episode 252: what does it really mean to be happy with your body?
There’s a version of today’s conversation that stays polite and surface-level…and then there’s the version I decided to record today.
I’m talking about the pressure women feel to “fix” their bodies, why so many of us are trying to escape any sense of emotional discomfort, and what it really means when we say a cosmetic procedure “makes me happy.”
This one of the most honest episodes I’ve ever recorded—and if you feel called out and uncomfortable, then I’ve done my job. Because complacency around this is NOT ok.
In this episode, I get into:
* the real reason we feel drawn to surgeries, lasers, and injections
* how social media makes it feel like everyone is doing it
* the difference between happiness and relief
* why peer pressure doesn’t end in middle school
* what happens when every woman strives to look the same
* how this impacts our kids (yes — even our sons)
* the internal work I’m choosing to do instead of “fixing” myself
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252
[00:00:00] Hello. Hello. Hello friends. Thanks for being here. Thanks for listening. This is episode 250, something of a diet diary as we are coming up. This might even be right around five years. Crazy, unbelievable. I can't believe I've had a podcast for five years. Five years feels like a long time. So I wanna talk about body image today, and I wanna talk about plastic surgery and injections and tummy tucks and boob jobs and lasers and all that fun stuff.
Um. And I always liked when I talk about this stuff, it's been kind of a while. I like to talk about the fact that I had a nose job when I was 16. Um, I was severely bullied in middle school, like really, really bad. And uh, that's why I had a nose job, basically. Um, and I will tell you that I do not love my nose by any stretch of the imagination.
It's fine. Um, but I look back at pictures of my nose when I was in high school and I'm like, wow, that really was quote unquote not that bad. Um. I share that more just about the fact that I've [00:01:00] had plastic surgery so that I'm, I'm someone who's speaking from experience and yes, I'm a sample size of one. My experience is not everybody else's experience.
Um. Um, but it's valuable and it means something. So that's why I'm talking about it. And really, there's something that's really been on my mind lately, and this is, I, I did a bit of a reel about this, a bit of, I did a reel, uh, TikTok about this a couple weeks ago and I'll link it. Got a really good response in terms of that, like people I think, felt really seen.
Um, and basically the, the post was about the fact that. It seems like everywhere you look on social media, you see people showing their tummy tuck, showing their boob jobs, talking about how much they love Botox, showing like what they look like the day after they got a laser, when their face is all red and like fucked up and like really owning it.
Like really owning the fact that they did these things, which I'm all here for. Like cool. I, I think that's, you know, pretending that you look the way you do. Because you drink a lot of water and eat vegetables and work out like it is fucking bullshit. So I really appreciate the fact that people [00:02:00] are sharing that and owning up to it.
But on the flip side, it literally feels like everybody's getting a fucking tummy tuck. That's literally how it feels on social media. Um, that doesn't mean that's actually true, but that's how it feels. And as we all know, the old cliche perception is reality. And that impacts us, right? That perception impacts us.
And so the real was me showing my, um, definitely not tummy unum, tucked body and saggy boobs and all of that. Um, just trying to give representation, trying to give voice to bodies, um, that. Bear the outcomes of childbirth and weight gain and weight loss and weight gain and all of that over the years. And, um, what happens is we age in cellulite and stretch marks and all of these things and having yellow teeth and sunspots and wrinkles and lines and um, no visible jawline and all these things that are completely normal parts of being in a human body.
And at the same time create an insane amount of emotional discomfort and unease. And. [00:03:00] Uh, dare I even say the word hatred for a lot of people. And so tummy tucks and boob jobs and lasers and injections become a way to fix that discomfort. We are like on a quest to fix those problems. And that's really what I wanted to talk about today, is that women are under an incredible amount of pressure to look a certain way.
I fully acknowledge that. And whenever I do these episodes, like I'm not, I hope it doesn't come off as I'm passing judgment on people who choose to do stuff because I know how hard it is. And at the same time, I also need to acknowledge that. We are using plastic surgery as a way to fix, to get out of the incredible discomfort we feel about how our body looks because it doesn't look the way that we are told it needs to look.
It looks the way it, I'm gonna use the word should, [00:04:00] should look after having a baby, after having gained and loss and gained weight after having been out in the sun for 40 years after having lived 40, 45, 50, 55, 60 plus years of life. This is how a human body looks as a result of those experiences. No different than, like, if you, um, leave a, uh, I'm trying to like, think of a good example.
Um. If you, you know, leave a plant out in the sun like without watering it or this, that's a terrible example. Um, it's just, it's the natural course of science is basically what I'm trying to say. Um, like if you leave a cup of water outside, it's going to evaporate, right? It's science, right? If a human lives and, and carries a child and goes out in the sun and lives X amount of years, their body is going to look a certain way, right?
It's normal and. Right. All those things have been made to be problems. Right. And that's where the, the pressure comes in. But my, my, the thing I've been thinking about [00:05:00] is that we're just trying to fix that discomfort. And you hear, you hear these women who like talk about the fact they've had a tummy tuck.
Right. They talk about, I mean, and I know I had, I have a friend or two who have done it. It is extremely, it is an extremely painful recovery. Extremely painful. Um, and certainly it gets better over the course of time, but you're not allowed to stand up straight. You're fully wrapped in bandages, you're bent over because you can't, like, stretch and open up those muscles.
Um, you have drains in, um, very, very painful and it's like we're willing to endure that extreme physical pain. Yes, it's for a finite amount of time. So that we don't have to deal with the emotional discomfort of what our body looks like. And it kind of blows my mind, you guys, like that's, that's what's happening.
Like there's no, there's no two ways around that we do these things to our appearance because we are unhappy with how we [00:06:00] look. And that creates a lot of emotional discomfort and unease. And again, like I think I said the word hatred. And even if it's not hatred, like really dislike. And so we need to fix that.
We cannot tolerate that discomfort and we need to do something about it. So we have surgery and we're willing to tolerate the, the pain, the recovery time, the money, all of these things. We'll tolerate that just so we don't have to look how we look because we are not willing to do any work to sit with the discomfort.
That we have about our appearances. And you guys, that's really fucking scary to me. I'm not gonna lie. It's really disturbing and like. I was thinking, I was thinking about The Handmaid's Tale. Um, and you know how they wear the red outfits and the white hats, and they're all made to look the same. All the women in that show were made to look the same, whatever your class was.
So it doesn't even, [00:07:00] it's not even about The Handmaids themselves. Whatever class you wore, you wore the same outfit as every other woman. Right? The commander's wives wore green. The, um, the, the, the, what are they called? Not the ants, the other ones who wore the brown. Uh, the Marthas wore brown. The Handmaids wore red.
You wore the same thing you were made to look like everyone else. And we watch that show and we're fucking disgusted. That's, that's not, that's not even the right word by how demoralizing, demeaning it is to women to make them all wear the same thing so they all look the same. 'cause they're all treated the same.
And yet we do things to alter our appearance to look the same as everyone else. You guys, that's what we're doing. And. You can be like, no, no, no. That's not what I'm doing. It's what you're doing. It's a thousand percent what you're doing. And you may not like that. That's a very, very uncomfortable truth, but it is what you're doing.
Every boob job, tummy tuck, injection, liposuction, nose job, laser peel is so that you [00:08:00] can look like a woman is quote unquote supposed to look, which is basically like every other woman looks now. I already said this, but I fully acknowledge this comes from the patriarchy, right? This comes, these are pressures and expectations that have been put on us by men and by, by sociology and culture and all these things.
And also we have autonomy, right? If you are a woman and you can afford. Any of these procedures, you also have the autonomy to make a choice around them. Nobody's forcing you to do this, and we do have to take responsibility for our own actions. So yes, we can acknowledge that these systemic pressures and expectations exist, and we can also acknowledge that we can fight against 'em and we can make choices.
And when we choose. To have surgery to change our appearance so that we can look like everyone else to fit in with the expectations of that [00:09:00] patriarchy. We are not fighting against it. We are just feeding into it. We are fueling it. We are, we are, we are propagating it. We are like, we are making it continue to exist and that's really disturbing.
And I am, I am part of that, right? I am. I am not like I, I just bought a, a cream a couple weeks ago that helps fade dark spots on your skin, right? That are naturally there. 'cause the time I spent the sun, I had a nose job at 16. Well, decisions you make at 16 decisions you make at 45 are very different. But yet I did because I wanted my nose to look like everyone else's nose, right?
Because I was made fun of. 'cause my nose didn't look like everybody else's nose. So I fixed it to make it look like everyone else's nose. So when you have a tummy tuck to get rid of loose skin or fat, or you have saggy boobs and you get a boob lift, or you have liposuction so your thighs don't touch, you are fixing the way your body looks because you are not able to tolerate the discomfort of it because you don't look the way that [00:10:00] everyone else looks and the way that you're told that you are supposed to look.
And it's really fucking hard to exist like that. And also I believe that we have a responsibility though, to push back against it because what are we doing then? What are we doing for the next generation and not just of daughters, of, of all kids. What are we telling them? We're telling them that the only way to be happy is if you look like everyone else looks, that you can't push back against kind of these systemic expectations.
Like, what the fuck? It's crazy. Um, it's, and it's like, it's really. Upsetting to me. Um, and I've just been spending so much time thinking about this and the way that this is just talked about and yeah, it's like, it's cool to own your plastic surgery, but like, why are you doing that? And this starts to bring up the whole conversation of, well, it makes me happy.
Okay. Why does it make you happy? [00:11:00] Does it really make you happy to sit in 10 days of extreme pain after a tummy tuck? Does it really make you happy to not be able to go out in public for four days after you've had a a CO2 laser on your face? Does it really make you happy to spend thousands of dollars a year on Botox?
I don't know. Probably not. Like, let's be honest, those things don't make you happy. Does the outcome of those things make you happy? Yeah, I get it right. Obviously, I'm not trying to say that like you can't be happy from things that create temporary discomfort, but the bigger question is. What does that mean?
Why does it make you happy? It makes you happy because you no longer have to deal with the discomfort of not liking how you look. It makes you happy. 'cause now you look the way you've been told you're supposed to look. It makes you happy 'cause you now look like everyone else. Like when you go on. If you on social media and you look at before and after plastic surgery photos, and I, I would bet that most of you listening have probably done that at some point.
Whether it's shown up on your feed now, it's probably going to, because despite what they tell you that the phone's not listening, the phone's fucking [00:12:00] listening. Um. And you'll see like the, the properties that they're looking for in a face, right? In terms of cheekbones and lip size and symmetry and proportions and all of this.
There's a, there's a look that everyone is going for, right? People don't, people don't want thin lips. They want really big. Full lips. People don't want round faces. They want super quote unquote snatched jawlines with really defined cheekbones, right? Everyone's going after the same look. People aren't having plastic surgery to have rolling bellies.
They're having plastic surgery to have super flat stomachs. People aren't having plastic surgery to have saggy boobs or having plastic surgery to have perky lifted boobs. Everyone is making these changes to look the same way, and if you. Can't acknowledge that. Like you, like I, I love you, but I'm sorry.
Like you have to acknowledge that. I can acknowledge that. Right. I can acknowledge that when I put makeup on my face or when I put concealer under my eyes, it's because I don't like how the [00:13:00] darkness under my eyes looks right. I can wait. Or when I fill in my eyebrows, 'cause I don't like how they look.
Right? Or when I had Invisalign, which was really for like grinding teeth and jaw pain, but like. Because I didn't like, you know how my teeth weren't straight. So like you have to acknowledge that what you are doing to change your appearance is to make you look like everyone else. And I don't actually think that's happiness.
That's just like a guise that we're all existing under, and it's an easy fucking excuse. And you see all these influencers. I did a podcast about her a couple years ago. I've talked about this many times over the course of the podcast. It's been five years now, like I said. But this one, uh, influencer that I followed who her whole account was all about being like a size 12, 14.
She was petite and she was all like body image and like, quote unquote self-love and showing her stomach and all that. And then she, um, went on a GLP one, got a tummy tuck and a boob job and totally changed her whole thing. Where she doesn't talk about any of that. [00:14:00] She's just like, oh, like size two, size four, fashion and mom life and whatever.
Um. And I remember when she had her plastic surgery, she talked about, well, this, this makes me happy. And I did a whole episode. I'm like, well, what the fuck does that mean? It makes you happy. It makes you happy to look like everyone else. That's what we're doing, and I'm not saying, again, I, I'm taking ownership and responsibility.
Like we're all doing it. We are all doing it, but we have to call ourselves out on it and we have to call, like see it for what it is, and so. And I, and we are responsible for doing work around this if we all just continue to fix our appearances because it makes us uncomfortable to feel that way so that we then therefore look like everyone else eventually, like it will just become like the standard for all of us to fucking look the same.
It will literally be like fucking. Um, Handmaid's Tale or all these other dystopian movies that exist, but we're doing it to [00:15:00] ourselves, right? Yes. I fully acknowledge that where this started from and where it came from, comes from, and that it still exists, right? Is like the male gaze and unrealistic expectations and all these pressures and culture and money and, and jobs, all of this.
Yes, it still exists. And also two things can, and always, almost always are true. We also have autonomy, and I already said this, I'm gonna say it again. If you not, and, and this is not true for everyone, but if you are a woman who has the financial means to be able to do these things, then you also have the financial means to get the support you need to be able to work through it.
Not all women have that. Okay. But the women who don't have those resources are also not affording $150,000, you know, deep plain facelifts and 75 grand tummy tucks, right? 'cause that's how much this stuff costs, probably even more, right? These are things that are afforded to the very, very wealthy and privileged, um, who then I, and then, and then what happens is we, these women then [00:16:00] create, they, we, we continue to perpetuate this, and then we make other women feel like they have to do this, right?
Yeah, everyone knows the Gandhi quote, be the change you wish to see in the world. It's totally fucking hypocritical to talk about wanting your daughter to love her body and accept herself and yay feminism and all this. But then to go and not be willing to do any of the internal work on ourselves to be able to sit with the fact that we don't love everything about our appearance.
That we have jowls and lines and stretched out stomachs and cellulite and thighs that rub together and boobs that drop down to our belly button, right? If we want things to change, we have to be willing to do that work. I did a post about this a couple years ago was, it was a post where I was like in a two piece bathing suit and my stomach was out and I showed a picture and I'm like, you've, if you want to see more women.[00:17:00]
With wearing, um, like showing their bellies and feeling comfortable in their bodies. You have to be a woman who does that. You can't just wait for it to happen. Like, yeah, I'm getting like super fired up about this because it, it, it's, I get it because I'm a woman living that and also, yeah, I'm doing that work.
Right, like I am not getting Botox. I am not getting lasers. I'm not getting plastic surgery, and I'm not saying, oh, I'm better than all of you. That's not it at all. But I am doing internal work. Doesn't mean that I don't want those things. I can't stand, I have no visible jawline from the side, and my face has been this way forever.
I have like, so anytime I have like a double chin basically all the time, not just when I look down at like a very severe angle, in a really shitty picture, like I have no visible jawline on my face. I do not like the way it looks. I don't like it. And also I am, I do work to work on that, to sit with that.
It's hard. It's really hard. You guys. Like, [00:18:00] and it makes me angry sometimes that like, sometimes I feel alone, like I'm gonna start to cry. Like sometimes I feel alone in doing this. And I know that's not true 'cause I know there's a lot of you out there, but we just don't have any representation. That's really, I think what I'm trying to get at, and that's what that post was about a couple of weeks ago, was like giving voice and giving visual representation to women who are doing some of this internal work.
And again, this is not like a team B team, this is not like trying to to, to pit us against each other. That's not it at all. But I do think that like we have to take responsibility for what we're doing and we have to acknowledge like how our actions are impacting both ourselves, impacting other women, impacting our kids.
And again, not just our daughters, right? So like I have a son, I have a 13-year-old son. Do I want him to think that a woman's only attracted if she looks a certain way? No, I don't want him to think that, and I'm hoping that because he's growing up with a mom who has a stomach that rolls over, who has lines on her face, who has a [00:19:00] double chin, who has yellow teeth and all this, that he will be used to seeing that.
Um. Yeah, like if you are someone who's fixing everything about your appearance, what do you expect your kids to think about? You're they're gonna wanna fix their appearance too. They're gonna think, well, it's not okay to look like that. And if you tell them you're doing it because it makes you happy, like, I'm sorry.
Like that's not actually, it's making you happy 'cause you're avoiding dealing with it. It is making you happy 'cause you're looking like everybody else and I don't think that actually makes you happy. That's just, it's just a guise to justify it, to make it seem publicly okay. But really it's about escaping the discomfort of not liking how you look, being so uncomfortable, so emotionally uncomfortable with how your face, your body, your skin looks, that you can't deal with it, so you have to fix it.
That's not happiness. You have to call it what it is. And again, I know this sounds like judgment, but again, I'm gonna say like I do these things too, [00:20:00] right? Like, you know, this is, let's be honest, like that's really what makeup is like, and I love wearing makeup, but let's be honest, I like how I look better when I have makeup on.
I will say that. And what does that mean? What are the implications of that? But again, like I'm also doing work. I'm also choosing, like I have so many fucking lines in my forehead. I am such a candidate for so many injections that people out there get. I'm choosing not to do it. I'm choosing to do the work and to find beauty in other ways and to learn to, and.
Be okay with, and even like my appearance without that stuff. And again, it's really fucking hard. And this is really a challenge to you if you're listening and if you're someone who's listening who's already thinking about this and doing this, great. Send it to someone who's maybe struggled. Like I think that we are doing a huge disservice to ourselves in the long run by not.
Calling this out. So yeah, I'm like calling everyone out in a really big way. And it might hurt your feelings and you might feel judged, but again, I'm trying to be, I'm trying to take responsibility and be really honest, but you've also gotta [00:21:00] own your own choices and behaviors and you've really gotta understand what are the impacts and the repercussions of that.
And you have to get really fucking honest with yourself and like. Yeah, I mean, this might be the most fired up I've ever gotten on a podcast. But I think this is so important and I think that this whole, well, it makes me happy and it makes me feel good. Well, it makes you feel good again because you look like everyone else.
I mean, it's like, it's like peer pressure in the most ultimate form, right? Think about when you're 10, 11, 12, 13 years old and all your friends are doing something and you really wanna do it too. Something that might be stupid or that might be harmful, and you do it anyway to. Fit in, right? Because fitting in and belonging is a natural part of the human experience, right?
So I acknowledge that and the desire to fit in and the desire to feel attractive, right? These are normal parts of being a human. And also important parts and normal parts of being a human are understanding your values and understanding what [00:22:00] happiness actually means, and being honest with yourself and acknowledging the reality of what it is to exist in a human body, which is not the bullshit story that we've been sold our entire lives.
Right. That's a huge part of this too. Like there's so much to it. Um, I totally just lost my train of thought. I knew that was gonna happen sometime in this podcast. Um, but we have got to, we have got to own this stuff. I was just saying something really important you guys, and I totally lost it,
man. I hate when that happens. We've got to own this stuff and we've got to be honest with ourselves and we've got to think about. How is our behavior, how is our choices, again, impacting not just us, but other women are in our lives, our kids? Oh, I was talking about peer pressure. I knew it would come back to me, right?
Like if you are with a whole bunch of women who have all gotten Botox and lasers and their [00:23:00] skin looks like. You know, they look 15 years younger than their age, so to speak. You're gonna feel pressured to do that too. You're gonna think that you don't look okay, because now suddenly everyone around you, every other 45, 50 5-year-old woman doesn't look the way a 45, 50 5-year-old human looks.
They look the way a 25 or 30 5-year-old human looks, and you're gonna feel pressured to do that, but you gotta call out what that is. Right. Like you gotta, you gotta notice and name that. You gotta acknowledge that shit. Like you don't want your kids to be peer pressured into doing things that aren't right for them or that are against their values or they know or wrong choice.
But yet women left and right are doing this all the time. And we have to take responsibility for that. You want your kid to take responsibility for not being peer pressured. Dude, you gotta do it too. And again, I know this sounds harsh, but like we have to call it out and. You know, even if you feel like you can't change anything, you've [00:24:00] gotta name it.
You've gotta call it for what it is. Say to yourself, I'm doing this because I don't know how to tolerate looking like this, and it feels easier to me to endure the pain and the money and the time of fixing it than to deal with that. Okay? That's at least a start. Right. Could you have that conversation with your kid?
I don't know. Those are tough conversations to have. Obviously not with younger kids, but with your 18, 20, 20 5-year-old kid, I don't know, maybe otherwise, what else are you telling them? You don't like something, you don't like something, you just pay money to fix it rather than learning how to work through it.
Like what does that actually, what does that actually mean? It's like, not it, it's, it's. We as humans. Again, it goes back to like, well, it makes me happy. Well, guess what? Happiness is not like the be all, end all, and it's not the defining human emotion. I've shared this before many times, but I read this piece several, many years ago around wholeness, and that wholeness is actually the goal as a human.
And wholeness means feeling happiness, but also feeling all the range of negative emotions [00:25:00] and being able to. Hold those side by side. Being able to tolerate negative emotions, being able to move through them and know how to cope with them versus trying to run away and escape them and try to fix them.
As natural as it is to have sunspots and skin and stretch marks and cellulite, it is equally as normal to feel negative emotions as normal as it is that the sun is orange and the moon is white and the sky is blue, and grass is green. All of these things are as fundamental to life as the next thing, and so it's okay to feel to not like how you look.
It's okay. It's not a problem. It's not a bad thing. Learning how to tolerate that is a huge life skill, right? Because you not, you can't fix everything that makes you uncomfortable. There are so many things that happen in life that we cannot quote unquote fix. [00:26:00] And we have to know how to tolerate that stuff.
And if every time we feel uncomfortable about something, we just try to fix it or when we can, what? What is that developing for us? Um, so yeah, I, I feel like I just yelled into the microphone and I'm gonna wrap this up because I think I got my point across. And again, I am saying this with love. I'm saying this because.
I know what a struggle this is because I have lived it and I had plastic surgery because I was so unhappy with how I looked because I didn't look like everyone else. So I get it and I am someone who has lines and spots and my teeth are super straight now, but they are so fucking yellow. 'cause all my enamels worn off.
I cannot whiten my teeth. My only option is to go literally and get veneers. Pick 25, $50,000. I'm not doing that unless it becomes medically necessary to replace my teeth, which honestly, at some point it might. I don't need to get into my dental history right now, but like I get it. I am not someone who sits here and like, oh my God, I look amazing and I'm doing a hair flip.
If you're, if you're not watching on YouTube, [00:27:00] no. I have to do work every fucking day to feel good about myself. But I do that work and I show up and. More of us need to be doing that around our appearances because we are on a true, we are on a very dangerous trajectory. It's not good guys. And this is not about GLP ones, this is not about weight loss.
If you notice, I have not talked about that at all. 'cause it's not what I'm talking about today. Yes, it is linked to that. But I'm, what I really was focused on was like the plastic surgery side of things and injections, lasers, kind of lumping all that stuff together. Um. Because those things are not connected to health in any way, whereas weight loss is, can be very often connected to health.
Um, it doesn't mean that everyone needs to lose weight to be healthy, but there are some people who do fact, right? You might not like to hear that, but that is a fact. For some people, losing weight will make them healthier. Not everybody, okay? I'm someone who's in the overweight category based on my BMI and my waist [00:28:00] circumference.
Losing weight's not going to make me healthier, okay? I already know that. Um. So this is about, these are about, um, elective optional things that we do, that they're not linked to health, that are purely for aesthetics. And why are we doing them? All right. That was half an hour. That was a long one. Thank you for listening.
I would love, love, love to have a conversation with this. If this resonated with you, if this pissed you off, if you felt called out, if you're like, yes, I hear you. All of the things, I'm here for all of it. Send me a message and, um, thank you guys for being here. Thanks for listening.