Chrissy Teigen Says It Took Having Two Kids To Be Comfortable With Her Body
She reveals she had plastic surgery in her early twenties to keep up with her modeling career
After spending most of her adult life criticizing her body, Chrissy Teigen is over it. Completely over it. She’s opening up about her body image issues, before and after kids, in a new interview with British Glamour and honestly, any mom can surely relate to the journey she’s experienced with learning how to love and accept her “new” body.
She says she’s spent years obsessing over the number on the scale, much like all of us have done at one point or another.
“I used to weigh myself every morning, afternoon and night. I knew what the scales would say after each meal,” she admits. “I did that for eight years and had this one weight I wanted to be at. That changed with Luna, and really changed with Miles, where it took me a year to be comfortable with my new normal number.”
While not all of us are former swimsuit models, moms everywhere can relate to how we feel about our bodies after we have children. The growing them, the birthing them, the feeding them, and the limited ways we’re able to eat properly and exercise the way we want to — well, it all contributes to how our bodies look. You can be proud of what your body was able to accomplish and frustrated with the changes at the same time, as Chrissy notes.
“I do look at [my body] in the shower and think, ‘Arghhh, these kids,'” she says. “But I don’t take the aesthetics so seriously now. It’s very fulfilling not having that pressure of putting on a swimsuit and looking good for a magazine while running around a beach, which I did when I was modeling. I don’t feel like my body is where I’m going to be shitty to myself, either. I’m already thinking enough things I am mad at myself about, I can’t add my body into it.”
She admits she had a boob job in her early twenties. “Yeah, I did my boobs when I was about 20 years old,” she says. “It was more for a swimsuit thing. I thought, if I’m going to be posing, laid on my back, I want them to be perky! But then you have babies and they fill up with milk and deflate and now I am screwed.”
Speaking about her former career, Teigen talks about how she would get fired from modeling jobs because her “measurements were off.” Which is just wildly toxic and, honestly, kind of shocking given how conventionally attractive she is.
“That was my entire career, doing weigh-ins,” she describes. “With model agencies, it was normal to get measured too, and I did it myself mainly, so when you had direct bookings without castings, [the clients] knew what they were getting. There were jobs I would turn up to and they would say my measurements were off and it was the worst feeling to be kicked off the job.”
When it comes to her anxiety disorder, which she’s been candid in discussing publicly many times, she says even after two kids and taking medication and knowing what she has to do to take care of herself, she says she struggles even getting a shower some days. She admits taking care of herself and staying on top of her medication isn’t easy for her.
“I’ll tell John, ‘Deep down, I know I am happy.’ But I think anyone with anxiety knows it’s physically painful to think about doing things. Sometimes reaching for your medication is like picking up a 60kg dumbbell that I don’t feel like picking up and I don’t know why.”
We shouldn’t take it for granted that someone who lives in the spotlight like Chrissy Teigen is willing to be so available to us in telling us that she struggles with the same things the rest of us do. We all need the reminder that we’re not alone, and she delivers that message so brilliantly every time.
