Like Khloe Kardashian I was obsessed with working out – but I don’t set the bar too high
'You're battling with the trenches of motherhood - it's quite a hard gig out there.'
‘People like [Khloe] have a lot of power over mums,’ says Mari-Carmen Sanchez-Morris, a fitness influencer and mum-of-three.
‘She’s setting the bar too high. We’re already tired.’
It’s been a busy 24 hours for Khloe Kardashian. Not only are people calling her ‘tone deaf’ for using an iconic Kourtney quote about ‘people dying’ during a time of war and turmoil, some are also picking her up on her choice words about body image in her latest Instagram post.
It isn’t so much the picture itself – which shows her gorgeously toned figure reclining on a sandy beach – that people are taking issue with, more the message she is quite literally sending herself – and, potentially, others.
‘This post is for me to be motivated! Come on Khloe! You got this,’ she wrote. ‘Time to turn up the cardio and weights.’
In response, a number of fans were quick to call out the 39-year-old reality TV star’s post, claiming it reinforced ‘impossible beauty standards’.
Some even mentioned Khloe’s six-year-old daughter, True Thompson, and the message it could potentially be sending to the youngster.
Pepper Saltzman wrote: ‘Would you want your daughter to look in the mirror and not love what she sees just as she is? Show her that. Not this.’ While Shawn Koehler posted: ‘You do nothing for all of the girls and women who suffer from body image issues. Please use your platform to do better. Truly, this is so shameful. Do better.’
Of course, not everyone felt the same. Khloe’s best friend, actress Malika Haqq – who is also a mother – rushed to her defence, commenting: ‘I see no problems but consider me motivated.’
The societal and social media pressure for mums to ‘bounce back’ after birth is still very much ever-present according to Mari-Carmen. As founder of the fitness app, Fit Mama, she believes posts like Khloe’s only exacerbate the problem.
‘I don’t think that is a good message at all,’ she tells Metro.’The problem is you’ll get mum’s looking at that comparison and say, “well hang on a minute, she looks really good in that bikini but she’s saying she needs to do more”.’
Khloe’s body image has been a topic of public discussion for more than a decade now, after her visible weight loss in 2013. She has frequently addressed it herself on social media, their former show Keeping Up With The Kardashians and in various interviews.
In an old blog post, she wrote: ‘My body weight will always be something I’ll struggle with for the rest of my life, but I’m finally in a good place and learning to love me for me.’
The six-time People’s Choice winner has also become synonymous with her passion for fitness, and is regularly seen in the show and online working out. She’s also recently become an ambassador for Fabletics, an online shop for workout gear.
With her brand Good American, Khloe has frequently said its mission is to reinforce body positivity for women of all shapes and sizes.
Prior to giving birth to her own children, Mari, now 32, would train a lot at the gym, doing a lot of strength-based work.
She had been bullied for her weight at school in year seven, so would go to the gym ‘because she felt like [she] had to look a certain way’.
This prompted a bit of a negative relationship with food and her body image, but after finishing university, Mari got herself a gym membership back home in Leamington Spa.
‘That’s when I started seeing a therapist, reading lots of books and doing a lot of personal development,’ she explains. ‘It took me a long time to have a food relationship with food and exercise.’
By 25, Mari’s relationship with her body was ‘quite good,’ she says.
‘I would go to the gym to exercise because it made me feel good, and also for my own mental health. Food became fuel. If I had some chocolate, I didn’t feel guilty for it, whereas before it would have.’
But it was also at 25 that Mari had her first child, Arthur, via C section and soon after her body confidence plumeted.
‘You’re battling with the trenches of motherhood, you might not have much support around you, and there’s the cost of living – so it’s quite a hard gig out there at the moment,’ she remembers.
‘My body definitely did change and I thought “I don’t like this”, but now I know it’s part of motherhood – I’m probably stronger than I was before I had my children.’
After struggling to know what exercise she could and could not do after birth, Mari trained as a personal trainer for mums, which eventually led her to found Fit Mama last year to ensure post-natal women can work out in a safe way.
It’s not with the aim of changing women’s bodies, she insists, but rather making mums feel better in themselves.
As someone familiar with the pressure on women to ‘bounce back’ – a term Mari doesn’t condone – she’s found it harder with her subsequent births.
She had her daughter Florence at 27 and then her third child Archibald, just last year at 31.
‘It certainly took a bit longer to get back to strength after my second and the more pregnancies I’ve had, and as I’ve got a bit older, it’s taken a bit longer,’ she explains.
While Mari is self-aware and won’t compare herself to celebs and influencers on social media, she has a lot of mum clients who enter into ‘a comparison spiral’ post-birth.
‘Mums come to me and say “I want to be healthy and fit” but they attach it to being a really hard and fast process. Posts like Khloe’s can often feed into the fact that it has to be this hard, massive, time consuming thing, when actually, a few simple changes in our lives can have a big impact long term,’ Mari adds.
Instead of huge tough workouts, she advises that mums who want to feel a bit fitter should aim to exercise a little every day.
‘It doesn’t necessarily have to be a home workout, it could be a walk listening to a podcast,’ she explains. ‘If I walk my children to school, I might walk back with my headphones in or try and go for a run to shorter pockets of time.
‘It’s just about being more efficient and time savvy, because you don’t have much time. You know, that is the reality, especially if you have more than one child.’
While Mari has a positive relationship with her body post-partum, she knows plenty of women who struggle and she thinks influencers and celebs need to show the ‘hard parts too’.
‘People who have massive influence need to show all the hard parts too, because that has more power,’ she adds. ‘Social media plays a massive part in body image comparisons.’
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