episode 208: how do you know when your body looks good enough?
Hey everyone, I had a totally different episode planned for today, but this topic has been living rent-free in my brain. So here we go. A stylist I follow on Instagram had a tummy tuck, and her journey sparked some big questions about body image and our obsession with "fixing" ourselves.
Why do we chase after the idea of looking like we've never aged, had kids, or lived life?
Where do we draw the line between personal choice and societal pressure?
I dive into my own experiences, including a nose job at 16, and how I’ve navigated similar decisions.
This is a raw, honest conversation about the expectations we place on ourselves—and each other—to look a certain way. No judgment, just curiosity and awareness.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one. Let's keep the conversation going.
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208 - 12:12:24, 11.25 AM
[00:00:00] Welcome to the diet diaries, a podcast where we have candid, heartfelt conversations that will help you figure out what, why, and how to eat. So you can feel amazing in your body because it's time to break the all or nothing mindset of yo yo dieting, food obsession, and feeling ruled by the scale. I'm your host, body image and nutrition coach, Jordana Edelstein.
I'm so happy you're here.
Hey everyone. It's episode 208 of the diet diaries, and I'm doing a total pivot right now. This is not the episode I planned on recording today but there's something I've just been thinking a lot about and I just Wanted to talk about it, and maybe I'm just talking to myself, but I figured okay I'm gonna record an episode because I do actually think this is something that Takes up space in a lot of people's brains, so here's what it is.
There's a woman that I follow on Instagram Her name is Brittany Sandstone. She's like a stylist slash influencer I'm sorry [00:01:00] Um, and I follow her. I, do I like her? I don't know. Like I have found some really cute things. She has helped me, seeing how she dresses has helped me find my own sense of style. I really like the way she puts outfits together.
I like the things that she wears. Um, following her and just watching her has given me a lot of inspiration. That's the primary reason I follow her. She buys more clothes than literally one human could wear like in an entire lifetime. Um, she does not have a body. She's very petite. very small. Um, so really like, you know, we don't really have any similarities in terms of like our bodies or anything like that.
I really follow her just because I've gotten a lot of inspiration from her, which is great. Um, kind of on the flip side of things, she had a tummy tuck last week. And so she has been talking about it a lot on social media. Um, she's been talking, I mean, it's a major surgery and she's been like really detailing like the recovery.
the pain, what the experience has been like, [00:02:00] dealing with the drains, the back pain, dealing with the bandages and the binders and all of this stuff. And she's been very open with like how, how difficult it has been, how painful it has been. And And she said, she's like, this was obviously an elective surgery.
I chose to do this. And I think that it just brings up such an important conversation. And this is something I've talked about on the podcast before I've done other episodes about this. Um, which is there are so many things out there that we can do to change our appearances. Endless, endless, endless, endless.
And how do you know what are the right things to do for you? And when it's enough, when you draw the line. Um, and I just think this is such an important and interesting conversation. And, You know, she's talking about how painful this is, and she's talking about how she's wanted to do it for a very long time, but she's got kids.
She has an 18 year old son and a 12 year old son, and she's like, I have known since my second son was, you know, however old. I [00:03:00] don't know. When they knew they weren't gonna have any more kids, she's like, I've always wanted to do this. Um, and so it was not like a snap decision or anything like that. It's something I've been thinking about for a very long time.
And, you know, she was like, I knew after I had kids my stomach was never going to be the same again. And, it's so interesting, there's another influencer that I don't follow her anymore, this other girl, um, What is her name? Claire Tamaro. I stopped following her quite some time ago, who also had a tummy tuck and a boob job like maybe a year ago or so.
This is often called the mommy makeover. Um, she also lost kind of dramatic amounts of weight kind of leading into that. You could just, you could, you know, just notice it on her. And yes, I am commenting about her body, right? Like this is the, this is a conversation about that in some respects. Not about commenting, but just about noticing people's physical appearances, right?
Which we do, right? It is human nature. If someone has done something to physically alter their appearance, we are going to notice it. That is totally normal. The things we [00:04:00] say, what we do with that noticing, that's kind of, I think, where the interesting conversations are. Okay. But it's like we, I think the reason I think this is so important, interesting to talk about, right, is because there are so many things we can do to our appearances.
And all of it, all of it, all of it, all of it, from hair coloring, to teeth whitening, to Botox, to Dysport, to um, Invisalign, to tummy tucks, to boob jobs, to liposuction, to cool sculpt, I mean, and all the things in between. are all in an effort to look like we have not been through the things of life that we have been through.
Whether that be age, whether that be child bearing a child, whether that be stress, um, we want to look as if those things haven't happened. And we also want to look like [00:05:00] everyone else looks. And if you think about it, if it wasn't about those things, If we wouldn't, we wouldn't do this stuff, right? If we didn't feel a need to look a certain way, but just to look like how everyone else looks, and we didn't feel a need to not look like we've had kids, to not have gray hair, to not have wrinkles, to not look like we have lived life, to not look like we have been alive for X number of years, we wouldn't need to do these things.
And that is not a judgment or a criticism of anyone. I am going to say it now. I've said it many times before. I had a nose job when I was 16. So I've had major plastic surgery, um, at a very, very young age. Um, but It is really being honest with yourself. I just think like, you know, I look, I think about women having like this woman, Brittany, going through this surgery.
I mean, very painful. It's a major abdominal surgery, major abdominal surgery, right? They are [00:06:00] reconstructing your abdominal wall, um, the muscles, the skin, all the connective tissue, like, It's major surgery. Um, when you have drains in your body, it's a major surgery. You can't stand up straight for weeks. You can't, she's like talking, she's out of breath because you can't talk.
You can't take full breaths because everything is so tight. She's like, it literally felt like I have a corset on my body and it is on fire. That's what she said it felt like. And it's like, Oh my God, that we, that women are putting themselves through this to look as if they haven't had a baby because having a body that looks like it's had a baby we've been told is not okay.
And it's so fucked up. It makes me so mad. That we have been put in this position to have to go through things like this, right? No, nobody has forced her to do this. Obviously, she has made the choice. And I think about this. You couldn't pay me money to have a tummy tuck. Am I a candidate? A thousand percent am I a candidate for a tummy tuck.
[00:07:00] I, you could not pay me money to do that. Because I am not willing to go through that kind of pain for my stomach to look a certain way. Now, again, that is not a judgment on her at all because we all fall to these things. Why do I get my hair colored? I mean, it's the same, it's the same reason, but on a kind of a different spectrum of the severity and the invasiveness of the procedure.
Right? But it comes from the same place. Um, I've talked openly. I have AM four, I'm almost 44 and a half years old. Not that I'm like. That sounds silly that I'm saying that more just to give you an idea of like how old I am and I have not Injected anything into my face. I have no plans to could that change at some point?
Of course, I'm never gonna say never but I have no plans to do that It feels totally out of alignment with what feels comfortable for me. It feels like I would not be myself I wouldn't look like myself. I wouldn't be myself if I did that Now, again, this is coming from someone who had a nose job at 16.
Um, and again, that's not [00:08:00] judgment on people who do do this, because the pressure and the expectation to look, again, as if we haven't aged, as if we haven't had kids, those are kind of the two big things. If you haven't aged, and you haven't had kids, those are the two, I think, big things. Factors that cause us to do these things is immense and it's there's so many factors that influence our ability to navigate that to make choices around that and Again, I I just I just I love talking about this because I think it's so interesting and I think it's something that people don't talk About what people do talk about and I did an entire podcast episode about this I'll try to remember to link it is like oh if it makes you happy do it and I call bullshit on that This is not about making you happy because that comes back to my original question was, well, where do you draw the line, right?
If you can get a tummy tuck and look like you never, your stomach never carried a baby. If you can get a boob job and look like you never either breastfed. I mean, I didn't breastfeed. My boobs are still saggy as all hell. You know, if you can, you know, [00:09:00] get Botox and laser treatment and look like you've never been out in the sun.
Like you haven't aged past, you know, being 21 years old. If you can whiten your teeth and look like you haven't drank coffee all your life. If you can call your hair and look like you're not 40 years old with gray hair, where do you draw the line? How do you know when it's enough? And to say that it's about, Oh, what makes you happy?
I don't, I don't buy that because it's like buying clothes, like, especially like this woman, Brittany, who just, all she does all day long is literally post links, links to clothes. I mean, literally, I don't, this woman will die and have an entire wardrobe of unworn clothes in her closet. Um, and she's, I'm making an assumption, you know, clearly pretty wealthy and can afford to buy a lot of very high end things.
And she does a mix of stuff, whatever. And again, I've gotten a lot of good ideas from her. Like I really do enjoy following her. Um, she has not made me second guess anything about myself. She's not made me feel bad about myself. Watching her go through this tummy tuck process has not made me look at my body and be like, I'm disgusting.
If anything, [00:10:00] it's made me say, you know what? I feel really good about the choices I'm making and gotten me thinking about the pressure and expectations that we are under. I was making a whole point two minutes ago and I totally lost what it was because I went off on a tangent. Um, but oh, it was about like knowing when you're happy, right?
It's like especially now it's holiday time, right? We just came through black friday. People are shopping like crazy. I'm gonna buy this. I'm gonna buy this I'm gonna buy this and you think that that next thing is gonna be the thing that's gonna make you happy and you buy The thing and it comes and you wear it but then two days later you're buying something else.
It's the same thing um So it's like this is when it comes back to like how accepting certain parts about our body, looking at what we are being put up against and why we are doing what we are doing, why we are making these physical alterations to our appearance, why we are doing that and recognizing we were never all meant to look this way.
We were never all meant to have flat stomachs. We were never all meant to have [00:11:00] flawless dewy glass like skin. That's like not even normal to have glass like skin. We were never all meant to have. Blonde, highlighted, caramel colored, beachy wave hair through the age of 75, right? Like genetically, that's not what being a human is.
And we have become so disconnected from that. And because of that, none of this will like, ever be enough, right? It becomes bound by finances in some cases, like what you can afford, and this stuff is not cheap. I've never gotten Botox. I know it's not cheap. I know people have gotten laser treatments. I mean, talking thousands of dollars and things that require maintenance, I mean, a tummy tuck, elective surgery, oh my God, 35, at least.
Um, I mean, there's a very small percentage of the population that has the type of disposable income to be able to do that. Um, And then the kind of the second thing I wanted to talk about in relation to this is then we compare ourselves to those people, right? You look at women who've done a lot of these [00:12:00] procedures, but we may not know that they've done that, right?
You may not know that a woman's had a tummy tuck and you look at her and you're like, oh my god, look at her abs. She's got a fletched, such a flat stomach. How is she had two kids? Well, she had two kids and her stomach looked like it had two kids and then she did Had it quote fixed and again, that's not a judgment on her It's an awareness that we need to have right when you look at a woman who doesn't have any age spots or freckles and no Lines in her forehead and you know, she's 45 or 50 and you're like, oh my god Like does she just have great genes or did she get Botox?
Who knows could be either But likely, for most people, she's probably had Botox, and that's fine. But then don't compare yourself to her and expect to look that, to look that way. And like that, that becomes the new bar. It's no different than constantly comparing yourself to people who are using Instagram filters.
Right, and this woman Brittany uses filters all the time. It says it in the top corner whenever she speaks to camera It's on a filter. Now Sharon says so, who I love in adore, also uses a filter and she's not you know her She's a government teacher, right? So it's everywhere. We look it's everywhere. It's insidious [00:13:00] and It's we start to forget what it is to exist in a normal human body.
What happens to your body when you do bear a child and all of the normal things that go along with that, right? Cellulite, stretch marks, loose skin, normal, normal, normal, normal. And yet there are opportunities out there to spend very large amounts of money and go through extreme, extreme amounts of pain.
in order to not look like you have done that because to look like you have done that is wrong and bad. And again, like this is the world we're living in. The reality is like that's not going to change. And so it's us to up, up to us, up to us, up to us, to have the awareness, to have the conversations, to get honest with ourselves, to talk to the women in our lives that we love and care about and help Cultivate their awareness so that we can all be making choices that are in alignment [00:14:00] with what matters to us and with what it is to exist and live in a human body.
Because we are forgetting very, very quickly what that means. And I include myself. Like, it's hard. Like, I include myself. I am doing this work right alongside you. That's why I'm talking about it. I'm not talking about it because I'm preaching to you or because I've got it all figured out. I'm talking to you because I think about it a lot.
That's Because of what I do for a living and because of the women that I talk to and the body image struggles that we collectively have, my own body image struggles, and the things that I see and observe out there and the way that I know that they are impacting us. And this has been really top of mind for me.
She announced that she was doing this like a month ago, maybe. And um, I was like, Oh, this is going to be interesting. And Yeah, it's just you know, and I'll be honest with you like I'm this is me being brutally honest I've she's never shown her body. She's never shown I mean, she's been she's been in bathing suits and whatnot, and I never noticed that she had any type of loose skin, right?
She specifically talked about loose skin. She's very [00:15:00] small She's like a size 25 or 26 because she talks about that openly. She's short. She's very petite, right? So in my mind, I'm like what you already have a flat stomach, right? This this is the thing about body images. I look at her body and I'm like she has the ideal So, humanity's ideal body type for a woman.
She's short, I guess would be the only quote, you know, stereotypical downside. She's not tall, but she's petite. She's small. She's got a weight, a small waist. She's got what I perceive to be as a flat stomach. But when she sees herself in the mirror. She doesn't see all of that, probably. I don't know what she sees because she hasn't talked about it, but clearly she sees a problem.
Clearly she sees something that she doesn't like because she just paid a lot of money and is currently going through a lot of pain in order to change it. And that is the thing about body images. I look at her and I see something, but I haven't, lived her life. I haven't lived in her body. I don't have her lived experiences.
And again, it's just a reminder of the fact that body image is an opinion. It's not a fact. It is [00:16:00] based on our beliefs and our experiences. It is not an outright fact like grass is green and the sky is blue. My stomach looks fat. It's not a fact. My stomach is gross. It's not a fact. I have loose skin fact.
The meaning that I assigned to having loose skin, the way that I feel about that loose skin, not a fact. And so again, I just think these conversations are so important. We can never have them enough. So I've already done a bunch of episodes about this. Here's another one and it will not be the last. Um, if you have thoughts on this, I would love to hear them.
Reach out to me. I'd love to have a conversation. I love talking about this. Um, that's what I wanted to share. Thanks for listening and I'll be back next week.