When Susie Todd quit her fulltime job as a teacher’s aide to pursue a career on YouTube, she had no idea she would gain a combined 847,000 followers in just a couple of years.
Susie’s channel (susiejtodd) posts fashion, beauty and fitness content, but it was her videos surrounding body positivity and midsize representation that made waves on the platform.
In August 2019, the Chloe Ting fitness challenge was well on its way to amassing over 387 million views. Response videos popped up all over YouTube, as women swarmed to “prove” the challenge’s purported benefits of giving anybody visible abs in two weeks.
Susie, who had been posting on YouTube as a hobby after studying film at CIT, watched the array of Chloe Ting response videos in utter disbelief, as each of the women appeared to be doing the strenuous workouts with ease, grace and a fully done face.
“Perfect hair in sleek ponytails, they were never even breaking a sweat,” she said.
“I thought, ‘This isn’t realistic for someone who’s still trying to get fit. I need to show people that it is hard to do these challenges, so they don’t feel bad when they try it themselves.
“Back then I didn’t work out at all … I figured I would put something out there where I was trying and failing and keeping on going, regardless of not being in shape, and maybe people would relate, and realise that if I could do it, they could too.
“When people saw me struggling, it made them feel better,” she smiled. “I put a lot of effort into filming, and it just makes me smile when I look back. That was the start of my fitness journey. Through YouTube, I fell in love with it.”
Susie now inspires thousands to follow along on their own fitness journeys, working out with her every day and still trying viral fitness challenges for fun. Her warm commentary with a touch of self-deprecating humour, all while never taking claims of fitness trends too seriously, has steadily attracted an international following.
Despite living in Canberra all her life, the mass of Susie’s fame exists on other shores. “The largest portion of my fanbase is in the US, about 27%, then the UK is my second biggest, India’s my third, and right here in Australia is my fourth.”
“It’s just crazy. I get messages saying, ‘love from India,’ ‘love from South Africa,’ ‘love from the USA.’ Here in Canberra though, my life is hardly different since before I started YouTube. I still have all the same friends from school, I still live at home with my mum. There’s no online persona. Just me, in my room, filming my life.”
Susie said the YouTube algorithm sends her to far more American screens, where her largely body positivity-centred content is more in demand.
“One of the reasons I started focusing on midsize representation was because I wasn’t seeing any here.”
The midsize movement, referring to representation in the media of women sized 12-16, has only recently become mainstream. Susie, a midsize beauty symbol, is one of the first to gain a sizable following in Australia, despite the national average women’s dress size being size 14.
“I don’t understand why it took so long for media to promote the average woman. Clothing brands are completely within their power to show that you can wear these clothes and look good in a midsize body, or any body.
“Wouldn’t it be great if the body positivity movement, wasn’t a movement, and just the norm?,” she said.
“Like most girls, I struggled with hating my body in the past. Now I just want to help girls feel beautiful in their own skin, stretch marks, cellulite, and rolls included, because I never had that growing up.”
Susie, who ends every video welcoming new viewers into a “family of all shapes and sizes,” said if there’s one message she’d like to give to young girls growing up surrounded by the beauty standards of Instagram, it’s to not spend hours comparing themselves to the “perfect” bodies online, and instead follow girls who look like them.
“Why not go and follow people who are showing their real bodies, without the edit? You can feel good about yourself and admire others online.”
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