Sarah Nicole Landry. A mother of three, an active participant in her community, and an entrepreneur. At first glance, you might think this Guelph Mamma was like anyone else, but she has a large following behind her that would tell you otherwise.
Sarah is a self-love advocate and a self-made internet sensation. With over 134,000 followers – and counting – on Instagram, @thebirdspapaya spreads body positive messages of love and acceptance to all that listen.
But Sarah didn’t always have the drive to share her imperfections with the world. Growing up, each woman in her family had her own health journey: Sarah’s mother struggled with obesity, her sister struggled with anorexia and bulimia, and Sarah spent a lot of her teen years and early 20s on different diets trying to lose weight. Sarah got married young, had all three kids by age 25, and moved to Ottawa – away from her friends and family. That’s when she began to suffer from depression.
Sarah describes three times in her life that she defines as “lightbulb moments.” These moments allowed her to see what changes she wanted to make for herself:
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- Embarrassment
- Shame
- Awareness
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First, Sarah says she felt embarrassed to be seen in public. She describes this time in her life as being afraid to run into people because she was self-conscious about the amount of weight she had gained.
Next, Sarah says she felt ashamed that she avoided playing with her kids. She explains that her lack of self-confidence prevented her from doing any physical activity that her children wanted her to participate in. Anything from playing catch to going tobogganing was daunting to her. Sarah says, “we had this pool in our backyard and I didn’t want to swim in it. I just tried to hide as much as possible. I was really just embarrassed. And I was noticing that the kids were begging me to come swimming and I was just like, ‘no I don’t like swimming’ but that was a lie, I just didn’t want to get in a bathing suit, and I just avoided everything that I could.”
Finally, Sarah says she became aware of how much her weight had been controlling her life when she saw an old picture of herself on Facebook. Of the three “lightbulb moments” Sarah experienced, she says that this was the worst. She explains that “there was this picture of me, and that day I actually thought I looked really really great and I was really happy with myself. But when these pictures came out afterward I think I just really awoke to how bad my health had gotten and that I wasn’t just a little overweight, I was a lot overweight. And I just wanted to do something about it!”
It’s here, in her journey to self-discovery, that Sarah’s road to Insta-fame began.
As a stay-at-home mother of three, Sarah felt like her options to get into shape were limited but she was determined to be successful. So she downloaded an app to monitor what she was eating and began doing workouts at home every day using free workout videos she found online. “And it worked! It worked really really well. I was losing weight very rapidly, and I was okay with the fact that I really didn’t know anything. I was working out in jeans at the beginning, I didn’t even have workout clothes. I was just doing what I could do with the resources that I had, and just allowed myself to learn.”
After Sarah lost the first 40 lbs she started to document her weight-loss journey on Instagram. Within the first year, Sarah says she lost about 70 lbs and then lost another 20 lbs the following year. At this point, she was learning a lot about what it meant to live a healthy lifestyle and began going to therapy for a food addiction and PTSD.
Shortly after this, in 2016, an article was written about her in the Daily Mail and her Instagram following grew from about 6,000 to about 15,000. Her popularity continued to grow significantly in 2017 after she was featured on the cover of Oxygen magazine.
When she was 30, Sarah decided to leave her marriage and move herself and her kids back home to live with her parents. It was at this time that Sarah says her life had “flatlined.” She explained that she went from having the picture-perfect life to moving back in with her parents – something she describes as humbling. During this time, Sarah was no longer actively trying to lose weight but the weight-loss continued because of stress. Sarah says, “I had to start recognizing the fact that I was, throughout that entire process, really never happy with myself. I was constantly picking myself apart, I had this image of being thin and healthy on social media, but I was really struggling with what I actually looked like.”
Eventually, Sarah got back on her feet, got a good full-time job, bought back her original home, and maintained a healthy weight. Her hard work had paid off, and she was happy.
One day, Sarah decided that she had enough of the body-shame she was still putting herself through. She took a big step outside of her comfort zone and posted a picture of herself wearing high waisted pants, as she usually did, but this time she juxtaposed it with one where her pants were rolled down to reveal her stomach. Sarah says that it took a lot of courage for her to post this to her Instagram because it showed the flaws she worked so hard to love.
This one moment of courage was the tipping point for her rise to fame. Sarah says that “in that picture, I was wearing my Knixwear bra and the founder of Knixwear, Joanna, reached out to me and said ‘we love what you’re doing, would you come and shoot with us?’ So this went from being me taking my own picture to ‘I need to go stand in front of a camera and do this.’”
Sarah says that she was terrified for the photoshoot with Knix, but she wanted to do it because she knew it was important and she wanted to contribute to something bigger than herself. During the shoot, she says that she “was standing next to a girl who had twins and not a stretch mark on her stomach. It was intimidating.”
But by the end of the photo shoot Sarah says, “you start looking at each other and you stop being so attracted to the perfections in everybody’s bodies, and you start just being drawn to the imperfections.”
Sarah explains that the photoshoot with Knix was such a liberating day for her and that Knix is changing the dialogue toward female empowerment. She says that after the photos of her were released on Knix’s social media, her message completely changed. “It took my message from being ‘you can lose weight, and you can be happy, and you can change your body, and change your whole life,’ which was all somewhat true, but also you could genuinely be happy with who you are.”
The messages Sarah began to spread through her Instagram feed became less focused on diet culture and more focused on self-love. She says, “now that I’m 20 lbs more than I was at my lowest point, I’m way happier being 20 lbs more and having ease of life, and enjoying myself, and having that glass of wine, or that slice of pizza, than I ever was being so restrictive and living in fear of gaining weight and feeling like I had to keep loosing in order to get whatever little bit was left on my body.” Sarah says that she has never been more proud of the content she is putting out into the world, and Knix played a huge roll in this transformation.
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Sarah’s following continued to grow through the support of like-minded brands and individuals. She was recently featured on the Off the Vine podcast with Kaitlyn Bristowe that helped to significantly grow her audience. Sarah says that just by sharing genuine messages, her following has grown with those who support her. She realized that her writing is her strength so her pictures became a secondary focus.
While it feels like her Insta-fame came overnight, Sarah says that it’s been about 6 years of growth. She works with brands that she genuinely loves, some of which include Well.ca, Urban Decay, RBC, Booster Juice, Etsy, and Value Village, among many others. One of her most recent partnerships is with Knix. Sarah started as a customer who loved their products and felt strongly enough to share their messages on her own social media, even though she didn’t start working with them until recently.
Sarah tries to work with approximately four brands per month, about one to two brands per week, in order to minimize the number of sponsorships she exposes her followers to. “As much as it’s incredible when a brand comes alongside you, to support you, you also have to really respect why people are following you. And they are following you because they want advice, or they want to feel something from you, and when somebody comes to sponsor you, they’re not sponsoring you, they’re buying into the feed of the people that watch you and read you.” Sarah respects the relationship she has with her followers and wants to share the brands she genuinely loves.
Now partnered with Knix, Sarah commutes to Toronto once a week to meet with their team as a consultant. This includes working with ambassadors, participating in events, and a variety of other jobs the Knix team needs her to do.
With a significant increase in her following over the last year, Sarah has also noticed an increased number of negative feedback from people over social media, better known as “trolls.” She says that the bigger your following grows, the more people feel like they can dehumanize you. Sarah explains that while it will almost always hurt to hear these comments, she continues to speak from the heart and spread messages she’s passionate about.
Sarah says that her biggest tool that she uses to grow her following is her passion. She began to prioritize her words, and pair photos with strong captions in order to have her passion shine through.
Another tool she finds valuable is Instagram stories. She says that her stories are her strongest point of engagement with her followers: “in terms of my posts, I’ll usually get somewhere between 2,000 to 10,000 engagements, but my stories get about 25,000 views a day.”
Engagement with her followers is more valuable to Sarah than competition and pursuing popularity. “I just really stayed intentional with my own audience. If they came to follow me, I was going to stay intentional with them as much as humanly possible.”
She says that she spends about two to three hours each day engaging with her audience. “I really do believe that the best way to grow is through collaboration.”
Sarah doesn’t consider herself famous because, although she experiences moments of fame, she says her voice is smaller in the grand scheme of things. “It’s something that I could walk away from at any time and my life would probably be undisrupted from the everyday. A lot of people who have real fame never really get that back.”
Now at age 33, Sarah says she’s the happiest she’s ever been. “It’s not a status thing, it’s not a weight thing, it’s nothing like that, I just really really feel like even though life has kind of been up and down, I finally feel worth having a life that I’m excited about waking up for every single day.”
Sarah is grateful and proud that she was able to take things that she never thought was possible, like getting out of a bad marriage, or feeling happy with her body, or improving her mental health, and turn them into her reality. “All of these things that were basically mental roadblocks that I told myself were never going to change. And then I finally just started to push back on one of them and when you push back on one of them you’re like, ‘hey I can push back on more.’ And when you start pushing back on these roadblocks that you realize you’ve created yourself, you just start opening doors for more and more happiness.”
Although Sarah is enjoying where she is in her life now, she is excited about the future. Her short-term goals are to start a podcast, blog without pressure, and continue to build her voice through social media. She says she is taking some time for a “season of listening” because she is done trying to predict where life is going to take her.