Follow the Joy  ·  The Bathtub Babe Chronicles

A picture of me in a bathtub is costing me reach. I’m not sorry.

A few women in my social network told me, kindly and directly, that my content reads as risky. They won’t share a post that shows a woman in a bathtub talking about weight loss. Referring to myself as a “babe” and a “philosopher” in the same breath apparently doesn’t help either.

They worry the image and the message won’t resonate with the professional women they serve, and the concern is fair.

My Ode to Archimedes

In legend, Archimedes, the ancient Greek mathematician, supposedly figured out how to measure the volume of an irregular object while lowering himself into a bath and noticing the water rise. The story goes that he was so excited he ran through the streets shouting “Eureka!” (Greek, for “I’ve found it!”), allegedly without bothering to put on clothes.

The problem he was solving: the king wanted to know whether his crown was pure gold or had been cut with silver, without melting it down. Archimedes realized that submerging the crown would displace a volume of water equal to the crown’s volume, and from there he could check its density against pure gold. That water-displacement insight became known as Archimedes’ principle.

My mind spins with symbolism and metaphor. A mystery. A mission. A test. The math. A philosophical baptism. And the revelation of truth through immersion.

As it turns out, some of my best ideas have also been birthed in a bathtub.

Please allow me to share what The Bathtub Babe Philosopher means to me.

Punitive self-monitoring for girls starts at a young age. Young women learn through cultural osmosis that their bodies are public report cards. My own inconsistencies with my weight across eight years and four pregnancies notwithstanding, the battle with weight loss became something more insidious in midlife.

The self-loathing. The failure cycles. The mornings I stood on the scale and read the number as a verdict on my character. Feeling furious because I couldn’t lose the weight and also furious that I still cared. I knew my worth had nothing to do with my size. And yet there I was, judging myself in secret by a measurement I swore meant nothing to me, unable to break out of the pattern. After a long and painful climb, as I leaned into my own transformation and began to understand my new physiology more deeply, I found my way out. Out of the resistance, the shame, and the secret math. I knew this would become my life’s work.

But unraveling weight loss resistance privately and standing up to say so publicly turned out to require two very different levels of courage. And the second one took me a bit by surprise.

The truth: I was terrified to be seen. And I mean really seen. Not out of cowardice. I was weighing the cost. The cost of rejection. The cost of my ex finding me online. The fear that I wasn’t skinny enough or ripped enough or perfect enough to be taken seriously as a weight loss mentor for professional women. So I stayed in the shadows, posting static images on Instagram, and never really writing from the heart.

The bathtub idea had been rolling around in my head for months. But I didn’t dare share the idea out loud with a single person because I was sure it would read as the exact thing that ends a serious woman’s credibility. I also knew I needed to step out of imposter syndrome and put my money where my mouth was, so I ripped off the Band-Aid.

With fear and trepidation, I jumped in (pun intended, wink wink) to film a promo video for my last masterclass. It felt like the first authentic thing I had ever done on social media.

You see, I teach women to stop fighting their bodies. To stop waging war on themselves at 5pm in the pantry, at 6am on the scale, in the dressing room mirror under that particular light.

Fat release happens from a state of rest, not war.

And there I was, planning to launch all of this from behind a desk in a blazer, arms crossed, chin down, looking like every other authority who has ever told a woman to try harder. The costume of war. The exact posture I was asking women to put down.

The bathtub was the opposite of all of that. A woman at rest. Unarmored. Not performing capability, not bracing for the next round, just lying back in the warm water with nothing left to prove. The first time I saw the image, I understood it before I could explain it. That was not a marketing pose. That was the thing itself.

I had been writing about rest for months. The bathtub was the first time I was willing to be photographed inside it.

That explains the bathtub. Now let me tell you about the title.

There is something about that name almost no one knows, and it is the part that still aches.

I have a degree in philosophy. I did not study it for the love of it alone, though I would do it all again in a heartbeat. It was prelaw. The plan was simple. Philosophy with an emphasis in prelaw, then law school, then the life I was building.

But that didn’t happen. At the time, I believed a woman could have a career or a family. That was how I was raised. It was what I held to be right and good and true at the time. And because I would not give up the dream of a family, I laid down the dream of becoming a lawyer.

So the degree became something else. A life interrupted. A dream I never got to live. Five years that many around me began calling a waste.

And the truth is, people even mocked me for it. A philosophy degree, in the minds of most people, means nothing. Except it was worse than nothing. It meant I was a fool. So I stopped speaking of it. And the thing that should have been a source of pride, proof of what I had accomplished, became one more part of myself I kept in the shadows.

So for the first time in almost 30 years, I’m using my philosophy degree. And I am only half joking.

Something I carried as a private embarrassment turned out to be the thing my work requires. A philosopher asks the better question. A philosopher refuses the easy answer everyone else has agreed to stop questioning. A philosopher seeks the truth. I peered deep into the eyes of a leviathan like the weight loss industry, telling women to eat less and move more and hate themselves thinner, and I dismantled its foundation. I squinted defiantly at a brazenly biased corporate culture taxing their most successful executives because of appearance, and I proposed a referendum. I gazed up at the ivory tower we call medical research, found the files on menopausal care empty, and demanded an audit.

It took me 30 years and a bathtub to find my true voice again, and that’s ok.

So when I chose to put that title next to my name, on purpose, it wasn’t a branding decision. It was me walking back into a room I believed I didn’t belong in, sitting down, and refusing to apologize for claiming a seat.

So that is the philosopher. Let me tell you about the babe.

I can be just a girl in a bathtub. Vulnerable. Bare. 50 years old. Imperfect in all the ways I spent decades trying to hide. And I can still be beautiful.

I can also be a woman of depth who says important things that bring real value.

And be revered for both.

Women like us are handed a choice our entire lives. Be lovely or be taken seriously. Be soft or be smart. Be a body or be a mind.

I am a babe and a philosopher. At full volume, in the same breath, in the same name, in the same bathtub.

So that is the Bathtub Babe Philosopher. And that is what the Bathtub Babe Chronicles are about.

They give us a place to gather around the truth about our bodies, this age, this strange and unfunded passage. And then laugh at all of it together. Because I don’t know about you ladies, but I have to look for opportunities to laugh. Otherwise, I’d be crying all the time!

Some of you will read this and decide it’s not for you. The bathtub is too much. The rubber ducky on my banner is a step too far. And I understand, and I mean that without a trace of sarcasm. This is not for everyone.

But some of you will read this and breathe a deep sigh of relief. You will recognize yourself in the hiding, in the degree gathering dust, and in the body you were taught to fight. You are the reason the bathtub exists.

Because under every title, in every corner office, behind every carefully held composure, we are still just women. Women who deserve the truth, the research, a good belly laugh, and a soft place to land.

Climb in. The water is fine.

xoxo ~ The Bathtub Babe Philosopher