re growing up in this world where they think that the key to making any kind of change, the key to getting anywhere in their lives is to become singularly visible. 

    And they’re learning the tricks of the trade at a very young age and many of them are being fabulously rewarded for it. But also, you know, rates of depression and anxiety are going up. From watching just the world as presented to me by social media, which who knows, could all be fake, right? It seems like the kids are not all right. And it seems like they’re being taught by, I know from my generation that the only way to get anything is to vote with your dollars and to be seen. 

Lucy (thinks aloud):    Something that really stuck with me after listening to Your Body, Your Brand was this idea that diet culture can be a form of violence. If you’re eating restrictively, or exercising obsessively in order to attain or maintain a certain body ideal, this is incredibly damaging. We might have called this diet culture 10 years ago, but today it might be dressed up as wellness or fitness. 

    And marketing this type of lifestyle as a form of violence seems kind of extreme. But when Kaila broke it down it made sense and it also made me incredibly sad. 

Kaila:    When you are inflicting a diet upon yourself, right, or a punishing exercise regime, when you are participating in experimental supplementation in order to change your body so that it fits an ideal, it is itself either self-violence, right? You’re making this choice to change who you are, to fit an ideal, or you’re doing so in reaction to some kind of messaging that has told you you are not good enough. That has told you that you do not fit in this world. 

    I think Melissa Toler really sums it up beautifully in the podcast when she talks about, especially the disciplining of non-white, non-thin, uh, non-young bodies, right? Um, but even thin, white, young people are engaging in a similar self-disciplining in order to avoid being uh, seen as any kind of deviation from the norm. 

    And when I say the ‘norm,’ it’s not the norm; it’s just the norm that we have kind of idealised as a norm. In my own personal journey, right, like I’m still a thin, uh, white, I say woman because it’s how I exist in the world, but like in the last couple of years, like I have noticed that even calling myself a woman is like a form of self-violence. Um, I don’t fit into a lot of the boxes and trying to make myself into a woman the way that I saw cisgender women existing in the world, um, heterosexual, cisgender women, you know, I know that a lot of the things that I participated in, including extreme dieting and extreme exercise, were a way of keeping the parts of myself that were, you know, that were not the ‘norm.’

    Keeping them from coming to the surface so that I would not be seen as bad or wrong or different. Something that I really hope to dive deeper into and give voice to in future seasons of the podcast, when I see, especially non-white women, especially older women, especially queer women, um, especially trans men, etc, like even if you look at the cisgender gay male community, it is terrifying what they do to their bodies in order to live up to some kind of visual ideal, right? 

    I wanna talk to people who experience this self-violence, right, in order to change who they are, to appear successful and aspirational and authentic, even as what they are doing is literally potentially been hurting themselves [laughs]. I’ve done years of armchair research on this, um, but there, I really encourage people to go out and read like every book on Health At Every Size and try to understand, uh, and fat acceptance as well, and try to understand how the constant cycle of dieting is the thing that actually injures people, it’s not fatness. 

    It’s something that is the damaging thing, right? And honestly, and this breaks my heart, but so many of the young, thin, cisgender, white women who came to me in eating disorder recovery, or disordered eating recovery because they had never been diagnosed, were like suffering from things like hypervolemic amenorrhea, right, which is not getting their periods, um, and they didn’t know why. 

    And it was because even though they were following all the wellness things and eating ‘healthy,’ they were under eating and over exercising to manage and discipline their bodies to the point where their hormones stopped working, right? 

    But from all accounts they ‘looked healthy,’ and I think there are more and more conversations being had at both the institutional and the anecdotal level where people are trying to understand how the constant need to present as well is in itself a disciplinary tool that does not actually do the work of wellness, but rather does a lot of reifying like privilege and class and whiteness. 

Lucy (thinks aloud):     If you’re sitting there and questioning your relationship to wellness, food and exercise in regards to the way that your body looks, you’re not alone. Hearing Kaila talk about this made me question basically everything I do and why I do it, as it relates to diet, exercise and also my own privilege. Given the societal structures we exist in and how we are still, on many levels, valued as women for the way that we appear and perform, I feel like this journey is lifelong. 

    I’ve also taken Kaila’s advice and have started to listen to podcasts and read articles about fat acceptance and Health At Every Size and it’s assisting my journey in understanding the landscape we live in. I’ve added a couple of my favourite entry level pieces of content about this in the show notes in case you’d like to do the same. 

    Kaila’s podcast also talks about the term ‘empowerment’ and why this can be problematic when it relates to something that a woman has done, or the way that a woman looks.

Kaila:    So, we use the term ‘empowerment,’ it used to mean something about community, economic, like uh, I don’t want to use empowerment in the definition of itself, but the ability of a community to rise up. And so the way that it’s being used in modern feminism is it’s this weird individual boss babe thing, but basically what it does is it’s like well, I have taken my life, my wellness, my economic situation, I have taken all of these things into my own hands and I have pulled myself up by the bootstraps and I have become empowered, right?

    It’s this word that seems to mean something but doesn’t really, right? It’s this thing where it’s like, I feel empowered because I got what I wanted. Or I’m seeking empowerment because I wanna get what I want. So, you know, it is aligned with understanding systematic inequality and working towards a world in which the systems get fixed, not about individuals who lean in hard enough, right? 

    Finding ways to prop themselves up higher and higher, um, it’s about actually working towards systemic equity, um, which doesn’t always look like me doing more reps at the gym or getting another job. You know, empowerment has become tied to things like um, getting uh, a promotion at work or building your own business. Empowerment has come to mean this thing about that you accomplish, so when you accomplish a thing, you then say, “Well, that made me empowered.”

    Now just because you accomplish a thing doesn’t mean all accomplishments are equally good, right? Losing a ton of weight through restrictive diet and a punishing exercise regime isn’t necessarily something to celebrate. So when we put things that are cosmetic or uh, tied to our physical you know, our physical presentation in the world, when we tie all of that into this message of feminism and empowerment and girl power, it stops seeming like it could be an issue and you can’t make an argument against it because feminism is therefore absolutely, like there’s like an absolute value on it, right? 

    And all feminism, all things that I call feminism are good, right, because somehow empowerment. Um, but that’s not the case. One of the reasons why I quit coaching was because I was tired of talking about eating disorders. So, I had become the Paleo eating disorder recovery person, right? 

    And people came to my blog to find out about Paleo eating disorder recovery, which meant people also when they come to see you as a brand, expect you to provide them with the services or the goods that a brand would provide them. So if they see you as the Paleo eating disorder recovery girl, right, then they’re going to go to that website and be like, okay, well I’m expecting Paleo eating disorder recovery and I know that the posts come out every Monday and if I don’t get one on Monday, I’m mad, right? 

    So I, for probably about a year after I was, first of all not Paleo and second of all, done with eating disorder recovery conversations, was still writing about it because I had an audience to which I felt accountable. When you’re a one person show who is the brand and the brand is built around this unflagging, unchanging thing that you have decided you are, when your life changes, but your brand can’t, what happens? 

    I had to make that decision to get out of selling eating disorder recovery because I needed to recover from my eating disorder, right? Like I needed to be done with it, I needed to put it behind me and not be talking about it and thinking about and engaging with it all the time. 

Lucy:    Yes. 

Kaila:    I think so much of the inspirational TED Talk language that exists around personal branding and like professional branding and professional, you know, achievement, so much of it is just telling us that it’s about like, it’s you, you, you. All that matters is you and your development and who you are and it doesn’t matter what you’re selling as long as it’s you. It’s like, argh, I don’t know. I mean what if it wasn’t about me? 

Lucy:     So can actual empowerment happen on social media? Is self-help and just being aware of this stuff enough to change the landscape?

Kaila:    I mean it’s really hard, it’s really hard because I don’t think the conditions are such that it’s something we can do alone, right? I think systemically something needs to change and you know, you mentioned self-work, right -

Lucy:    Yeah. 

Kaila:    Like be like just do self-work and like figure it out and I think yes and no, right? Like there’s a real soul searching that does need to happen before systemic change can happen, right, because you do have to change your mindset. I think this has to happen outside of the frame of social media. It has to happen collectively. Um, and I don’t think a lot of people are interested in that. 

    So this podcast and also all of the things that I talk about, none of this is meant to punish people individually for the choices that they’ve made because I do believe that we get to where we are in life not just because we’ve, you know, divinely chosen it, but there are a ton of systematic forces that socialise us and lead us to make certain choices 

    So I think there are people who are out there doing their best to make it right. But if you’re somebody who is like, oh, wait, I didn’t, what? [Laughs] Right, this is the first time you’re thinking about this, um, and now you’re going, oh my god, now I have to start a brand about feminism. Just take a breath, slow down. I think it’s just thinking about ways to work within the system, to reduce harm, to both others and yourself. 

    Um, to challenge brand thinking and to find people to work with. I do believe that there is some hope in collectivism and that sucks because you know what? Collectivism means that maybe your name isn’t gonna be the top of the marquee. But I do believe that there’s hope there. Um, and I do believe that by having these kinds of conversations and sharing our puzzle pieces with one another and not just thinking about how we’re going to message this to our email list to save face, I feel like that’s where we start. 

    Not to get coached, not to coach other people, but to just listen, to ask questions and to seek answers. 

Lucy:     Kaila Tova, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and thank you for all the incredible work you have done with Your Body, Your Brand. 

Kaila:    Yeah, thank you [laughs]. 

Lucy [Outro]:  Today’s episode of Selfie Reflective touches on just a few of the things that Kaila’s 15 episode podcast series covers. Listening to Your Body, Your Brand gave me so many tools to unpack my relationship to Monday Hustle, health and wellness, online brands and to be completely honest, the whole world in general. It sounds extreme, but it’s not! [Laughs]

    I encourage you all to have a listen, it’s jam packed of mindblowing stuff. You can find links to Kaila’s platforms and the Your Body, Your Brand podcast in the show notes and if this podcast was in any way triggering for you, I’ve also left some links to mental health support in the show notes too. 

    I’d like to give a shout out and thank feminist marketer, Kelly Diels for pointing me towards Kaila’s work. If you have any questions, feedback or recommendations for this podcast, I’m so excited to hear all of the things. Please get in touch by emailing selfiereflective@gmail.com, or find me on Facebook or Instagram @selfiereflective, all one word. 

    If you enjoyed this podcast and are excited to see where it goes next, feel free to hit ‘subscribe’ and share it with your friends. Episodes come out every Tuesday, but the prologue and episode two are currently also live. I’m Lucy O, thank you so much for listening. 

    The Selfie Reflective podcast is hosted, produced and edited by me, Lucy O’Connor, final episode audio is finessed by Tom Frankish. 

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Lucy O'Connor