Everyone please welcome my new friend, Health and PE educator, as well as the founder of Pretty Little Lifters, Tiffany Ragozzino to A Broadway Body: Continued Conversations! Tiffany and I were connected by a mutual friend who I recently shared a conversation with (hi Maddie McGuire!) because of our shared passion for dismantling diet culture and leaning into strength and wellness.

Tiffany is battling a social media driven world in her classroom to remind her TikTok-loving students the importance of having physical strength and general wellness, and she leads by example. Her stories of conversations she’s had with students and the ways in which she’s working to even educate their parents when she has the opportunity gives me hope for our future generations when it comes to helping them to foster a healthy self-image.

I walked way from our conversation feeling empowered as heck, and I hope you feel the same! Please check out The Pretty Little Lifters podcast and follow Tiffany to stay updated with the incredible work she’s doing!

“ We do a lot of weightlifting, we also do Pilates too. We're well-rounded; we're balanced. But sometimes I'll hear them say, “Oh, I just want to do Pilates.” And when I hear it and I'm like, “That's great for muscular endurance, but what are we gonna do for muscular strength? This is what we're doing for muscular strength.” I'm constantly course-correcting. I'm trying to teach them, “This is long-term health and fitness. That's what I want for you. So I'm not gonna do any quick fixes because that doesn't go with what I'm teaching you.” So it's almost a little bit more of an accountability, I guess you could say. It helps me really practice what I preach. The information that I'm sharing with them, I really do want it to be aligned because I do feel like they will find me more authentic when they see me also living my truth and doing the things I teach them.”

- Tiffany Ragozzino

Megan Gill: Would you want to start by diving into a little bit of your own body image story, your body image journey, and kind of what led you to your work today?

Tiffany Ragozzino: So it's so funny you asked this question because I was recently talking to a friend about body image, especially since I work with teenagers and I teach PE and health, and we were sharing our stories. It's interesting navigating – I'm a millennial, so I grew up during those primitive Y2K moments. When I was a teenager, just getting all of those stories of being skinny and how nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. That was a wild time to grow up when the celebrities gracing the covers of magazines were extremely thin. A lot of them had eating disorders, and that's what we were used to. That was the expectation.

I've always been on the thinner side, so I kind of fit into that socially-acceptable body. And it was really interesting because when I started wanting to do weightlifting, a lot of people were like, “Oh my gosh, don't get too big. Don't get too manly. Don't get too big,” and I was like – and I was just excited to do really cool stuff. I was just like, “Wait a minute, I want to do really cool things with my body!”

Megan Gill: Yeah, “I want to lift some heavy shit out here! I want to be strong!” Yeah.

Tiffany Ragozzino: Exactly. So it was very interesting, and you know what's funny? I think when I started doing a lot of things with street training, it was the first time that sometimes like being on the thinner side or lean didn't always work to my advantage because I remember there was this one photo shoot I wanted to do and participate in, and the person whose gym it was was like – and he didn't say it directly to me, but I kind of heard through the grapevine where it's like, “Oh, she's a little too thin. We want somebody muscular,” and I was like, “Okay, is this where we're shifting to?” But I kind of wasn't mad at it, you know what I mean? I was like, “That's cool. This guy wants to show strong women. He wants to show a different body type and not maybe more of my typical body type that you see already.” So it was actually a really cool experience to be on the other side of that.

Megan Gill: Yeah, it kind of shook up your world a little bit? In a world where we always have known where the ideal is, “How small can we be?

Tiffany Ragozzino: Exactly.

Megan Gill: For then someone to come in and be like, “No, actually, maybe we want someone a little bit thicker or with a little bit more muscle,” or whatever it may be. Yeah, I could see how that's such a wild concept.

Tiffany Ragozzino: Yeah, exactly.

Megan Gill: But also it’s so important to reflect all types of bodies, right? Not that your body isn't needed, but just having a diverse range of different body types.

Tiffany Ragozzino: Yeah, exactly. And this was, you know, in the earlier 2000s still. So it was kind of cool to hear something like that because you didn't get to see that very much.

Megan Gill: Right. Totally. I'm also a millennial, so I feel you.

Tiffany Ragozzino: So you get it.

Megan Gill: I get it, right there with you.

Tiffany Ragozzino: Yeah. So it was definitely an interesting transition. And what's funny too is when I did start strength training, that shift that I had even in the beginning, because at first it was really like aesthetic, you know? It was just like, “Okay, I want a six pack. I want to see my muscles. I want to be so lean” And then there was a shift when I really started getting into Olympic lifting, gymnastics training, more like CrossFit stuff, I was like, “Wait, I need to be really fed. I need to be fueled. I need to be strong to be able to keep up with all these really cool athletes and figure out how my body can move in a different way.” And it's interesting because that even came with its own – body image is so weird. It's so weird because you go from one extreme to the other.

So then there I was in this new arena of like, “I want to be strong like them. I want those muscles. I want this,” and then it was just like a whole different fixation of being strong and having that six pack and not being so just thin and skinny. I just feel like that pendulum has just kind of swung back and forth, and it was really healthy to step away from aesthetics a little bit and really focus on what I can do. But it is kind of interesting to just always see that pendulum swinging a little bit.

Megan Gill: Like societally, you mean, or for yourself?

Tiffany Ragozzino: Yeah. Yeah, I think societally because, unfortunately, as we've seen throughout history, women's bodies are trends, unfortunately, you know? And so, I don’t know if you remember when booties were in, and then everyone was like, “Okay, we're gonna squat, we're gonna hip thrust, we're gonna do this.” And you can see the reflection in fitness, in types of movements people are doing, in the way we dress. So it's really interesting to kind of try to separate yourself from that. But as a society, it's really hard to, you know?

Megan Gill: Right. Of course, of course. Especially in this time where everybody keeps using this phrase, and I'm like, okay, I get it. It's like, “Thin is in.” Like, “Thin is back.” The early two thousands are back, and it is very true because in the way celebrities now, these people that have access and have money, have access to like these other tools to alter their bodies, or just easier access, I would say. It is quite clear, I keep seeing – and I try not to judge also, but I can see that people are not wrong. Thin is very much around us right now, and a lot of people want that. That's the ideal again which does suck because strong is so important.

I'm curious also because, as someone who – I mean, I grew up dancing. I've been pretty active my whole life. I’m deep into a hot yoga practice myself right now.

Tiffany Ragozzino: Ooh, I love hot yoga

Megan Gill: Oh, it's been so, so good for me. Mentally, I feel like I've never been stronger. I actually have triceps, and I've never really been able to feel a tricep in there before, so it's really cool. Like, “Wow.” I feel really, really strong and really mentally well, and I have a really great relationship with my movement practice. It's taken me a long time to get here.

When “thin is in,” – I'm just using that phrase as like a general way that we're trending right now, societally, as far as body goes, in my eyes, I think it takes the focus off of strength of general wellness and off of building that muscle so that we can age and be able to walk and move and have that strength and flexibility and mobility still. That's really important. For me, it's really important. I look at my parents, and I want them to be strong as they age. I understand how vital that is. So I'm just curious to hear your take on that.

Tiffany Ragozzino: It's crazy. I don't know if you're on TikTok, but like the rise on SkinnyTok has been interesting, to say the least. And it's weird. So I started teaching at the school. I work at an all-girls school, which is amazing. It's the ideal population that I want to work with. So getting to talk about these topics with my girls, with my high school students is so important. But I started working there in 2018. It is now 2025. And like I said, that shift that I've seen