I'm teaching this class and it's kind of a joke, because you can do whatever you want. Like, you're here. I'm giving you a guideline to what I'm doing. This is how I'm rolling on the floor today, this is how it looks when I do it. It doesn't have to look the same when you do it.

You're listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I'm Virginia Sole-Smith and I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.

Today I'm chatting with Lauren Leavell! Lauren is a trainer and fitness instructor based in Philadelphia, and the creator of Leavell Up Fitness a body positive and weight-inclusive fitness network that makes working out accessible and fun.

I am a big fan of Lauren's work. I have been doing her barre and strength training classes for the last few months. To be clear: I pay for her classes, I am delighted to support her work. This isn't sponsored content. I just really love Lauren's approach to exercise and movement. And I wanted her to come chat with us a bit about that philosophy and her experiences navigating fitness culture and finding such a new, and frankly revolutionary, way through it. So here's Lauren!

Episode 80 Transcript

Lauren

My name is Lauren Leavell. I am a Black woman. I use she/her pronouns. And I'm located in the city of Philadelphia. I was born and raised in LA but moved to Philadelphia for love. And I am a fitness instructor.

I consider myself a weight neutral fitness instructor, meaning the goals and the language that I use is not around weight loss and bodies and aesthetics. I really am not too worried about what people are doing when they're not with me, because they're only with me for pretty much 45 minutes every time they see me. And I really focus on joyful movement and connectedness to your body.

Virginia

For everyone listening: I am a Lauren super fan. I've been doing her barre classes for a few months now. So this is a big thrill for me to get to hang out with you for a little bit! I'm just going to fangirl for a moment and say I have done a lot of other barre classes and it is very hard to find—particularly with barre, but in every fitness arena—a class where there is not something I have to be like “I didn’t want to hear you say that.” To realize this is a safe space and there's none of that and it's just not part of what we're here to do is such a relief. I just really want to thank you for doing that.

How did you get into this and what makes you determined to do it in this different way that you're doing it?

Lauren

Yeah, you are so welcome! I tend to attract people who are just like me, obviously. You get this theme going with the people that you have come into my membership or into my social media, that they're interested in what I'm interested in. So it's become a really good group. I really appreciate the people who are in there.

I started working out at 19—I just turned 31, so that's a little math problem there. I started for the reasons that a lot of 19-year-old women, in particular, start working out. And I was not an athletic child. I might have been. I came from a family, a long line of non-athletic people.

Virginia

I relate to this deeply.

Lauren

It was never a thing. Like, we weren't sports people. We weren't athletic people. My family, their forms of movement are cleaning and gardening. That's their jam. And that's real! Like, that is legitimate, but they just weren't into anything else. So the children were also not into anything else.

But yeah, I started working out and I kind of fell in love with movement, separate from the unhealthy and disordered other things that I was doing. So those two things really never tainted each other. I was like, “Oh, I love going to the gym. Even though I'm doing all this other stuff that probably is very unhealthy for me, this still feels fun. I feel really connected to this.”

When I started to recover and started to realize that I didn't want to live that way anymore, I never was one of those people who was like, I have to stop exercising. I was like, no, I actually still really, really, really enjoy this. And this is really something that I love. And I think that it can be done without the pressure and the standards and the goals that I was using on myself. There's got to be another way.

So I started doing that and then I went to a barre class. It totally kicked my butt. And then I was like, what is barre? And I started digging and I was like, “Oh this doesn't look like me at all.” And I took that as a challenge. So I decided to get certified because I was like, there's gotta be people out here who want to take this class, who wouldn't feel comfortable if they didn't have an instructor who maybe didn't look like them? Or did not use that language—“toning” and “lengthening” and “shredding” and all the other things. I didn't want to do that.

I was like, what if people just want to come here and have fun and get their butts kicked like I did? And so that's where it started. And then I got certified as a personal trainer, and I have a corrective exercise certification under that which really just was a little bit more in depth on how to help folks who are coming off of injuries or any other thing, which is really important to me to try to make things as accessible as possible in a group fitness class, which is kind of an oxymoron. But like we're doing, we're doing our best over here to make as many accommodations and I'm fully aware that not everyone is going to find something every class that clicks with them.

Virginia

I'm interested in separating your love of moving your body from the diet culture/disordered piece of it. There are so many layers to that, right?

I'm someone who also grew up very un-athletic, in a fairly un-athletic family, and just didn't think of myself as someone who enjoyed movement, period. So then I got into it in a really diet-y way. I've been on this process of, do I even like it? Can I like it now that I'm not doing it in this other context? I'm just so interested that you were able to hold onto what you did love about it and strip away the other stuff. I think that's a really tricky process for a lot of us. I'd love to hear a little more about what made you realize this part of it is good for me, even though this other stuff doesn't serve me. 

Lauren

I do hear that all the time. I have a lot of folks who are in membership who are like, this is like my first try into into movement again after I set it down for a while, after I had an injury.

Virginia

Because that’s really necessary sometimes. Like, really necessary. 

Lauren

Oh, totally. I don't want to gloss over that as a step for many people. And I have many, many, many close friends for whom that was their step. They were just like, “peace, see you never, exercise!” For me, I don't know if it was the feel good endorphins, I don't know if it was a thing that made me feel super independent and super connected—I didn't feel like I grew up having a good communication with my body. I felt like everybody else's outside input and communication about my body was the narrative around my body. And when I was exercising, I felt like that didn't matter. Because they weren't the ones picking up the weights. They weren't the ones walking on the treadmill. They weren't the ones doing all those things. It was really a form of independence for me, and reconnection, which is what I try to stress to people when they're moving with me.

I'm teaching this class and it's kind of a joke because you can do whatever you want. You're here, I'm giving you a guideline to what I'm doing. This is how I'm rolling on the floor today. This is how it looks when I do it. It doesn't have to look the same when you do it. Because I want people to feel 45 minutes of connectedness with their body or 45 minutes of trust in who they are.

And I think that's really the thread that kept me in it: I feel like myself doing this and I feel independent, I feel strong. And I feel like I can make those decisions, which a lot of times in a lot of different areas of our life, we don't maybe feel like we can do that.

So I think that that's what held me to this. I had to change. I changed the form of exercise that I was doing. I went from working out alone in a gym doing really, really intense workouts to doing barre. And barre is really intense, but it was in a group and it was somebody else was leading it. So I got to just do that and connect with my body and connect with those moves. But I changed the setting and changed the scene and it allowed me to evolve into a new space where I was like okay, yeah, I could do this, too.

Virginia

I love the idea of movement as a means to achieving body independence. That's really powerful. It takes it out of the traditional framework so completely that you were able to find that. We should also say, just for folks listening: I always want to put out there that you don't have to find movement enjoyable. That's not a moral obligation. There's a lot of movement I don't find enjoyable. And there may be other paths to feeling independent and in control of your body. But it's awesome that moveme