Supporting Young People With Body Image and Navigating the Digital World with Natasha Devon MBE

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Body Image & Navigating the Digital World

Speaker 1  0:09 

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the JenUp podcast. So if you’re struggling with an eating disorder and feeling lost, you’ve come to the right place. So both myself and Becky stone are former sufferers of eating disorders, and we understand the challenge that challenges that you’re facing. So join us for inspiring, educational and relatable content, whether you’re seeking support, guidance or just someone who understands we’re here for you. So today, we have Natasha Devon MBE on the show. Today, she is a writer, broadcaster and mental health campaigner. Um, since 2008 she’s visited schools and global events to speak on mental health, body image and gender equality. So she co founded where’s your head at and launched the mental health media charter to improve media portrayals of mental health. Natasha hosts a weekly show on LBC and the New Beginnings podcast for bet no more. She has also written both fiction and non fiction books, including a Beginner’s Guide to Being mental and clicks. Her debut novel toxic was shortlisted for the diverse books, awards in 2023 she’s an ambassador for glitch UK, a patron of no panic and a fellow of the University of Wales. In 2024 she was named one of the UK’s most influential queer women by Diva and pride. So thank you so much Natasha for coming on the podcast, and I hope I got that all right in your bio.

Speaker 2  1:44 

You absolutely did. Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 1  1:48 

Yeah, no, thank you for coming on. And unfortunately, just to say, Becky has can come today due to unforeseen circumstances. So it’s just myself and Natasha and we both met at Westminster insight, at a mental health conference for schools, which was thoroughly enjoyable. And you know, you made some great points there to all the teachers that they could take away with them. And I feel that leads perfectly onto my question around, you know, telling us about what you do to support young people and their mental health as well in schools.

Speaker 2  2:23 

So the way that I work is I do focus groups in schools with 14 to 18 year olds, and I ask them to reflect on their PSHE or PSE, which is personal health and social education. And that covers a lot that is everything from how to budget to there’s elements of sex and relationship education in there, to drug awareness, to learning about things like depression and anxiety. So I asked them to reflect on if there was a lesson that was missing that they wish they’d had, or if there was stuff that they were taught about that maybe they wish it had been approached in a slightly different way, and then, based on their feedback, I work with experts in neuroscience and psychology, and I come up with lesson plans and the lessons that I deliver, and I also share the lesson plans with charities as well. It’s not so much about mental illness, it’s sort of mental illness adjacent so it’s it’s things like body image and social media and exam stress, these everyday mental health challenges that most people experience to get them thinking about the fact that everyone has a brain, you know, and and your mental health is something that you can nurture and monitor in just the same way as we learn to do with our physical

Speaker 1  3:42 

health? Yeah, no, definitely. I can see a lot of young the students, struggling a lot with exams. There’s a lot of exams stress. They get really stressed about that, don’t they?

Speaker 2  3:51 

So, yeah, they do and and I think a lot of the time it’s a kind of symbol of the broader pressure that they’re under. And a lot of people misunderstand this, that the world is a lot kind of harsher and more competitive and individualistic than it was generations hence. So often, when a young person says, I’m so stressed out about my exams, they don’t actually mean the exam itself. They mean everything that it represents in the kind of context of their

Speaker 1  4:20 

life. Yeah. Would you say that? Like, you know, I see this a lot in schools, like, we’re more, you know, competing with each other now, rather than lifting each other up or Praising others, there’s always, like, the art of comparing going on. There’s increased competition. Would you say that’s right?

Speaker 2  4:37 

Yeah, I think it’s Michael Gove’s education reforms from 2010 onwards, really have a lot to answer for because what they did was they made everything more exam focused. They took away a lot of the coursework elements in a lot of subjects, and then you had people like the the behaviours are Tom Bennett saying, oh, you know, group. Work is just teachers being lazy, you know. So the kind of elements of collaboration were devalued and sort of labelled as soft skills, and it all just became about the individual’s ability to perform in an exam, really. And yeah, I think in a in that context, then everything is a bit more competitive, maybe, than it used to be.

Speaker 1  5:21 

Yeah, no, that’s really good answer. Thank you for that, because I do see that a lot, and I think that it’s, I think that we do need to live, you know, and kind of lift each other up, you know, and kind of complement each other better. And I think that that’s really good to like, promote and stuff in school as well. And, and this leads on to like, the next question of like, you know? Why? Why do you think? Obviously, we know there’s been a massive increase in young people suffering with their mental health and their body image. So why? Why do you think that has increased drastically?

Speaker 2  5:52 

I think it’s a number of different things. There’s definitely an element of, we’re more aware now of different mental health conditions, what the symptoms are, what they’re called, children have a better emotional vocabulary. So the example that I would always defer to, because it’s my life, is I’ve been having panic attacks since I was nine, but when I was nine, no one knew what a panic attack was, so my doctor diagnosed me with asthma and allergies and just literally everything apart from what it actually was, because panic attacks weren’t an option back then. And so, you know, to say that suddenly there’s this huge influx in mental illness, I don’t think, takes into account children like me, who couldn’t be part of the statistics at the time, because it wasn’t, you know, something that was really acknowledged in society. Having said that, I do also think that body image issues and mental illness are on the rise, and I think that’s a combination of neoliberalism, so just the society that young people grow up in they they’re kind of oscillating between too much connectedness that happens through the online experience of knowing everything and too much, and almost like an omniscience of seeing what their friends are doing all the time, and then just feeling utterly isolated and lonely and they never get To experience, or hardly ever get to experience. The in between point between those two things, which is community and community is absolutely essential for mental health. So I think there’s that. I think there’s the fact that lots of elements that we know support young people’s mental health suffered under austerity. So things like social services Sure Start sports, clubs, libraries, all those kind of community hubs have been taken away. And then I also think that technology, it plays a part in it. It’s just like social media isn’t a bad thing in of itself, and it shouldn’t be a bad thing. It’s just the fact that it has not been up until very recently. It’s not had any checks and balances put on it. And it’s we’ve just given young people this thing and let them go on with it. You know.

Speaker 1  8:14 

Yeah, no, no, I agree. I agree. I always when I chat to sort of young people, I say, what’s the one thing you think that’s harming your body image. And they say social media, the word they use, is toxic. It is toxic. Yeah.

Speaker 2  8:30 

And for every child that says social media has been harmful or toxic to my mental health and my body image, you’ll find another one who will say it’s plugged me into a community of people who are like me, who get me maybe if they’re disabled or neurodivergent or in some other minority in their school, and they can find other like minded people who share the same life experiences or even interests and passions, and they will describe it as a lifeline. And I just think it’s such a shame that we cannot give children and young people the benefits of social media without this massive side serving of you know at the same time.

Speaker 1  9:15 

Yeah, so would you say it’s giving them the tools on how to navigate social media in a healthy way, like getting them to like not taking them off it, or banning it, because I know Australia have put in a ban now social media. Would you say it’s giving them the tools to navigate in a healthy way?

Speaker 2  9:31 

Or, I mean, Australia’s social media ban does not include YouTube, which does make me think, Okay, what’s the point then? Okay, I don’t know if a ban is the way forward, to be honest, I definitely don’t think that primary school children should be given smartphones and access to social media. I don’t think there’s any reason for that, but I think with older young people, that doesn’t really make sense as a sentence with with a. Older teen, you know, teenagers. It’s got to be a combination of the two. It’s not either or so at the moment that we seem to be sort of fighting across these dividing lines of, should there be a ban, or should there not be a ban? I think it’s a combination of social media companies need to be much more accountable for what is being published on their platforms, and they need to understand that the consequences that arise with young people developing eating disorders LOOKING AT Pro suicide content, pro self harm content, they have to accept that that is their responsibility, and governments need to step up and rein in the tech oligarchs. At the same time, we also need to be giving young people in school the critical thinking and scientific literacy skills that they need to be able to navigate that world.

Speaker 1  10:53 

Yeah, yeah, no, I totally agree, because then they can understand and make informed choices about what’s good, what’s not good for me to watch on social media. I know TikTok has got a lot to answer for. They’re always and then I’ve always seen in the news sort of promoting harmful especially around eating disorder content. I do believe they have tried to regulate it a bit better, like the skinny top was trending, and now that’s been taken down. So that’s good, yeah.

Speaker 2  11:22 

I mean, it does feel slightly whack a mole, though their approach to it. And I just think the example I always think of right is so my friend, who is a trans man, posted a picture of himself topless, and the Instagram algorithm was sophisticated enough to identify his torso as, essentially as a female nipple, right? So, so on Instagram, if you’re a man, you can post a picture of yourself topless, but if you’re a woman, you cannot. So the algorithm identified him as having a female nipple and automatically took that picture down right. And I think if the algorithm is sophisticated enough to do that, it’s sophisticated enough to remove pro eating disorder content before 10s of 1000s of people see it.

Speaker 1  12:14 

I totally agree with that.

Speaker 1  12:16 

Yeah, it’s like, you just said it’s like, if it’s that sophisticated and that in depth, you know, it’s, it was, it’s going to be easy enough to ban, you know, harmful content. Um, that’s scary as well. Like, algorithms, how, you know how, how clever it is and how targeted it can be towards, like, promoting the marketing products to certain people, like,

Speaker 2  12:38 

when they care about it, it’s so sophisticated. You know, when it’s it’s either something that the people that own these platforms are deeply invested in, which, for some reason, they seem to be about, whose nipples get posted, but but also, you know, if they’re making money out of it, as you say with target advertising, it is really terrifying how sophisticated it is. So then when they hold their hands up and say, Well, you know, we’re not, we’re just hosting, and we can’t keep an eye on what everybody is publishing on our platforms, I just think that’s a cop out.

Speaker 1  13:14 

No, definitely this is going away from what I originally was going to ask, but I’m going to venture I do see so much skin care as well. Like, even just being marketed like tick tock, I’ve seen it, and just I haven’t even liked it or, like, it’s just been it’s just come my way. I mean, I’m on tick tock because I have my own platform. I tried to do good on there, but I have seen it. And even I’m like, Oh, my God, it’s made me so aware of, like, oh, you know, how’s my skin like I never, and I never used to think like that, like I just wanted your opinion on that, because I’ve seen young girls as young as 14, having skincare routines.

Speaker 2  13:50 

You know, yeah, that’s a huge thing. So as well as a very worrying kind of 90s esque trend for extreme thinness coming back, the other thing that I’ve noticed over the past, I’m going to say five years, are these skincare routines that I just think and they describe them as anti aging. So I’ll be talking to a 1314, year old girl, and she’s, she’s saying, I’m doing this anti aging skin care routine, and it will have 12 Steps to it. And I think I’m 44 I have like, I know you should probably tone, right, but I don’t. I never do. I never bother, because I don’t think a toner does anything that a splash of cold water wouldn’t do, right? So I cleanse and I moisturise. This is, this is how I look after my skin. I don’t understand beyond the kind of cleanse, tone and moisturise, what are the steps? There they are. And I’m looking at these girls and I’m thinking, This doesn’t seem like this is a fun it’s not like when, like, I would go to my friend’s house for a sleepover and we’d put a face back on, you know, for a laugh. This doesn’t seem like it’s relaxing for you. This seems like something that you feel that you have to do. Yeah. Yeah, and it’s taking up so much of their time and their money as well.

Speaker 1  15:06 

It’s costly. Yeah, yeah. I just wondered your opinion on it, because I’ve seen it come up a lot now it’s just worrying. And I’ve seen a couple of students sort of talk about it and say, and I never thought about that as a 14 year old, never, I was never concerned about my skin. That never even that thought, never even came into my brain at that age. Yeah.

Speaker 2  15:27 

I think the only people that that I remember at school ever thinking about their skin was if they had acne. Yeah. Other than that, it’s just not something that you and rightly so, because, you know, and unless you have teenage acne, your school, your skin is going to be as good as it’s ever going to be when you’re that age. And I just hope that they don’t look back on their life and regret the time and energy that they put into that. Yeah.

Speaker 1  15:53 

No, yeah, same, yeah. I mean, in what sort of this goes into, really well, into the question of, like, what sort of changes would you like to see in how mental health is taught in schools, on how, you know, should we be teaching students all this, what we’re talking about? How would what changes would you like to see, especially, you know, in schools?

Speaker 2  16:13 

Well, I think you can take the basic principles and then you can ask them and what you will recognise, because I hear a lot of educators say, oh, you know, I don’t understand young people now, the language that they’re using, that the things that they’re into, it’s so far removed from anything I understand. And I think to an extent, it was always that way, even though you know that the cultural icons, I guess, because in times past, everybody was watching TV, and now they’re all, you know, the people that are really famous, I don’t know who they are. For young people, as people got millions of followers online, and I could walk past them in the street and have no idea who they are. So that is a major difference. But in terms of the themes of what young people are experiencing. They’re exactly the same as when I was a teenager. You know? It’s it’s anxiety about, do I fit in? How do I compare to other people the decisions I’m making right now? What does it mean for the rest of my life? And it’s magnified to an extent by the the environment that they’re growing up in, but it’s not anything that I can’t relate to. So I think if you have the kind of solid principles of understanding how to help them manage anxiety and to think critically and scientifically about things, then you can kind of tailor it to where they want to go with it, and then it will feel very relevant to them.

Speaker 1  17:42 

Yeah, I do think they need to learn more about nutrition in schools as well. Like, would you agree? Like, taught nutrition to, like, help debunk these myths on social media that I see on kind of, oh, high protein, you know, all this, yeah, I see,

Speaker 2  17:56 

yeah, almost to kind of re simplify it for them. Yeah. They say this to them all the time. I’m like, it’s not actually that complicated to be healthy. It’s it’s boring and relentless. You know, you would not believe. I saw a meme the other day on social media, and I thought, I’ve never related to anything more where it says, I can’t believe how much effort it takes just to have a mid body and a reasonably tidy house, right? That’s adulting, isn’t it? Where it’s like, I can’t believe how much maintenance I have to put into just having sort of quite an average body and quite an average house. But you know, it’s, it’s actually not that complicated. It’s, you know, move when you can stay hydrated, eat your vegetables, get enough sleep, try not to overthink it, you know. And yet, there’s these kind of multi billion dollar industries that are dedicated to persuading them that it’s more complicated than that, because there’s so much money to be made. So yeah, I agree that in school, you could just kind of bring it back to the basic principles and go, as long as you’re doing these things, you’re probably alright.

Speaker 1  19:03 

Yeah.

Speaker 1  19:04 

I wonder if, like, all this sort of marketing can create a lot of things like health anxiety, kind of like the obsession with, like, being healthy.

Speaker 2  19:11 

Yeah, I’ll never forget I saw a lecture by Dr Susie Orbach who wrote fat as a feminist issue, and this was back in something like 2010 but she said, if somebody came into my office 30 years ago, when I first started practicing, practicing psychotherapy, and said, I have cut out an entire food group, not because I’m allergic to it, not because I’m a vegetarian, but because I think that I have to do that For my weight and my health, I would have diagnosed them with a serious eating disorder at that time. And then she was saying, you know, now that’s something that is advocated in women’s magazines, because it was still a time when we had the kind of hangover of Atkins, you know, where everybody was trying to cut out carbohydrate carbohydrates. And now I think. You know, there’s that orthorexia, which is an obsession with wellness and health. I think, like the majority of the population, have that, and 20 years ago, we would have diagnosed them with that.

Speaker 1  20:10 

Yeah, I agree. I think orthorex is on the rise. I definitely do. I hear a lot of hear it from schools as well, especially in boys and as well, I don’t know, I don’t think we talk about that enough as well. Like, yeah, with orthorexia, like, I think TikTok has got to as added to that. And like, social media kind of promoting things like lemon water in the morning to do this, or having a supplement, you know, got things like collagen, you’ve got, like, all these sort of powders, and it’s in all these clean diets, I do think that there’s, there’s so much information and people don’t know what to do with it. And again, this kind of eating clean health anxiety, vicious circle. And it’s interesting, you said that, because I’m seeing it a lot as well. So and also

Speaker 2  20:58 

this rise in this is it’s interesting because it’s happening concurrent with this rise in natural is best, which a lot of people have taken way too far to the extent that they, you know, won’t take a paracetamol because of Big Pharma, and they’ll go, Well, you know, back in the day, we didn’t have this medicine, and people were fine. And I’m like, well, first of all, that’s not true. People died when they’re about 30. You know, infant mortality rate was really high back in the day. Yeah, talking of all, didn’t have collagen or creatine back in the day either. It’s like, pick a lane, you know?

Speaker 1  21:35 

Yeah, no, I agree. And I mean, talking about that, what’s your obviously, I’m going to mention weight loss drugs, because I want to talk about that. I have massive concerns, you know, around that. And so my question for that is, is that, you know, do you think weight loss drugs are going to affect people’s relationship with their food and their body image?

Speaker 2  21:59 

I think these weight loss drugs, I’m so concerned with the way that the health secretary is talking about them, and the way that they’re being used. And don’t get me wrong if, if somebody is very obese has a diagnosed food addiction, has type two diabetes, I believe that they can be incredibly helpful, but that’s often not how they’re being used, and particularly in celebrities and influencers. The people that young people look up to, these are people who are not even slightly overweight to begin with, who are using it to attain a very unrealistically slender aesthetic. And my my concern about it is that we seem to have forgotten that, you know, if you’re addicted to alcohol, you can live without alcohol. You know you can go you can get clean and you can be dry. If you’re addicted to drugs, same thing smoking, the same thing, you need to eat. And I don’t hear any kind of acknowledgement of that that, you know, completely taking away any desire for food in people.

Speaker 2  23:11 

People are gonna end up malnourished, and I just think that we’ve demonised food to such a harmful, worrying extent, because the government and the Public Health England and the NHS and the media are obsessed with obesity and have oversimplified a lot of the health messaging around obesity as well, to the extent that, you know, people think that they can make these kind of big, sweeping assumptions about your lifestyle based purely on your weight, and it’s such an unhealthy mindset. I’m really, really worried about it.

Speaker 1  23:52 

Yeah, no, I’m really, it’s, I totally agree with what you’re saying, and I’m, I’m really concerned about it as well. I’ve seen, I mean, I have seen celebrities open up, but I’m not so sure. It’s Kate Moss’s sister. She opened up about how she took a weight loss drug and then she ended up in hospital. I was watching a little one of her videos, and like social media, and it’s good that she spoke about that, and she warned young people, anyone like don’t take it unless you’re obviously a BMI 30 above. She’s a classic example of someone who is really unwell from it and got it illegally. Yeah, yeah. And that that concerns me, like, if they because what I’ve seen is, is that people have gone on it, and then they’ve copied and then I’ll go on it, because he or she’s gone on it, they’ve had great results. Or it’s just my concern is gaining it from, you know, online websites that you know, and you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know the long term side effects of that. We don’t know the long term. There’s not enough studies yet. I know that. I don’t think on it, and it is a concern. I think the only thing is to educate right young people. It’s not healthy.

Speaker 2  24:59 

Yeah. Yeah, and it feels like it’s undoing a lot of the work of the body positivity movement. I mean, one of the things I talk about in my body image lessons is we’ve got it twisted, right? So what you’re told is this quite narrow weight range is healthy, and so if you weigh between this and this, you are healthy. Doesn’t matter what you’ve done to get into that weight range or what your lifestyle looks like. That is health. And that is nonsense. Health is, you know, it’s genetic, mainly, but there are lots of different elements to it. But in terms of the lifestyle, if you are leading a healthy lifestyle, then your body looks how it’s supposed to look. Some people are built smaller, some people are built bigger. You know, it’s all fine. There’s a lot of variety, particularly in women’s bodies. There’s a huge amount of of diversity, but we should be encouraging people to practice the components of a healthy lifestyle, rather than focusing so much on BMI, which is such a flawed system.

Speaker 1  25:59 

It is.

Speaker 1  26:03 

I think we’ve forgotten, like what health looks like.

Speaker 1  26:07 

I think that that’s kind of teaching young people as what you said about what, what being healthy actually is. It’s not being a certain way or looking a certain way. It’s, you know, it’s this, isn’t this. And you know, feeding your body, nourishing your body to do the Food is fuel. It’s not the enemy,

Speaker 2  26:25 

yeah, and it’s and it’s such a huge part of how human beings live. And you know, sharing food is a big part of how community is built. And you know, a lot of family time is is built around that. And that’s okay, you know, there’s no reason why. I’m sure you couldn’t just survive on supplements. But nobody wants to do that, because food is important and and it’s alright, it’s right to acknowledge that food is important and enjoyable.

Speaker 1  26:54 

Yeah, definitely, yeah, definitely. That’s it. And feed is there to enjoy. It’s part of life. Yeah. So what? What would you say if, if a young person is talk you’ve talked about your body image, sort of lessons that you do in school. So if a young person is struggling with their body image, or they have body dysmorphia, like, what would be your advice for them? What would you know? Where would you start?

Speaker 2  27:17 

I think a lot of the time, the solution with body image obsession is to actually take the focus away from the body. So there’s a thing that some of the schools that I go into do, which is a compliment swap, where, rather than paying the sorts of compliments that we would ordinarily pay, like, Oh, I like your shoes, I like your dress, you’ve lost weight. I like your hair. You know, whatever it is. Instead, you talk about the qualities that really matter. So, you know, that was kind. You were brave just then. That was clever, that was insightful. I enjoyed spending time with you, and it makes you realise that actually the things that you’re bringing to the table have nothing to do with your weight. And I actually did a back in the day, I used to have a column for Cosmopolitan magazine, and I wrote about, I did a challenge where my friends and I weren’t allowed to talk about anything body image related for a week. And that included, you know, I like, I like her outfit. You know, it was, it was that strict. And it turned out I’ve got really interesting friends. I was learning about books they’d read and theatre shows they’d seen and, you know, their relationship with their partners, or, you know, dates they’d been on, or, you know, just things they’d done, and the conversations that we were having were so much more interesting. And I think sometimes you do need to just be kind of jolted out of it a little bit. You know, the most extreme example I’ve heard of that is a friend of somebody who she said, I think my friend was developing an eating disorder. She went on a diet, and she got obsessed with it. And she was doing this thing where she was going, am I fatter or thinner than her? Am I bigger or smaller than her? And she said, One day, I just went so boring. This is so boring and as harsh as it was, it actually did make her think, you know, who am I becoming? Why? Why am I talking about this endlessly, yeah, I think that would be my advice. Would be, like, think about who you are outside of your body.

Speaker 1  29:30 

Yeah, no, I love that again, kind of like, as you said, it’s boring, like, let’s change the topic of conversation. We’re so obsessed with our bodies, our diet. Like, it’s just, again, it’s changing, changing the conversation. And, you know, it’s a shame, when I was, well, yeah, when I was, when I was younger, I was really interested in sports. I love sport. That was my thing. I joined a club and, and, like, I always say, like, you know what, what’s your hobby? It’s like, get into something and kind of educate yourself, learn something new. Or, I. Then again, I think that this is a cultural thing, though, because I am seeing schools are struggling with all of this. But I love what you said. I think it’s, it’s great, and I love what you said. It is boring, like, and it’s just, let’s change the narrative. Let’s change the subject.

How to get help?

Jenny Tomei is a Nutritional Therapist and Eating Disorder coach. See all her credentials on her About Jen page and then should you need help then make contact with her today. Your road to recovery can start now!