For a normalized analytic function $f(z)=z+\sum _{n=2}^{\infty }a_{n}z^{n}$ in the unit disk $\mathbb{D}:=\{z\in \mathbb{C}:|z|<1\}$, the estimate of the integral means $$\begin{eqnarray}L_{1}(r,f):=\frac{r^{2}}{2{\it\pi}}\int _{-{\it\pi}}^{{\it\pi}}\frac{d{\it\theta}}{|f(re^{i{\it\theta}})|^{2}}\end{eqnarray}$$ is an important quantity for certain problems in fluid dynamics, especially when the functions $f(z)$ are nonvanishing in the punctured unit disk $\mathbb{D}\setminus \{0\}$. Let ${\rm\Delta}(r,f)$ denote the area of the image of the subdisk $\mathbb{D}_{r}:=\{z\in \mathbb{C}:|z|<r\}$ under $f$, where $0<r\leq 1$. In this paper, we solve two extremal problems of finding the maximum value of $L_{1}(r,f)$ and ${\rm\Delta}(r,z/f)$ as a function of $r$ when $f$ belongs to the class of $m$-fold symmetric starlike functions of complex order defined by a subordination relation. One of the particular cases of the latter problem includes the solution to a conjecture of Yamashita, which was settled recently by Obradović et al. [‘A proof of Yamashita’s conjecture on area integral’, Comput. Methods Funct. Theory13 (2013), 479–492].