The Glow-Up After the Glow-Up

After losing 100 pounds, having her fourth baby, closing a business, and basically redefining her entire identity… Tasha is finally ready to share what came next.

In this first episode of Real and Natural(ish), she’s getting real about why she started this podcast, what therapy cracked open for her, how social media has changed, and what it actually looks like to rebuild your life (and body) after the transformation.

It’s messy. It’s honest. It’s not about weight loss anymore—it’s about evolving into the most confident version of you.

If you’ve ever felt stuck between who you were and who you’re becoming… this one’s for you. 

Thanks for being here! 

Mentioned in the Show:

The Body Confidence Club is your ongoing support system—designed to keep you moving, even when life gets busy, motivation dips, or you feel like giving up (again). CLICK HERE for more info. 

Transcript

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You're listening to Real and Naturalish, the podcast where we evolve and own the glow up in real time. I'm your host, Natasha Pearson. Bye, Buffer. Are we going? What was the thing that I was gonna say? Oh, I have been doing short form content for so long that every time I go to hit record, I'm constantly thinking if I don't hook people in within the first 0.4 seconds, they're not gonna listen. And I need to remind myself that a podcast is a very different format, and people are actually hitting play with the intention of listening to me talk for an hour. So hello, you might get to listen to me talk for an hour. I am a talker. I am so excited for this format of doing a podcast because I'm literally sitting in my closet right now and I look like a scrub. I'm wearing a I'm wearing a sweatshirt that says normal mom's club, and I don't want to be on video right now. I don't want I didn't want to have to do my hair and makeup. Like this is how I am most of the time. You know, I'm just a normal person doing mom life, running around, making lunches, doing all the wake-ups and tuckens, and constantly sweating. And also constantly sweating because I live in Arizona and it's really hot. So, shall we get into the podcast? I am not gonna lie, we are kind of figuring this out as we go, which I'm really excited about. I have always been a perfectionist my whole life, and typically before I start anything, I always want to have the big picture in mind and know how it's going to end. When I changed my mindset about being a perfectionist and instead started showing up and telling myself, messy action is better than inaction. Just do something, just start, because if you sit there forever, you're gonna just procrastinate and it's never gonna happen. And I've wanted to do a podcast for about a year now, and so I literally looked at my producer and said, just hit record. I'm just we're just gonna jump right in and do it. We are gonna have segments and we are gonna have different styles of episodes. I have so many things that I wanna do, but we're just gonna figure it out as we go. If you are here listening to this, it's probably because you found me from my viral weight loss transformation online. But I really want this podcast to be more about what happens after the transformation. Yes, I shared my entire weight loss journey, but that's really only a snippet of my entire life. If you really think about it, all of my exercising that was 20 minutes a day. That's a lot of what I shared. I shared what I ate, but there are so many other aspects to myself, and I have learned so many things. I have so many stories that I want to share, and this is the format for me. So if you're listening, I'm so excited that you're here. In today's episode, episode one of the Real and Natural-ish podcast, we are actually gonna talk about why is this called Real and Natural-ish? And it all starts with a story from my childhood. My mom used to keep these journals, and I remember when I was about Gretchen's age, probably a little bit younger. Gretchen is my oldest daughter, she's 11. So probably when I was like eight or nine, I found all of these journals that my mom had in this box. There were so many of them, and I started reading them, and they were stories from when myself and my brothers were babies, and it was things that we did every single day, little moments that we had as toddlers, how we behaved as babies. But the funny thing about it is the journals started with an entry almost every single day in the beginning, and towards the end, they spaced out to maybe one journal entry every month or two. And I am the third child, so there was the least amount of journal entries about me and the most about my oldest brother. And I always felt jealous of him because I wanted to know what did I do as a toddler? How was I as a baby? And my kids today, they even Gretchen, she asks me all the time, Did I do that as a baby? My youngest Alan, he'll do something funny, and she'll ask me, Did I do that? Did I do that? And I'm over here thinking, I honestly don't remember. Mom brain is so real. I remember asking my mom that when I was a child, and she was like, I don't remember, honey. And I get it now. It's like, it's almost like amnesia. Like I just you forget. And it's so bizarre now because I feel like that is a phase of my life that I am leaving and I'm entering into a new phase, thus, the podcast. And now looking back at that whole time period that was about a decade. I mean, it was a long portion of my life. I almost felt like I was in a daze because I was constantly either getting pregnant, being pregnant, having a newborn baby. I feel like I have hardly slept in 10 years, or trying to lose baby weight, and then immediately getting pregnant again and just constantly being in the chaos of mom life and newborns and diaper changes and all of the things. And life is really changing now. And at first it was scary, but now I've decided to just embrace it. And I am taking you along through this evolution of me. And I'm really excited about it because really quickly, I will just give a brief overview of kind of what the last year of my life has been like. It has actually been the hardest year of my entire life. I had so many big changes happen simultaneously within a two to three month span. And going through that was really hard, especially since a huge part of my job and how I actually make a lot of our income is online content creation and having that be a part of your job where you have to still show up every single day and share these aspects of your life. That was so difficult when I had all of these things happening to me behind the scenes that I didn't want to share. I wanted to live them first and process them and I wanted these things to play out. But now I finally feel like I am on the other side and I can talk about the things that happened because I'm finally able to move on and grow and I'm fully in that next chapter now. So earlier this year, one of the things that I actually did was I started therapy. And I started therapy because I was having very severe anxiety about some things in my life, and to the point where it was, it was impacting other areas of my life where I knew I needed to get help. And so I started therapy. Um, and it actually turned out my therapist told me I wasn't dealing with anxiety. I actually was dealing with PTSD. And right now I'm currently doing EMDR, which is this up right now, because I don't I want to explain it correctly. EMDR stands for eye movement desensiti desensit I can't say it, desensitization and reprocessing. Um pretty much it helps people heal from emotional distress and PTSD type trauma. At my very first therapy appointment, we went through just my intake form, and my therapist actually told me that what I thought was anxiety, I was really dealing with PTSD, and so she recommended EMDR, and that's what I'm doing now. Anyways, my whole point in sharing this is when I went into therapy, I sat down and I wanted to just trauma dump and say, this is everything that's happening. These are all the things in my life, why I think it's causing this and XYZ. And she was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up just a minute. This is not how therapy works. And I had never really gone to therapy before, so I didn't, I didn't know. I mean, you all I knew is what I saw in the movies and what you hear from other people. And honestly, all you ever hear is, oh my gosh, therapy's so great. And if I'm being honest, I didn't want to be one of those people, but I feel like I am now because I I get it. Um but what she told me is how this pretty much works is we're just gonna talk. And as we are talking, as you are living your life, as things are gonna come up, it's going to remind you of things that happened in your past. And why I want to share that is because for the longest time, those journals that my mom had, I wanted to do the same things for my kids. But I am that perfectionist, and every year that goes on, all I can think about is I should have started this last year. I should have started this two years ago, I should have started this five years ago, and now with my daughter, I should have started recording everything a decade ago. And again, going back to messy action is better than inaction. I decided to just start, and I feel like this podcast is my outlet. It is really my passion project that I want to create for my kids so that I can document my life. I can share life lessons as I am learning them. I can share how I'm changing and growing and all of the things that I want my children to hear when they're 25 and 30 years old. I want to record it right now because some of these things aren't appropriate for them as children, but I want to have this record. So I'm really doing this for them. So that's the real. Why natural-ish? Well, it's kind of funny. So, part like I said, a huge part of my job is showing up online. And I feel like nowadays, if you are any person that shows up online, the culture is you have to have an opinion about something and you have to be at the extremes. And I really experienced this a couple of years ago when I was on my 100-pound weight loss journey. I read this book. It was a phenomenal book. It's called Super Life by Darren O'Lean. It's so good. And I read that book, and it really taught me a lot about clean living and getting rid of the toxins in your life. But I'm not gonna lie, after I finished that book, I almost felt like I was too afraid to live my life because I was aware of all of these toxins everywhere. And while I was reading the book, a lot of what I did, I went through my kitchen, I got rid of all the plastic that we had, I went through my bathroom, I got rid of all of my beauty products that had parabens or phthalates or anything like that, which is great. And I'm so grateful that I did that. But what I learned is that it is so unrealistic to try to be perfect 100% of the time. I could not live my life when I was worried about is this organic? Did I where did this food come from? Are there pesticides on it? And so I just learned it's important to have balance. It's important to have 80-20 in all aspects of your life. And I don't want to be on one extreme or the other. I really just want to be in the middle. And this is my place where I get to be in the middle, where yes, most of my beauty products are clean and they don't have any bad ingredients. But my 20% is yeah, I still get Botox a couple times a year. And sometimes I go to Sonic and have those cheddar jalapeno poppers, which are really good. But most of the time I eat clean. Most of the time I have a high protein diet. I still move my body, I still exercise, but I want there to be a space where it's okay to have a to have balance, to not be extreme. And that's why it's natural-ish. Mostly natural, but we also talk about the 20% here. Okay, I'm gonna be the girl that brings up therapy again because while I was in therapy, like I said, this past year, so many changes. I mean, my past fitness coaching business went away overnight. On top of that, you know, I had my last baby. I lost a hundred pounds, I was no longer in losing weight. I mean, my entire life, since the time I was in sixth grade. I mean, I remember going on my first diet in middle school, and that whole portion of my life, what took up a lot of my brain space was you need to lose weight, you need to lose weight. It was constantly on my mind. I was so insecure. I was always thinking about losing weight. And if I wasn't thinking about losing weight, it was because I was pregnant. So after I had Allen and I lost the baby weight and I knew I wasn't gonna gain it back, my body is just completely different. I mean, I also got surgery, I had a breast reduction. I had been wanting to get a breast reduction my entire life. I mean, I was a D cup in seventh grade. Um, even when I was 130 pounds in my early 20s, I was a double F cup. I've always had large boobs. And when I was getting my breast reduction, I also decided to get a tummy tuck because I've had I've had four kids. I've lost 100 pounds. I had so much loose skin, and on top of that, I had a lot of ab separation. You know, it's funny, so many people online, I I never respond to the haters. I don't want to give them a platform, but I guess I'll give them a little shout out now. Well, it's not even a hater. I I feel like just people don't understand that a tummy tuck is not weight loss surgery. A tummy tuck, I literally had my abs sewn back together after them separating from having four children. I had five pounds of loose skin removed from my stomach. I lost 100 pounds before I ever had surgery. Does that mean there was anything wrong with my body? No, but I also want to normalize the fact that if you want to change your body, it's okay. It's I I did it for me. I didn't do it for anyone else. I did it because every time I put my pants on, I was worried about ziping up my loose skin on my stomach. Oh. I started this whole story with I'm that girl talking about therapy again. This is the third time I've brought up therapy. So I went to therapy to talk about like my anxiety and getting help with my PTSD, all of the changes that happened. And my therapist pretty much was like, We need to do some work before you can start EMDR because you have gone through so much in your life. If you don't take the time to process this, it could actually cause more harm doing this type of EMDR therapy. And so we started doing what's called IFS. Essentially, what IFS is, it's the idea that you are made up of a bunch of different parts. You have different parts of your personality, and honestly, I feel that way all the time. And sometimes those parts can go into extreme roles to protect who you are at at your core. And I sat with that for a week or two, two weeks actually, because there's two weeks between my sessions, and I came back and I said to my therapist, like, this was really hard for me to admit to myself, but I was like, I don't even think I know who I am. I don't know who I'm at at my core. I don't know what these parts of myself are trying to protect. And it's because they were in these extreme roles for so long. After that session, I decided to figure out who am I? And I really started to just kind of reflect on my life and think about all of these different time periods and what were the best parts of my life? What did I love the most? What did I love doing as a five-year-old, as a 10-year-old, as a 15-year-old? And I started doing those things again. You know, I remember when I was like five, I had this Dr. Seuss book. It was like 200 pages long because it was a ton of Dr. Seuss books in one. And I thought I was so cool because I could read the whole thing and I thought I was reading a chapter book. I've always loved to read. And I got back into reading again last year. I read 52 books last year and I loved it. And I did it for me. It wasn't personal development. I did a lot of that for work in the past. It was just reading for pleasure, reading for fun, reading because it is something that I love to do. I could I could do so many episodes about books, especially fantasy books. I nerd out when it comes to books. Um and this doesn't mean that anything from the past decade, even though it was a really hard time in my life, it doesn't mean anything good didn't come out of it. It just means that I took the time to reflect and think, what were the things that I loved about it? And one of those things is I love coaching women and weight loss. I don't want to stop doing it, but I don't want that to be a hundred percent of what I do anymore. That's something that I love to do and I want to have more balance and harmony in my life. I mean, my word for 2025 is it's 2025, right? It's not 2026. I don't even know what year it is. My words for 2025, I had two of them balance and boundaries. And I've realized that those actually have to be paired together because you cannot have balance unless you have boundaries. And all of this happening at a time in my life where everything was changing, it seemed like the perfect time to step into chapter two. And so after a couple of months of just really struggling and then starting therapy, I feel like I realized I was grieving my past self. That I was almost leaving it behind. But then I realized that doesn't have to be a bad thing. It could be a good thing. I am stepping in to this new evolved version of me that's taking all of the best parts of my life. And now I get to truly live the life that I want. And I feel like that's why women always say, like, your 30s are your best. Your 30s are when you stop caring what everyone else thinks. And it's true. It's like, I just want to live a life that I love and I know the things that I love. And it's different than the things that you love, probably, but that's okay. We are allowed to be different people. We are all allowed to have different strengths. And you know, it's funny because I think about in my past job, I was compared to people all the time, and everyone was always trying to be like everyone else. And if you were not someone that someone else could imitate or duplicate, then it was a bad thing. I realized this a couple months ago. I'm like, I don't want to be someone that other people can be like. I want to be me. And I think that we all have these unique gifts and talents. And if we're just trying to be like everyone else, we're not gonna make the world a better place. I feel like it is my job to find the things that I know I am good at, the things that I'm gifted at, the things that I love, and use that to help other people and to make a difference and to make the world a better place. And I think we all should do that. We all should find those things that we are good at and we love and stop comparing yourself to others and go be you. Go be the best version of you. And that is my chapter two. My chapter two is being the best version of me. The version of me that reads romantic, that gets Botox. I started dancing again. I'm a tap dancer. Okay, I so many people don't even know this side of me, it was just so crazy, just in a nutshell. I mean, when I was young for all for 10 years of my life as a child, I I didn't just do rec recreational dancing. I like went to a dance school. Like I would go to school during the day, and then I would go to my dance school and do ballet for two to three hours a night, do tap for one to two hours a night, five days a week, and then I would have practice on the weekends when there was rehearsals and performances and all of the things. During my most formative years as a child, like all of this muscle memory, everything that I learned is like instantly coming back to me after starting dance 20 years later, which is crazy. But I love it. It makes me happy. And my body literally feels alive. Like, I was thinking about this last night, I was getting a massage. Dave and I go on date night once a month to get a massage, and it's like one of my favorite things that I do. Eduardo, he is the best masseuse ever. But I feel like, oh my gosh, my massage last night, everything was like popping and cracking. But I feel like since I started dancing, I'm getting this mobility back in my body that I have not had in 20 years, and it feels so good. I literally thought my body feels alive again. My body feels like it can move the way that it was meant to move. So this is chapter two. You're gonna get all of it. You're gonna get mom life, you're gonna get wife life, you're gonna hear about me being a dancer probably, because I am going to compete at the World Tap Dance Championships in Prague randomly. You get to hear about my books, you get to hear about the things that I'm doing. Oh, we're definitely doing an episode. Maybe I could get my myofunctional therapist to talk about tongue ties. I've learned mind-blowing things. It will literally blow your mind. I cannot tell you every single time I go to myofunctional therapy, these words come out of my mouth. Why do they not teach this to every single new mom? This needs to be taught to like things that I'm just learning about breathing and your airways and how important those things are, not even in not just adults, but like children, and so many things affect it. It's it's not just gonna be about weight loss anymore. Yes, that is a part of me. Yes, I still love it. I still hope that I can inspire you to be the healthiest version of you, but I'm I'm here to share what happens after the transformation. This podcast is for the woman who loves following me for my transformation, but you're ready to see what comes next. It's not about being perfect, it's about evolving, it's about growing and living confidently. And you get to come along with me. I don't know if you've realized this, but social media has really changed over the past probably the past year alone. I mean, social media changes so fast. And part of my job as a content creator is I have to pay attention to those analytics. A lot of times, I mean, letting you in a little bit behind the scenes on what it's like being an influencer and working with brands and getting these contracts, a lot of those things are based off of numbers, analytics, views, clicks, everything. And so when social media changes, you have to adapt and you have to adapt quickly. And with algorithm changes, I mean, I used to share so much on my stories. I used to show up every day and talk on my stories, but the way that the algorithm's changing and when users behave a certain way, those stories get deprioritized. And so now what's working is sharing more still frames, using stories more as like, here's um, these are the headlines. I feel like that's kind of what stories are like. These are the headlines. My feed is my short form content. And I feel like, well, yes, it's been nice to kind of have that break. I don't feel like I've really been able to connect in the same way. And I feel like that is what this podcast is for. Thing I was gonna say is, while I love connecting, if and I love having this community, if I am being really honest with you, it's kind of exhausting sometimes to have to show up every single day, even the days where I'm sick, the days I don't feel like it, the days I'm having a bad day. And honestly, I feel like podcasting is way more realistic for my lifestyle. I wanna connect, I wanna share, but I want to do it on the days where I feel my best. And also, I am a mom of four children. I homeschool. I am now dancing in Scottsdale at least once a week, sometimes twice a week, which is an hour drive there and an hour drive back, plus an hour class. Like, I am super busy and sharing every piece of my life in real time, it's not realistic. And honestly, I don't want to do that. I want to live my life and then I want to share what happens. And that's why I'm excited about the podcast. I get to share the stories. I get to live my life, but I still get to let you in behind the scenes. And it's like that with like pictures and stuff. It's like, I want to take the pictures, but I don't want to take a picture and then open up Instagram and then go post it. No, I want to take the picture, I want to have fun, I want to go to the trampoline park with my kids, and then maybe in my newsletter you'll get to see that behind the scenes picture. Oh, and if you are not subscribed to my newsletter, make sure to go do that. It's in the show notes. I'll put a link for you. Every Friday I send out my favorite recipes, links, things that I'm doing behind the scenes, so you can get even more over there. So that's it for today. Short and sweet, just me opening up this podcast. It's gonna be the place where we share the real stuff, the stories, the lessons, the balance, all of it. So if you connected with this, if you're excited to hear more, make sure that you follow the show so you don't miss an episode. And I will see you next time. You made it to the end, which means you're officially one of the real ones. Don't forget to follow, leave a five star review, and text this episode to your bestie. And if you want the unfiltered behind the scenes, get on the email list. Links in the show notes.