For Dr. Tiffany Brown, helping others accept themselves is second nature

By Daniel Schmidt

AUBURN, Alabama – Tiffany Brown had missed all the obvious warning signs. A swimmer at Rancho Bernardo High School in San Diego, her best friend on the team had fallen prey to an eating disorder. It would ultimately prove destructive.

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Nothing warranted suspicion in the beginning. There was her obsession with food that dominated conversation at times. Handfuls of low energy-dense foods such as carrots for lunch. Weight loss that elicited praise from their coach who proclaimed she was doing a good job at working on her physique for performance.

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Everything was good. Until it wasn’t.

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That benign behavior surrounding grub and gossip eventually manifested itself in more obvious and unhealthy ways. Her palms slowly turned orange from all the carotenoids. Secretive binge eating and purging episodes became the norm. It wasn’t until after they graduated that she admitted her problem.

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It was partly that confession that drove Brown, now an assistant psychology professor at Auburn University, to pursue a career educating about and researching eating disorders and body image issues through the institution’s ACCEPT Lab.

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Now nearly two decades after she began this Odyssaic journey that has seen her flee Hurricane Katrina while enrolled in Tulane University and help pilot cutting-edge research at the University of California San Diego, Brown is beginning to make a difference.

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While an undergraduate transfer student at Villanova and a graduate student studying psychology at Florida State University, Brown identified early on that she wanted to work specifically with those who are typically an afterthought in such research.

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An early manifestation of that work was the More Than Muscles program at UC San Diego, where she worked with LGBTQ+ men who experienced muscle dysmorphia.

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“I had a client who was a gay male who also had an eating disorder at that time, and I was also working on some other research that was connected to those topics,” Brown said when detailing why she chose to work primarily with young men. “So then a large portion of what I've done since then [graduate school] has been looking at eating disorders in particularly underrepresented groups, young men, and then LGBTQ+ folks.”

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In Brown’s nondescript office on Cary Hall’s second floor, the ACCEPT Lab’s relative novelty is apparent. After moving from Thatch Hall at the beginning of the Fall 2022 semester, the mostly-barren beige walls still contain only necessary office furniture, seating for four guests, various diplomas and a picture of her jet-black mini schnauzer Stella she hand-painted herself – the necessities.

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Her work with the lab has garnered the attention of hundreds of other researchers at dozens of universities across the nation. Internationally it has also been implemented in Brazil to determine if it can be replicated across nationalities and continents. So far, it can.

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Get Brown talking about the program long enough and her pale blue eyes begin to sparkle like the Southern California shoreline she spent most of her childhood summers at. Her dedication and passion for helping those enrolled in the program is borderline obsessive.

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Yet there’s good reason for that.

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“Typically, I think when most people think about an eating disorder, they think about a young, white, maybe affluent, probably straight woman,” Brown said. “So a lot of our work has been trying to help expand that definition a little bit about what folks with body image concerns or eating disorders look like.”

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That expansion can be a lifeline for young men struggling to find their place in the world.

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Seba Bakoyema, a peer group leader with ACCEPT, always considered himself skinny growing up. He thought it was a bad thing, and snide comments about his size from peers never helped. Such comments even brought about “multiple low points” as he struggled with self-image and body acceptance while attending Loveless Academic Magnet Program in Montgomery.

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“It actually helped a lot with [my] mental health and how I viewed my own body, which is what our main goal is: to help men be able to be more comfortable in their bodies without having to change it,” Bakoyema said about how Brown’s ACCEPT program helped him personally.

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After going through the program himself, Bakoyema had the opportunity to lead a peer group, and that was when he began to work directly with Brown herself. That relationship made all the difference when it came to how he viewed their work.

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“I definitely view her as more of a mentor. She is one of the best mentors I'd say that I've ever had, just because she's very easy to approach,” Bakoyema said of Brown. “She's always seemed very nice, very enthusiastic about this work. She's kind of passed that down to me because at first, I was just doing it to get involved in something. But now I actually care about the work that we're doing.”

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To those who know her best, this is no surprise.

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A true California kid with light blonde hair and a quiet yet open personality, Brown was born and raised in San Diego to Kevin and Michelle Brown, a CPA and stay-at-home mom respectively. Hers was an idyllic childhood, with both parents highly involved in her swim meets and her younger brother Trent’s tennis matches.

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There were the routine hour-and-a-half drives to Palm Springs to spend weekends with a close-knit and large network of friends who would congregate and share meals together under the swaying palm trees by the pool, and summers spent at the beach soaking up the intense sunshine and battling the 115-degree temperatures in the waves near the border with Mexico.

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Growing up, Brown had several career interests: a movie star, although her camera shyness allowed her to identify early on that she probably wouldn’t make it on the silver screen; a fiction writer, although she did not believe the children’s book she wrote about her childhood cat Simba would have been commercially viable; an Olympic swimmer, although she recognized she was just talented enough for a scholarship at a small Division-I school.

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Once she entered middle school, Brown’s life became increasingly dominated by academics and athletics. There was little room for much else.

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A perfectionist to the point where even her parents would have to calm her down if she made a B in a class or fail to finish first in the 200-meter backstroke, she was also taught from an early age to work hard and put others first.

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Those traits are readily apparent in her today.

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For researchers under her wing in the ACCEPT Lab such as Jorge Castro Lebron, a research project coordinator, those life lessons instilled in her shine through in her approach to leading and helping others.

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”I really knew immediately how lucky I was to have somebody so supportive and healthy,” Lebron said of Brown. “I think that's what really impressed me with having such an amazing mentor/supervisor. Personal work with everything, it was just her balance of warmth, but strength and support, that really probably the best thing I could have asked for from a first job.”

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While Brown is proud of the work she has done helping young men accept and love themselves, she wants to be known for more than just her work: she wants to be known for her love for others.

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“I would want people to say that I was somebody who was passionate about trying to be a good and caring and loving friend, a compassionate friend and family member,” Brown said. “That I tried to bring awareness to parts of expanding our understanding of eating disorders in different groups and trying to make things more equitable. That overall is the legacy I would like to leave here.”