The Truth About Body Image - Jessi Kneeland

Tell them, hey, the thing that you want, you don't really want that. You want this other thing that's a thousand times harder and more painful and scary. And um, I can offer you that.

Hey fitness fans, welcome back to the Future of Fitness podcast interview series. I am your host, Eric Malzone, and this is episode number 45, and I'm talking to Jesse Nealin. And I have met very few people in my life who are as honest, authentic, and raw as Jesse, and this interview will prove exactly that. Before we get into who she is and what she does, uh I want you to consider taking some action. So if you are a fitness professional and you are interested in learning more about uh digital marketing, science and technology, and all the current advancements that are going on with the industry, as well as QA with the experts, uh, go to the Facebook group, a post group called the Modern Fitness Pro. And it's by application. And if you are accepted in, you will be part of a group of 2,000 fitness professionals from all over the world. And starting next week, we're gonna be pumping a ton of great content in there that's essentially dedicated to helping you grow your business and advance the industry as a whole. So it's called the Modern Fitness Pro. Go check it out. Let me know if you have any questions. And let's get on to Jesse. So Jesse is a TEDx speaker, uh, she's an amazing blogger, and she's also a personal coach of sorts. So she was a trainer in New York City and she was working with a lot of clients, especially females, who uh were really focused on body image and trying to attain these uh almost impossible uh standards. And that's what she had was a crisis effect, and she completely changed. She completely changed gears, that was a very great thing to do, and now she helps mostly women work on their body image and acceptance of themselves and loving themselves. And it's something that's we actually need to take hold of. It's it's a tough thing to do. We all know in our hearts that's the right thing to do, but she actually did it. So hopefully we're all inspired by what Jesse's doing, and we can go check her out on our website. Uh so let's get into it. This is episode number 45, and her name is Jesse Nealin. Jesse Nealin, welcome to the show. It's an absolute pleasure. I've been looking forward to this. Uh, this the date of the recording is January 25th, and uh you and I first connected, I think, in uh December. And you told me all of your story, and I'm really excited to have that be shared with with our audience. So um yeah, let's get into it. Let's talk about you, talk about your story through fitness and uh how you got to where you are today.

Cool. Um so I I landed in personal training very much by accident. I just needed a job and uh they needed women to work there. Um I got certified, I shadowed people, I moved up in the ranks, I got, you know, I moved into a private gym in Manhattan where uh peak performance where you know I was surrounded by some of the best, and I decided that I wanted to be the best. And I really dove into education and fell in love with strength training for women especially. I saw how empowering it was, how much it was changing people's perception of themselves. Um but as a personal trainer, even the people who come to you and say, I want to feel empowered and I want to feel confident, they also want to change the way their bodies look. Like, I don't know if that's true everywhere else in the world, but at least in New York City, I don't think I met a single client ever who was like, I'd like to look just like this, but I'd also like to be a little stronger, faster, you know, healthier, what energized, whatever. Yeah. So it was always this delicate balance that I felt like the thing they wanted to change, it was the wrong focus that what they wanted was to feel good and to feel, you know, accepting of themselves and to feel happy and uh to feel lovable and to feel all these things that that they were hoping they'd feel when their body looks different. And so since I was working mostly with women at the time, body image stuff started to come up in a really big way. And I realized, you know, I'm training like Victoria's Secret models, and they're still tearing themselves apart. Like, this is not actually about our bodies. Um, and I wanted to hold better conversations and not talk about weight loss. Like I'd get these women who are, you know, perfectly fit, really healthy, and they would just be obsessed with this one thing. They'd be like, Can you help me get rid of this one flaw? You know, can we hide my cellulite or can we like just change the shape of my ribs, you know? And it was just all manner of things. And sometimes they were models, and their agencies actually sent them to me for those things. And sometimes they were just people who were comparing themselves to models and wishing that they looked different. And it became very clear to me that I wasn't going deep enough. I wasn't getting to the point that we needed to be talking about with fitness and to continue, uh, it felt like I was enabling people a little bit to stay in the story about how the thing that was wrong with them that was keeping them from being happy with themselves was their belly fat or, you know, the their shape or size or weight. And so I became a life coach. I I had had remodel fitness was my my online business at the time. I totally changed branding, um, got rid of the fitness component, and moved into just body image coaching. Um, but it it very much came from that whole line. It it people have said to me, like, wow, you totally changed careers. And I'm like, I guess I did, but for me, it was all the same thing. I was trying to help people just using the wrong tools before. You know, the intention was the same, the tools were just different.

Yeah, I would see it as more of an evolution, right? Uh I'm the first thing that comes to mind is how is this how does this process work? Like, how does how do you do clients come to you because of this particular thing? Do you start a conversation with them? And then how does it, is it a coaching process? Is it in person? Like how does it how does it work?

Um, good question. So none of it's in person except my workshops, which I do travel and do workshops in person. But I live in Syracuse, New York. So like there's, you know, it's it's all done online. Um there's there's nobody here who wants well or could afford to work with me. So um yeah, it basically through social media or through blog posts um or through articles that I write for other places, um, people find me and then start getting a sense of what I'm about, which I talk about body image a lot. I mean, I talk about other things too. I share a lot about my story, I share random thoughts. I'm constantly reading, so I'll share thoughts on books I'm reading, things like that. But most of it centers around self-acceptance in whatever form. Um, and that includes, you know, like I have a program called Make Friends with Your Feelings. So, like emotional acceptance is part of self-acceptance. It's not all just about your body. In fact, I think people wish it was about their body, and more often than not, we have to go way deeper than that in order to accomplish anything. So, yeah, so if they do coaching with me, if they decide to move into that, then it's all on the phone or Skype, depending on the person. Um, and we just move into like talking about what's really going on underneath the story about their body. So if they're like, okay, I really want to love my uh this actually happens a lot, is clients will be like, okay, I really want to love my like body, but it you know, my butt's too flat and I'm I'm not thin enough. I'm like, okay, great. So like what does that make you feel? And they'll be like, I feel like it meets it, you know, I'm too not thin enough. Or I feel like my butt's too flat. I'm like, okay, those aren't feelings. Those are you're just you're staying in the same spot. So I help them dig into what's really happening underneath. For example, I feel like I'm unlovable and I feel like it's my job to be attractive. And I feel, you know, those are the things that we start digging deeper and deeper, and that's where we can actually make shifts, where by the end, they're not talking about their bodies, but they're also not thinking about their bodies. So it's not like they suddenly magically, you know, find their bodies super sexy. It's just that we we deal with the stuff that's really problematic that the body anxiety and the body hatred kind of just reflects.

I don't know if anyone ever, if your clients achieve like success or if it's probably just an ongoing process, right? Um, but give me give me an idea of someone who you consider, you know, success. What do they what do they feel like after? What's the after effect?

Yeah, so it's tough actually uh for as a business too, it's tough to be like, here's how you'll feel after because everyone's so different. Um, and it is an ongoing journey. I say it's like peeling back an onion, like there's always gonna be more. It's the process of becoming yourself. You do this forever. Um, however, what different to me looks like, what success to me looks like, is when someone is showing up and following their actual desires and acting on their actual authentic drive and impulse and being who they feel they really are, instead of performing, doing things that is expected of them, you know, hiding and posing and fixing and thinking about what is wrong with them. They're actually just out in the world doing what they want and feeling free and safe to be who they are, um, which can be anything from like, I went to this party and I just like wore what I wanted and I started talking to people and I, you know, they liked me and it was so great. So sometimes these things that don't sound like a big deal are the first time that someone has ever done that.

Yeah.

Because they would have been in the corner thinking about how they looked and how nobody likes them and like, you know, staying stuck. And what they really wanted was to go like dance with people. And so they just went and danced, and that's a huge success. Um, another would be career changes and things like that that happen when you start tuning in to the part of yourself that like the wisdom of your body, that some things are for you and some things are not for you, some things are working and some things aren't. When you're not obsessed with what you look like and how you should be, you can actually hear those messages loud and clear. So things like, huh, I hate my job. I'm I'm not supposed to be doing this job. Those things can come to the surface out of seemingly nowhere when you get rid of the distraction of like, what do I look like? What do I look like? Right. So people make huge shifts in a lot of a lot of the coaching stuff. It's like I've had people, I've had a lot of people quit their jobs, actually, surprisingly. Um, as well as some relationship shifts that are pretty major too, like, oh wow, this was not working. But I've been so focused on what does he think about my butt that I haven't stopped to be like, I don't know that that we communicate well enough for me or whatever, you know.

Wow, that's uh that's impressive. I'm I'm curious too. Do you work I presume you work primarily with with women just from our conversation, but do you ever work with men?

I do sometimes. You know, I'm always surprised by um how many men reach out to me in messages and emails uh just to thank me for my work, uh, that let me know that it resonates with them. Um actually, just now on Instagram, a friend of mine from New York where I haven't talked to in a while, he he commented, hey, not to you know, like split hairs here, but is it would it be cool if we said human instead of women in this situation? Um because I said, you know, we women are taught to hate ourselves. And he's like, we kind of all are, like, aren't we? And he's right, we we absolutely are. You know, I I use women as part of my branding because that's who I am most familiar with the obstacles that we face, but men face different obstacles, non-binary trans people face different obstacles, but we are all taught to reject parts of ourselves and hide them and feel ashamed of them and just present this other thing that we've all decided is acceptable. So yeah, it's a very it's a very human problem, not a female problem.

Yeah, I think men are just uh more reluctant to acknowledge. And that's or we're just you know, we're taught to to push it down. I I've talked about in previous podcasts about what I call uh superhero syndrome. Because giving my background, like you know, I was a chubby 10-year-old, right? I had to go to swim practice 10 times a week. So I had to squeeze myself into a speedo. And I read a lot of comic books, right? I read a lot of comic books that paint a picture of who I was. Sure. And uh I was always God, I like I wish I looked like that. I wish I looked like the Punisher, right? I wish I looked like that. And I think that early age of like, okay, this is the perfect male form, is uh I think there's something there, and just no one talks about it as much. We're just we're just used to kind of pushing it down.

It's so true. And I would say increasingly so, men are being roped into the same standards for beauty that women are. Well, not the same exact standards, but you know, like a higher level of standard. And I don't know that that was so true 20, 30 years ago, but it has been increasingly so, and I expect it'll continue to be increasingly so. Um, I think it kind of started only in like the gay community where they suddenly had to hold themselves to the highest possible aesthetic standard. But I think it's it's permeating. I mean, I partly because it makes people money to be insecure, and so all the marketing out there is they're definitely capitalizing and pushing new standards on everyone that they possibly can so that you buy their stuff. Um but yeah, it's definitely spreading.

That's a damn good point. There's there's money to be made from people's insecurity. Absolutely.

There sure is. I mean, the beauty industry, the like supplements industry, the weight loss industry, it is just massive quantities of money being made off people who don't feel good enough.

We had talked about this previously, but I love how you tie you you have a message to the fitness industry about taking a hard stance, right? We had talked about that. Um essentially it was like, you know, all all like everyone in fitness understands that maybe what we're doing is not for the benefit of the big picture, you know, but it's really hard because we, you know, this it's easier to go down that route versus taking a hard stance and saying, you know what, that that two inches off your waistline ain't gonna change your life, right? Yeah, talk to me about that message that you have for the fitness industry because I think it's very powerful.

When I shifted branding, I was very afraid that I was going to fail and not have a business anymore. Because despite the fact that I had always had this like empower yourself, it's about what you can do, not what you can look like, I also was a fitness business. And people make assumptions about fitness businesses, and my clients would always come to me and say, I want to love myself, but I also want to change this thing. And I would kind of say, sure, let's try and do both. Because that was what I had to do. That was what I thought I had to do, was my expectation that if I only said, let's not try to change what you look like and only focus on what how you feel about yourself, then nobody would buy anything. And then I, you know, couldn't do any work. So I stuck with that for a while. And when I shifted, I was like, this could fail. Like genuinely, people might just stop caring about me and I'll just have to get a job as a barista or something. Like, I don't know where this is going. But it was very scary. And when it succeeded, I had so many people, uh, friends in the fitness industry asking me, like, hey, how how should I like I don't want to talk about fat loss anymore because that's not really the problem. And you know, it just keeps people like obsessed, and I think it's bad for them. And how do I stop doing that? And I'm like, uh, like I have no advice for you. I just jumped. So maybe if you want to do that, I don't know. Like, there it is a terrifying prospect, and we know money is made from fat loss promises. Yeah, we know that sculpting and aesthetic transformation sell, and we also know that people really, really, really want to stick to the magical thinking that they'll be happy when they finally have abs. And so to tell them, hey, the thing that you want, you don't really want that. You want this other thing that's a thousand times harder and more painful and scary. And um, I can offer you that, you know. And the person's like, no, thanks. I'd rather have abs, and I'm gonna go to someone who will promise me them.

Yeah.

So it's very challenging. It's uh, I don't have any advice for how other people should do it, just that I think it's an important conversation that we should all be having about where does your line, where is your line? Like, are you still selling something that you don't actually feel great about?

Yeah.

If so, consider that and why. And is that doing anybody any good?

Yeah, well, I think about it, you know, I've I've always thought about, especially um, you know, when I was running my gym, the and it always stuck in my mind, you know, you gotta give people what they want until you earn the right to give tell them what they need.

Right.

And sometimes it's it's like I always thought, am I doing a greater good by letting this this person walk down the street to someone who's promising the six-pack abs. I can tell them, hey, yeah, I can get you there. So let's just start and then maybe see where it goes. Right. Um, I don't know. God, it's it's just it's tough. But I think you're right. Just the the discussion has to be has to be and every mentor I've had on the coaching side, they they talk about the same thing. It's like that's it's not right, you know, because they've gone through that pattern.

So you know, it's it's funny though, because like when I would get the models who would come to me as a trainer, they came through their agencies. They didn't, nobody was at their own volition. It was just like agencies would like shove models at me and be like, here's what you need to fix on her. We need to like just lower the you know the measurement of her thighs and keep everything else the same. Wow. And I would lie to these people and say, no problem, I got that, even though that is physically impossible and insane and absolutely rude, by the way. Um, and so I would then take this girl and do everything I did with everybody else. Like I would teach her to deadlift and we would get stronger, and you know, her body would reflect changes that usually were fine, you know, that the agency would be like, Cool, thanks, because they didn't, they didn't really want what they said they wanted. They nobody has any idea of how things work. And so I was like, I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that like a big portion of my business is made up on lying to people that I can change these girls' bodies. I am changing them, but not how they think that I am. But the end result is like she looked good in photos, so no one cares. I don't know. It was a very strange experience, and I definitely felt conflicted about it because it's not cool. But at the other side of it, like I was getting to help them in a way that I believed was better than how most other people would have helped them. You know, caloric deficits and I don't even know what, like Pilates, something, you know. So it's an interesting line to to travel.

Yeah. Well, I mean, if you didn't go through that, you wouldn't be doing what you're doing right now for sure. You're doing a lot of good. Um so let's uh let's shift because I want to talk about the the online business. I think uh, you know, what you've done is uh we we coach a lot of people through this process too, finding out, you know, okay, what's your core competency? Who's the niche that you want to serve, and then just keep diving deeper and deeper and deeper into you know what that niche is. And it can be as small as you want, because as soon as you go online, you're global, right? Talk about your processes of starting your business online and how that's been, and you know, if you have any advice for people who want to go that route.

So I I started a business online thinking that it would offer me mobile mobility, which it it does, um, and a means to serve a greater number of people, which it does. I did not ever have any interest in running a business by myself or working on a computer all day. And I certainly wasn't interested in sales funnels, marketing, or any of that bullshit. So I some days I really hate working online, and I think that I've gotta find a way to move back into working with people. I don't know what that would look like, but it's like my workshops actually came out of that same thought. I hate working online. So I love writing. I love writing. And so I think what I've kind of done is pretty counterintuitive to what most people would say is good business advice. Um because I'm not a good version of myself when I do stuff I hate. So I just basically wrote a lot. Um, I write to my email list exclusive emails. I I do some blog posts still, uh, write articles for other people, and then most of my writing on a daily basis is on social media. And so all of that is stuff that I really enjoy doing. And that's pretty much the only way I've ever grown my business. Um, but I hear, you know, I've like read marketing books that are just it's like gritting my teeth to get through them. I don't care about this, I don't want to know about this. Um, I just want to hire someone else to like do everything I don't like. Uh, but yeah, I don't recommend it to anybody, honestly. Like, it unless you love business, you spend a lot of time doing businessy stuff instead of serving people. Um, and so I think for me, it's just been a lot of trial and error and throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Every program I've ever launched, everything I've ever created has just been like a let me try this. Now let me try that. And then I have friends who are like, oh, I'm doing this like, you know, crowdsourcing way of finding out how to solve the problem and get them exactly what they want. And I'm like, I can't do that because what they think they want is not what I do. It's a joke among my business coach friends. They're like, most people see a problem and then solve it. Jesse sees a problem and then tells everyone they don't have the problem they think they have and then tells them there's another way to do it instead. Uh yeah, no, it's not, it's not easy. I don't know. I don't have any advice in that realm. It's it's all just trial and error.

I think what you're saying too, and this is uh this goes from anybody, whether it's brick and mortar or online, is once you go from trainer to to business person, you know, if you if you become a gym owner or um you start, you know, like you start an online business, now you're in a business, right? Yeah, and it's the the rules are there's a lot to do. I mean, bookkeeping alone. Screw that. That's all open source. That's all uh that's just one component of everything they have to worry about. You have to be marketing influence. So I don't know if it's necessarily online, I think it's just it's making that lead from trainer to business person, which uh can be painful, you know. Um at the same time can be incredible re incredibly rewarding. You have some new. You have some new products out, or you have a new product out. Do you want to talk about that?

Sure. So this actually, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got was to beta test my programs. And that way I'm like, you know, I was able to be paid to create something with people, getting their feedback and everything, which was just awesome. So I've done that a lot. And this one I finished the beta test of this program. It's called Authentic Body Confidence in the Fall. And so this is my first public launch of it. So it starts February 19th. It's a 12-week online course. And I actually had to play with this idea of like, is it for women? Not exactly, but it's it's for anyone but men. But that seems like something I can't say. So I'm calling it like for women and non-binaries or for you know SEM-identifying persons. Um but basically, yeah, it's for it's for anybody uh who is looking to have a more positive relationship with their body and feeling really stuck. Um and I take them through all of this stuff, like what like what I just said. If you stay stuck in the body story, you're stuck there forever. You could talk about how you want to learn how to love your belly fat for literally the rest of your life. Right. Um or you could dig way deeper and get to the stuff that actually matters, what's really holding you back. Um, and so that's what this course is designed to do, to take people into themselves. Um, and something I always tell them too is like, I'm not the expert on you, but I will help you become the expert on you. Like, this is a map back to you. This is not me as a coach being like, everyone has to do what I say. Um, which again is a much more challenging model, I think, to sell, but way, way more aligned with what I know to be useful and uh yeah, real.

Yeah, I love it. I think when people listen to this too, I think there's gonna be a lot of fitness professionals are gonna resonate with your message too, and probably have that inner, you know, that voice saying, like, maybe I should contact Jesse.

Please do. Honestly, I would love to talk to because I consider fitness professionals to be like the ground floor of having these conversations with people. People trust them with their bodies and say, I think I should lose this. What do you think? And if the trainer says, I don't think that's a problem, they risk their job, but they also get to be in a position of helping that person change their view of their body. And so I think there's yeah, they're they're like the gatekeepers of this conversation, up close and personal with people. And I would love to talk to more fitness professionals about this. And yeah, all please reach out if anyone's interested in hearing that kind of stuff.

And where do they find you, Jesse?

You can find me at my website is jessynnealand.com and um at Jesse Nealand on Instagram and Jesse Nealand on Facebook.

Awesome. Oh, and Twitter.

Yeah, it's all the same.

You're everywhere, you're omnipresent. I love it. I I read your emails, I read your posts, uh, I love the messaging. So um just keep up the great work and I appreciate your time coming on. All right, we'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Jesse. Bye. Hey fitness fans, don't leave yet. This is Eric Malzone, your host, and I have an extremely special offer just for you. If you go to fitnessmarketingalliance.com forward slash assessment, you can claim your complimentary digital marketing audit. Are you a modern fitness professional? Do you have some sort of online presence? Do you have a sneaking suspicion that your website is not performing optimally and therefore costing you money? Well, this is how you start to find out all the details. Just like fitness, you need to start with an honest and objective assessment. So go to fitnessmarketingalliance.com forward slash assessment, fill out the form, and we will have it to you within 72 hours. It will cover your overall site performance, rank from zero to 100, how you rank for your chosen keywords. So that's search engine optimization, your website traffic history over the last six months, so the ebbs and flows and what worked, what didn't, your website speed, which is highly relevant for people coming to your website and then bouncing off because it's working too slow, your social media presence, competitive analysis, and much, much more. So this is just the tip of the iceberg, but this is the starting point for building your online business. So please take advantage of it. We're offering it because we feel it's deeply important to you and the industry overall, and you can claim it by going to fitnessmarketingalliance.com forward slash assessment. Do it today, do it right now. Don't hesitate. This offer will last forever. So thank you for listening. Greatly appreciate it. If you ever need to reach me, hit me up, Eric at Fitness Marketing Alliance dot com, and I'll be talking to you very, very soon.