Out And About: Online trolls and body confidence

It is blowing a gale and pouring with rain, and Lise is unashamedly dodging a wet weather Out and About. Instead, she is tucked up in her study with her favourite canine friends scattered around her feet, mulling over what to do when the online trolls come knocking, and why being at peace is the best way to go.

Join Lise and discover...

• What happened when a tongue-in-cheek bikini post went viral
• How Lise handles trolls and why a community love bomb could be the best answer
• Why shame around food and bodies gets in the way for women of every age
• How to hold two things at once: appreciating your body and still wanting to change it

Quote of the episode

“Just be at peace that it’s about them and not you.”

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Produced by The Good Studio - thegoodstudio.co.uk

Creators and Guests

Host

Lise Thorne

Host of Walking This Way and champion of midlife women

Producer

Tim Beynon

Podcast producer and Founder of The Good Studio

What is Walking This Way?

Welcome to Walking This Way - the upfront, no-nonsense podcast about midlife for women who are done with pretending it’s all fine.

Join Lise Thorne for honest conversations, unfiltered stories and a good dose of humour as she explores what it really means to be a woman in midlife - from shifting priorities and changing bodies to rediscovering joy, purpose and self.

Real talk. Real women. Real midlife.

Because this isn’t about surviving midlife - it’s about walking it your way.

Walking This Way is produced by The Good Studio.

Lise (00:13)

Hello, hello, hello. It's that time of the week again where I go out and about and we have a little chat on the Walking This Way podcast.

So, you know me, I have a truth gene and I find it very hard to lie. It is blowing a gale out there and it's pissing down with rain, and I'm sat in my study with my favourite canine friends scattered around me and we're not going out. And sometimes I love a wet, windy walk, but at the moment my back... I was like, it's my back. Such a midlife thing, isn't it?

I've done something to my back, and so I'm not gonna be pulled by a 40 kilo black Labrador around the circuit. But I do love a wild [?] walk, and then you kind of come in and have a hot chocolate or something, and you feel like you've got that precious little moment of difference between hot and cold, and I think we should embrace that feeling, that hug of coming into a warm house, and also gratitude that we get to walk into a nice warm house.

Today I thought I would have a little chat with you about the trolls, because anybody who follows me on Instagram will realise, or see, that I have had quite a significant increase in the negative comments. And I am so lucky. I say it again and again and again. The demographic of the people who follow Walking This Way are 98% female, which is not to say that all the comments have come from men. We're between the ages of about 45 and 65 and much older. My favourite thing in the world is 80 year olds. What are they, Gen something, X, Y, Z? I still don't get that nonsense. Anyway, they're like, "That's me, I'm still living that life. I'm living with joy, I'm living with purpose. It's a bit slower," and absolute joy to me. So it covers a full range of ages, but predominantly we are what I would term midlife women.

Anyway, I put a post out there. It's heading at the moment for about 1.2 million views, and it's me in a swimming pool. And the caption is something like, "Most people out there are worrying about what their body looks like, and I'm lying on a Lilo in the sunshine in a beautiful pool [?]. I'm just thinking, what's on the hotel buffet?" And the reason it's gone viral is so many people identify with that tongue-in-cheek but true, you know, what's for lunch? What's for breakfast? What's for dinner? And also my thing about body confidence, like, Jesus, I'm in a bikini and... you know, five years ago I never would have been in a bikini, full stop, and lying on a Lilo, or God forbid, just relaxing and calm, rather than my brain going through 652 options about what my body looks like.

So it's a tongue-in-cheek post, it's obviously landed really well. But the minute these things sort of take off and go viral, you get the backlash. And I'd started to get a little bit before that post. There was one lady, an Olympian, Jane, who said I was gonna die early and that I wasn't healthy and that I was morbidly obese. And by the way, by the statistics, at 20 stone and 5 foot 10, 11, say 5 foot 10, 11 (I'm between 5 foot 10 and 5 foot 11, I used to be 5 foot 11 and I'm not quite yet 5 foot 10), but 20 stone, I am morbidly obese.

And if I'd looked it up before we were chatting, I'd have told you about the two Victorian men that came up with this arbitrary scale, at a time in the 1800s when they had no idea what body composition looked like. And we know more and more about that. And it's the visceral fat that we hold around our organs, which is often on our waist, that is the most problematic. And given that I've had a body scan and I know that I am not carrying huge amounts of that visceral fat, I feel quite happy with where I am.

In fact, my body scale said something like 98%. I'm something like on the 98th percentile. I always remember this just from the kids. Do you remember their head circumference, or their height, or their length? They were on percentiles. And I had big babies, so we often had quite big percentiles, not on height, but on the scales. And so for fat mass, I was something like on the 98th percentile. So that means I'm quite fat, right? I'm carrying quite a lot of actual fat on my body. Okay, I understand that. I'm also at something like 97% of lean muscle mass. Now, some of that includes bones, my skeleton happens to be four kilograms, but it means that I have a lot of muscle as well. So I really care about, as you know, my "move every day", moving my body, keeping strong.

And the other point of this trolling, which was not what I was going to talk about, but I hope it's all relevant, is just to mention, if somebody says to me, "By the way, you're overweight, you're going to die sooner," or "You need to lose weight," or "Haven't the doctors told you to lose weight?" it's like, my God, fucking hell, I never realised, silly me. Of course. That dialogue, that rhetoric, that conversation is as helpful as nothing. Any bigger woman who's ever been to the doctor and been told, "Well, you need to lose weight," it's like, no shit, Sherlock. Telling people they're overweight and they have to lose weight, in any circumstance, is rarely helpful. It rarely helps shift the mind of the person that you're talking to. So that's point number one.

Let's go back to the trolls. So we had the Olympian, Jane, who was skinny and had taken part in the UK Olympics. I think that she won, I can't remember what it was that she participated in. And she told me about my health and that I was going to die. So I had a little bit of that, but this post, the post of me having a lovely time lying in the pool, my goodness, the comments I have faced.

I mean, literally, and usually when you look at the profiles they're not that active, apart from lovely Alison in the Canary Islands. I can't remember what she said, but she was there with her little dog and stuff, and I thought, "Alison, don't do it, just don't do things like 'dead whale'," or lovely Rob, who just put "RIP". Somebody else said I was a fat, greedy slob. I mean, when that happens, don't get me wrong, I put myself out there so I can expect to get something back. And I believe fundamentally I do far more good in the world by putting myself out there than by hiding under a rock because I'm fat.

But what goes through those people's heads, if they are indeed even people? Apparently there's, like, places in, I don't know, shall we say Russia for the sake of it, that have just people in boiler rooms, that you are out there to make us mad, to keep us small. Like, if we're angry, we stay small. So don't get me wrong, you get a comment like that and there's a bit of an intake of breath, and you sort of think, "What? What?" Although often, I think sometimes I probably miss them, because on a viral post you'll get so many comments and you won't necessarily see them all.

So you take a breath and you think, "Is this about me?" And then you realise it's got nothing to do with you. Imagine what must go on in the heads of Rob and Jane and Alison. What is happening to them, or what has happened to them, that they want to write something so hurtful and offensive to a stranger they have never met? And to someone who clearly is a human being, who isn't AI generated, who isn't hiding on the internet, who isn't anonymous. I mean, clearly, if you look at my profile. What did they go through? What poison sits within them? What hurt sits within them? And their comments make people really, really angry.

In fact, I'm digressing for another little side story, and I don't think Louise will mind me telling you it. We went up to... "we", the royal "we", it was just me. I took a lovely train journey up to Harrogate for the launch of Rachel Peroux's [?] new Liberty swimsuit. Absolutely stunning. And there were four of us talking. It was kind of a live podcast, and to launch this swimsuit. And we were having a few drinks at the beginning, and suddenly Louise... the other side, she was my art class buddy in South West London. We sat next to each other for about two terms before she moved north, and we just used to have a giggle and do our art classes. It was a lunchtime thing that we went to. So I hadn't known her long, and then she went, and eventually I gave up art classes because it wasn't the same without Louise. But suddenly, across the Hotel du Vin [?] foyer lobby, "Lise!" Louise comes running over, and she hadn't told me she was coming. It's absolute joy.

Anyway, she was then in the audience of this talk, and at the end we formed a panel and they had a chance for questions. And this is kind of what got me thinking about it all. Louise said when she first read those comments, the troll [?] comments, she was so angry. She was so angry about it. And she was telling this story, and God bless her, she, you know, burst into tears, the whole room, and I said to everyone, "I didn't plant her." And she just said, "I was so angry, and I went to go and find out all about these people. Who were these people? How dare they be rude?" Given that my message is so, hopefully, positive. And don't get me wrong, I am far from fucking perfect. And there are times when people write those things, and I have in the past made ruder remarks back, and one of them came in and I just... the words that went through my head, only through my head, was just like, "Fuck off, Rob." I'm not perfect.

But she said to me, the following day, "I put a post out about trolls, and I said compassion. You know, we need to have compassion for these people." Even if it is a boiler room, Jesus Christ, imagine that job. If your job all day long is to rile people, and I don't know, or AI bots, who's training the bots to make the world a worse place and full of hate? Who's doing that? In fact, ironically, somebody said recently, about that Lilo post, they said it looks like Donald Trump. And he was an anti-Donald Trumpist. But I was like, so you just hate either side of the coin. I'm like, what is it?

And Louise said this thing about compassion, and having compassion for the person who gives those comments, who says those comments. What has happened? And I go back to the poison within them, and it's like the revenge or the hurt or the anger is like taking the poison twice. It's like me taking the poison. I did jokingly say to Louise, "I don't need to be angry, because I've got all these wonderful people like you being angry on my behalf." But really none of us should be angry. None of us should take that poison. We just have to think, that's sad. That's really sad that they would want to do that.

And so, yeah, now I have my troll policy, and I will call them out. I rarely delete them. If somebody's a troll and they attack the comment of somebody else and really go for them, which I've seen, I've seen that happen. I've got a lovely friend in Albania who says "dogs" [?], and she really pulled someone up on their behaviour, and then the counterparty went into attack, so I deleted it, because nobody needs to read that. Just shit, basically. But generally I leave them there, and now I pull them up and I put them into stories, and I ask my community to love bomb them. Because how frustrating must that be? Even if you're an angry individual and you want to, you know, create more anger, and as they say, hurt people hurt people, or if your job is to create more anger, how frustrating must that be, really be, to be love bombed? To be truly love bombed. You know, to write back and say, "I'm sorry for your hurt." I mean, Jesus, that would rile me. Nobody wants pity. Hurt people hurt people.

And so there's a double whammy to it, actually. Number one is, piss them off. Don't give them what they want. Don't be angry. Don't be upset. Don't let it affect you. Don't let it change your path [?] and your goal and your passion and your mission. Do not let harsh words of other people affect your mission. And as women, often we are harsher to ourselves even than other people's words. Hence, "fuck off, Bob", but "fuck off, Rob". Fuck off, Bob, and fuck off, Rob.

Really, do not let other people's harsh words, whether it was your mother's when you were a child, or your father's, or your friend in the playground, or your friend now when you go for a walk. Sometimes they mean it, but it's always about them, and mostly they don't mean it. So don't let them get to you. Number one.

And number two, we need to make the world a nicer place. We need to make it, you know, kinder. And it does surprise me sometimes that people... I think that particular post, I think the point was I was a fat person showing an enjoyment of food. And I think there's some old-fashioned belief systems within our culture. And it's not within all cultures, clearly. And definitely not within all ages within our culture, as in, you know, the Rubenesque era, within all eras of history. But I think there's this belief that fat people can't enjoy food. We shouldn't enjoy food. We should feel ashamed. And I think that's why that particular post riled people, because I mentioned an enjoyment of food whilst openly being okay about my body. And that is something we need to change, because ultimately, if the goal is weight loss for any of us, it will be the shame around food, and the negativity around food, and the negative words around food. We digest it differently.

I genuinely believe if you eat a cake... that takes me back to my choux [?] buns from [name unclear] choux pastry place. Yummy! Oh my God, the most delicious cakes I've ever eaten in the whole entire world. If we eat a cake with love and joy and calm, I genuinely believe we put less weight on. I think there's even science behind it now. If we eat it with shame or fear, or rush it because we don't want to be seen, or secret eating, we will never lose the weight. We are holding on to the weight, and the shame, and the heavy, and the... none of that. I will not have it.

I will not have it. I am not the weight I wish to be in order to do all the activities that I wish to do. And yet I can still do those activities. I might just be slower, and I will not let that stop me doing it. I'm allowed to have two things at once. A dichotomy of: I love and appreciate my body (and you don't have to love it, just accept it), I appreciate my body, and I would still like to lose weight. And I can still enjoy the most amazing choux pastry.

So that's my thoughts from today. A bit of a long ramble. A ramble, my rambles. Can you tell I'm sponsored by Ramble Worldwide? I like the word now. I like the word "ramble". Ramble for a slow talk, or a slow walk, or even a fast one. I don't know, seems to match.

Anyway, so I hope that's helpful. Don't really know where I went with that chat, but about, you know, don't be affected by negative words. Don't get involved in the troll chat, whoever, whatever, real life, social media, your boss at work, your mum, your mother-in-law. Just be at peace that it's about them and not you. And that generally, for all good things in life, being at peace is definitely the best way to go.

And as always, always, always, always, my dear, wonderful podcast listeners, this is the end of another special Walking This Way personal therapy session. I love you, rock stars.