Congresswoman Sara Jacobs

I'll be honest with you, body image, body weight, food are things that I've struggled with my whole life.

And I've worked really hard to get to a place where I feel neutral about food and that I don't have the scarcity mindset and that I love my body the way it is and not am constantly trying to change it.

And that's

really difficult work.

It's work that I have to do every single day.

And I hope that as a society, we do a better job of not giving the kinds of messages that I received as a young girl to future generations.

I'm good.

Thanks so much for having me.

So I got sworn into Congress at 31 years old and realized that I was going to be quite busy getting everything started.

And I come from a big family.

I always knew I wanted to be a mom, but I knew that it wasn't the right time.

And so in my first term in Congress, in my first year in Congress, I froze my eggs.

And made that decision because I wanted to have agency in my life and my timeline and be able to make that decision when it was right for me, not just based on my biological clock.

And then as I continued serving in Congress, I turned 36 and realized it was still not quite the right time for me.

It was time to go back and check on some things my doctor recommended.

We do another round of egg freezing to make sure that I had as much optionality as I could give myself.

And so this past year, I did two rounds of egg retrieval, froze my eggs and spoke about it very publicly, which I will say was amazing.

difficult it was like to say it was an act of radical vulnerability I did not have talking about my boobs hurting with the New York Times on my bucket list but that's what happened but I feel like it's important to be talking about these things because look as a 36 year old woman right these are the conversations I'm having with all my friends all the time right who's having a baby who wants to have a baby who doesn't want to have a baby and if we're not normalizing those things if we're not talking about them we're certainly not going to make good policy about them in the end

Well, that's such a good question.

I had the most intense food cravings and food noise.