Erin: Welcome to Hotter Than Ever, where we uncover the unconscious rules we've been following. We break those rules and we find a new path to being freer, happier, sexier and more self expressed. I'm your host, Erin Keating.
For those of you who are new to this podcast, welcome, welcome, welcome. For those who are returning, thank you so much for coming back today. I want to talk about the body. I want to talk about my body at age 52. I hate health things. I hate them. I hate medical things. I hate all things about wellness and nutrition. I see them on my social media, I see people talking about all these different physical nutritional plans and treatments and I just want it to go on way. I don't like it. You may feel this way. You may have a healthier relationship with your body and health and wellness. You may have had that for a long time.
It is new for me to be paying attention and giving tender, loving care to my physical self. I'm talking about this today because we all have bodies and at this age we cannot afford to ignore them. I spent most of my life trying to pretend like my body didn't matter, like it wasn't there. And I can't afford to do that anymore. I was lucky that I never had any health problems. I literally have never had any real meaningful health problems until I got very sick with COVID when I was 49 and that became the catalyst for all of the change in my life that I initiated on the eve of turning 50. My health, my well being, was the catalyst for all of the radical reinvention that I am talking about here on this podcast and sharing with you week over week. I think the reason I was so disconnected from my body most of my life was because I was a chubby kid and I was shamed for it.
I was definitely made to feel like I was not acceptable. My body was not good enough. I was a problem that needed to be fixed. I was not athletic and I thought, you know what? The body is a fail. My body is not okay. And it's best to focus on what is between my ears. It is best to focus on my mind and who I am as a human being, my intellect and my thoughts and my emotions. Because my body is just not a place where I'm going to win in life.
It's actually a place where I've already been told I've lost. And eventually I found sexual pleasure, masturbation, and then sex with other people and that became a place of comfort and solace and excitement. And that was kind of the only way that I stayed connected to my physical self. But when I was with partners, you know, early boyfriends, and even, even till today, if I'm totally honest, don't look at my stomach, you know, like, just don't look at my stomach. Like, let's just not talk about my stomach because it is such a source of shame, such a sight of shame. For me, it was always the emblem of my not good enoughness and the fact that I could never be a woman who was, like, treasured for her beauty. And obviously there's a lot of storytelling going on here in my head and in my life around what my body and what it's like, meant for me.
But I'm sharing this because maybe you can relate, maybe you can relate to just valuing your intellect and acting like your body doesn't really count. And I think the older we get, the easier it is to do that. And I think especially if you were a woman who at some point in your life was prized for what your body looked like, that's a tough, tough transition, right? I think my disconnection from my body was a lot of the reason that I was able to be in a marriage where I did not have sex for the last 10 years. My body was not the source of my value, and it sort of stopped being the source of connection to my ex husband, and I preferred to ignore it anyway. And it got pretty extreme, right to. To be so disconnected from your body that you have no sexuality and no pleasure, which is something I had prized as a younger person. It was clearly a sign that something was very, very wrong with the life that I was living. For me, it was a sign of that.
I also have a very tortured relationship with exercise. As a child, I was forced to do it. I think, you know, the thought was that if I could be trained to exercise, then we could sort of counter some of the problems with my problem body. But I always tied exercise to not being good enough. And throughout my life, I've gone through periods of intense exercise, which usually was tied to my once every decade weight loss goals. Every decade I have lost a bunch of weight, and then I have just watched my weight climb up on the scale because I was not able to maintain the food regimen and the exercise regimen that would take over my life as I was trying to lose weight. So I've been very on and off about taking care of my body through exercise, through diet, and for the longest stretches of time, I have been off rather than on in terms of taking care of my body. But nearly dying of COVID and turning 50 in the same year and getting separated and rediscovering my sexuality and reinventing myself and my life.
And my career has also included the beginnings of a new relationship with my body. For me, my relationship with my body has always been the hardest thing in my life. And I'm so fucking lucky to be able to say that. What has been hardship for me has been my internal struggle with my relationship with my body. What a privilege to have that be my main personal issue. Sometimes the thing that you resist the most in life that feels like the hardest thing is the thing that holds the key to your freedom and your happiness. My whole life has this sort of sense that my body sucks and that it isn't good enough when it's been carrying me around and taking care of me my whole life. And it birthed two beautiful babies that gave me some kind of reprieve in my relationship with my body, gave me some respect for my own capacity.
But still, every day, there is some kind of suffering around my relationship with my physical self. I do believe these pain points hold the key to our liberation. And I want to feel as free and healthy and happy and joyous and sexy as I possibly can for the rest of my life. And so this is what I'm taking on, especially this year. Now sex has really helped me to knit together my mind and my body and I have a real admiration for my body because of the pleasure that it's capable of feeling today. You have to admire the power of an orgasm and stand in awe of the wave of oxytocin that pours over you when you have sexual pleasure. It is built into us, and we all deserve to feel it and I am so committed to that feeling because it helps me to love my body in its capacity. And it also just makes me feel good in the world. I also started to heal my relationship with exercise. I have always loved swimming, but I have never loved any other form of exercise. Sure, I'll go for a walk with you, don't make me go on a hike, call it a nature walk.
I'll definitely show up, but I need the reframe, otherwise I'm not there, it seems too hard, I'm not going to do it. So I walked into a Pilates studio in my neighborhood about a year and a half ago because I've always had this story about my stomach and the story about how I don't have any core strength and how core strength was something that was elusive to me and that it was for other people, and I decided I wanted to change that. And I had so much shame around my lack of core strength because my belly has always been big, but it had gotten bigger and more out of proportion post childbirth. And whenever I put on weight, I put on weight in my belly. And I really, really struggle with liking that part of my body.
I want to like all of myself and so I have been doing Pilates twice a week on the reformer, and I have to say that it has really helped to transform my relationship with my body. I now have a strong core. My legs are stronger than they've ever been. I was lying down the other day, and I found myself lowering myself onto the bed as opposed to flopping. This is a very different me. This is a very different relationship with my physicality and it shows up in all these small ways, and I just want to keep doing it and getting stronger.
And I also have an amazing Pilates teacher, and we gossip the whole time, so, you know, that really helps the human connection and the human relationship and the not having to do it alone. But Pilates has really been a key to reconnecting me with my physical self and as a result of Pilates, I have noticed that I have a chronic spot on my lower back that hurts all the time. And sometimes it keeps me from being able to do stuff in Pilates. And so my Pilates teacher encouraged me to go figure that out, get some treatment for that. And I found a chiropractor. And when I walked into the chiropractor, I said, I have this lower back pain, and I've had it pretty much forever, but especially since I have my kids and he started to do normal chiropractic stuff on me. And I said, you know, and I had a C section. And he said, you had a C section? Why didn't you tell me that right away? And he started to work on unknotting the scar of my C section. My C section scar has been like a rope at the base of my belly. And the work that he's done on it with lasers and physical manipulation, and this sounds insane. Lasers sounds insane, the word laser. I don't really get it.
I don't know what he's doing. But what I do know is that tissue is much softer, and I feel more knitted together. I feel like there's no dividing line from my belly to beneath my belly. And it is helping me to have a kinder and warmer relationship with my belly. It is also helping me not be tense in my lower back as I walk through the world. It's just one of those discoveries that you're like, of course it's related to the C section. Of course it's related to the C section scar. But like we've talked about many times on this podcast, women's health, women's reproductive health, our physical well being, it's not studied, it's not discussed, not to the degree that it should be for us being 50% of the population and for us being all the moms.
The fact that no other care person in my life, no other doctor, no other chiropractor, no other masseuse, no one else has ever asked me about my C section and thought to connect the dots between that and my lower back pain, which has been chronic, is just a testament to the fact that women's medical care, that the specific care we need for the bodies that we have and the things our bodies do is so under prioritized in even the more woo woo corners of our healthcare and wellness community. Ugh. It makes me so angry. But what makes me so happy is that I am feeling relief for the first time. You know, in the first year after my separation, I could not find the space to take on all of this stuff. It was all I could do to get through my mediation sessions and to manage my kids emotions and to start this podcast and to start dating and having sex again. Like I was busy doing all that stuff. But this year what has opened up for me is the willingness to do all of the preventative medical things that doctors suggest you do when you turn 50.
This is the portion of the episode where I'm going to give an organ recital. We call it an organ recital in my family. When the old people start to tell us about their ailments. Well, I'm joining that club. This is the organ recital. And here are all the fucking things that I have had to do since I turned 50 in order to take good care of myself. I had my first colonoscopy. Gross. The prep for the colonoscopy, holy moly, I had heard my mom complain about it, now I understand. I did that. I got a mammogram and then I got another mammogram and an ultrasound because they found an irregular mass. I got that biopsied, as of last week, it's probably a cyst.
We don't have breast cancer in my family, but that was scary. I'm still waiting for the results, but I am not scared. The doctor who did my biopsy also told me there was probably nothing to worry about because it was behaving like a cyst, but fun and stress, right? When you have to get a mammogram and something shows up irregular. I also got my IUD out. I had had it for eight years. It was running out of estrogen and that's it for me, for, you know, hormonal birth control or the mechanics of birth control beyond condoms.
That's it for me. I will not get another one. I am 52, I went to the dentist and got a long overdue teeth cleaning. I went to the dermatologist and got a skin cancer screening. All of those things are kosher and good. This is on top, on the skin side of taking care of my skin with lotions and potions. You know, I used to let my skin just be dry and uncomfortable, that was the degree to which I was ignoring my body. I was not even putting lotion on my legs. What would be the point, you know, of paying attention to my body, to any degree, of caring for myself in that way when there were so many larger fish to fry in my life? It's hard to believe, but that kind of little, little caretaking really makes a difference.
I also get periodic facials, and I get some Botox and some fillers. It's a light touch, but I live in LA and also I want to look the way I want to look. And, you know, when I first started doing that stuff in, when I was like, 43, 44, I had a lot of story about it in my head about, like, what kind of person does that make you if you get Botox? What kind of person are you if you're fighting aging? If you want to look young, what's wrong with you? Why can't you age gracefully? But the fact is, I want to look youthful, I don't want to look tired. And, you know, this is the golden age of cosmetic dermatology.
And so I take advantage of it to the degree that I feel comfortable. And my mother always makes a point to judge me about it. Tell me, don't do too much stuff, don't do too much, and so I hear her voice in my head whenever I go. I have also had blood work done, and as a result of the blood work, we have found that I have too much calcium in my blood and too much parathyl thyroid hormone. So I've been diagnosed with hyperparathyroidism, which was leading me to get a whole bunch more tests and probably have to get part of my parathyroid out. That is not my thyroid, that is another thing that sits behind my Thyroid. And if I don't deal with it, it'll probably give me osteoporosis and kidney stones when I get older. And so I will probably deal with that too.
When I went to the endocrinologist to talk about the hyperparathyroidism, say that 10 times fast. I also asked her about weight loss drugs, another thing I had a tremendous amount of judgment about. And it turns out that I am pre-diabetic, I do have all of the requisite symptoms that sets me up to if I stay on the path of being 30 to 50 pounds overweight, which, like, who knows how overweight I am, am, but I'm overweight like that. These weight loss drugs that exist out there today, these miracle drugs, you know, they can really help me avoid having diabetes eventually.
I really don't want to have diabetes. It's not a thing I want, but I can't say that that's the main reason I wanted to take weight loss drugs, which I started about six weeks ago. I decided to take weight loss drugs because I don't want to be overweight. And if there is a way for me to not be overweight without suffering and torturing myself and being in a constant, relentless dialogue about food and restriction and shame and this overwhelm, this experience that I have had that in order to lose weight or maintain a lower weight than I tend to creep up to, that is an all consuming exercise in my experience. And that was a lifelong every decade endeavor. And I think I'm doing it again this decade because these drugs exist and what I am feeling on them is a freedom from food and body obsession that I have never felt before. And what I realized is that I was using my weight, and I have always used my weight as a safety blanket to protect myself from the unwanted attention of men, to protect myself from having to compete in a marketplace of attractiveness, which I feel is such a large part of the narrative that we're given as women in this world.
I also realized that I was using my weight as some kind of moral test or shield. Like, I dare you to be attracted to me. I dare you to like me. You must be a good person if you like me and I'm overweight. You must be a good person if you're a man and you're attracted to me and I'm overweight. What the fuck? The storytelling, the storytelling is so insidious. I want the privilege that comes from being not overweight. I want the privilege that comes from having a conventionally normal quote, unquote body. I do not judge anyone for the way they choose to handle their weight and body image issues, but this is where I am on my journey.
I want to see what life feels like being this person inside and not having the armor that my overweight has always provided to me. When I've lost weight at different points in my life, I have often felt like I am walking around with no skin. Like I am so exposed that I can't really handle it. I don't think I'm in that place anymore, I hope I'm not in that place anymore. I think I'm much more integrated in terms of myself and my well being, my intentions for myself and my happiness, my actions and my intentions. And I will keep you posted on how this journey goes. I've lost anywhere from like 8 to 10 pounds in the last six weeks, I'm feeling really good. I don't really care about food for the first time in my life, I have to remember to eat.
I always didn't understand those women who were like, I forgot to have lunch today. What? I've never missed a meal in my life. But now if I have two moderate sized meals and a snack, I'm good, I'm good. And I also want to stop 3/4 of the way through a meal, I've never had that before either. I'm feeling some really profound freedom around this stuff. And for today, I'm staying on this path and I'll share with you how it goes.
At 52, I have a health to do list. I have to do tests and appointments for the hyperparathyroid thing. I have a list of vaccinations that are overdue. Now I have to worry about shingles. What? They say you should get a shingles vaccine after you turn 50. Shingles in my mind is like connected to scurvy, it's like a thing that old seafarers get if they don't eat enough limes. It's not true, but that's where I go when I think about it. I hate all of this, I hate all of it, but I realized that I wanted to live my best possible life and you cannot do that if you are cut off from your body. I am so determined to make peace with my body and to become more fully integrated between my mind and my heart and my body. Honestly, I'm determined to take impeccable care of myself.
I have never given myself that. I have never attended to my own needs to the degree that I need to do today and that I am willing to do today I really want to go after everything in my life, full force. And to do that I need to put myself, my well being first as much as possible. Now obviously I have children and their well being is so important to me and it's my day to day, every day, all the time concern. But having children and caring about them and being a good mother is not incompatible with taking excellent care of yourself. And for me, as a person who has always put other people's needs in front of my own, this is a wild new chapter. I am not great at it, I don't like it, and you won't catch me having nutritionists or wellness people on this podcast because I don't like it.
I don't want to talk about it, it feels boring to me compared to talking about sex and empowerment. God, that stuff is so much more fun. Let's talk about mushrooms. Let's talk about what lights us up and what gives us joy. Let's talk about all the sexy fun things. I'm going to let other people talk about wellness. Lots and lots of people want to tell you what you should eat and how you should exercise and what you should do to optimize, it's not going to be me.
There are so many more conversations I want to have, but I want to ask you, what are you doing to take care of yourself? What are you doing to knit together your mind and your body? What are you doing to set yourself up for success for this next incredibly thrilling chapter of your life where you are doing what you want for you, for your community, based in your values and your own desires? What are you willing to do to take care of yourself? What are you willing to do to make sure that you have as much time as possible left on this planet to do all the good things you're going to do to have all the laughs and all the fun and all the connection and all the depth and all the meaning and all the orgasms and all the pleasure and all the incredible experiences that come with being a human being on planet Earth and being a woman on planet Earth today?
What are you willing to do to change your mind about some things where you might have been fixed in the past and you might have those pain points that are like bruises that you avoid touching because they hurt? What would it take for you to choose one of those and go towards it rather than run away from it? My bet is that trapped inside my fucked up relationship with my body is all kinds of power and all kinds of freedom and all kinds of pleasure and all kinds of joy. Where is that spot for you and are you willing to look at it so that you can have the best life possible? Think about it.
Thanks for listening to Hotter Than Ever. Please reach out to us with questions that I will personally answer on the air in our weekly Advice episodes. Episodes did this conversation spark some thoughts about the connection between your mind and your body? Are you wrangling with some tricky stuff in how you think about yourself at this phase of your life and what you are willing to do to care for yourself? Oh girl, I have been there and I am here to give you my very biased and totally unqualified feedback. So just DM us on Instagram @hotterthaneverpod or call and leave a voicemail or text your question to the Hotter Than Ever Hottie Hotline at 323-844-2303. I would love to answer your question in a future episode.
Hotter Than Ever is produced by Erica Gerard and Podkit Productions. Our Associate producer is Melody Carey. Music is by Chris Keating with vocals by Issa Fernandez. Thank you so much for being here here. Thank you for being part of this conversation. Thank you for signing up for the Hotter Than Ever substack. Thank you for your comments on our social media. Please join the party, please get involved, please use your voice. It is your one and only voice and it is your birthright to speak out.
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