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Photography by V. Elly Smith
Annie Arehart and Bri Minter with their daughters
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Photography by V. Elly Smith
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Photography by V. Elly Smith
Bri Minter, who's 6-foot-3, was 395 pounds and pre-diabetic. She didn't want to set the wrong example for her daughter--or, and here vanity came into the picture, be "the big mom picking up her kid at school." So she got healthy, dropped weight, built muscle, and started running, playing, and hiking with her daughter.
Annie Arehart is already a societal ideal: petite, lean, and lithe. And it's not enough. "I have—in psychology they call it body dysmorphia," she says. "I can look at myself and feel a way that isn't true. I think a lot of it stemmed from gymnastics. Our teacher would pinch our fat and say, 'You need to eat less.' In my adult years, and after having a baby, I've been able to work through that—but if I eat poorly over a weekend, those feelings still come up. That's why Bri and I started talking about this, because sometimes I have the same thoughts she has when I look in the mirror. And there are things I can't ever change about my body, either. I'd want to be curvy, and that's just not my body type."
Arehart's a registered nurse; Minter has a master's in professional counseling and wants to integrate that expertise with fitness work. Their daughters are best friends, and as unlike each other, physically, as their mothers are. So, for their sake, Minter and Arehart have decided to team up, plotting a campaign to talk to mothers and daughters about body image—and the gap between how others see you and how you see yourself.
"I'm never going to look like Bri, and she's never going to look like me," Arehart says.
On the other hand, "If you put our bloodwork side by side," Minter says, "you probably wouldn't be able to know whose lab results were whose.
"Annie gets, 'Go eat a burger,' and I get, 'Eat a salad and run a mile,'" Minter continues. "If somebody looks as me, they're not going to know I can deadlift 200 pounds. They're going to think I feed my daughter chicken McNuggets and Mountain Dew."
She and Minter teach their daughters to move, and to eat well, and to refrain from judging other people's bodies or their own. "We don't talk about what we should look like," Minter says. "And I never, ever say, 'This will make you fat.' If she says, 'Mom, I'm hungry,' I say, 'Choose some protein.' If she says, 'Why can't I eat this donut?' I say, 'Because it's gonna make your brain kind of foggy, and it'll make you kind of cranky.'"
The other day, Arehart told her daughter she was beautiful. "No," her daughter corrected her, "Eleanor is the prettiest girl at school, because she has long, brown, silky hair."
"For a 4-year-old to say that!" Arehart groans. "I tell her every day that she is beautiful!"
Arehart's not bothered by the injunctions to stop complimenting female appearance. "We all have eyes," she says with a shrug, "and what we see is what we see. But I think it's important to be beautiful in the way that you are, and not in someone else's way."
How did we even get to this crazy place of comparing and judging? "Society, almost like a living organism, has this power and control over us," replies Minter. "Somebody at some point thought it was a really good idea to be a certain way. It's just some standard that's been set—and it mutates."
Right now it's swinging wildly between elite fitness and the body beautiful movement, which, Minter adds with an eye roll, ought to be about all bodies but somehow wound up being about bigger bodies only.
"We're all in different packages, and we can all be healthy in our bodies," Arehart says. "The unspoken things between women that you just don't talk about, we want to talk about."
Photography by V. Elly Smith
