Thrive State Podcast

EPISODE 15: Former Miss California Reveals Health Insights from the World of Pageants

Episode 15: Crystal Lee

YOU are not just a number on a scale

With image touch-ups, enhancers, and filters at your fingertips, it’s very easy to get enticed to follow the trend or make yourself look like this or that influencer. Likes, shares, and retweets have become this era’s form of external validation people, especially young women, sought.

Being skinny is fashionable.
Being skinny is a competitive advantage in most pageants.
Being skinny is beautiful.

But former Miss California and Miss America 2014 1st runner-up Crystal Lee has a gentle reminder: Self-worth is not a number on a scale. Your weight and shape do not define your relationship with and knowledge of food.

Her Mixed Blessing

As early as her teen years, praises kept coming in for Crystal but so are the expectations. While almost everything was an uphill battle for the Asian-American beauty queen and TV personality—everyday living, school, the world of pageants—both support and criticism supercharged her to go further. Her mom’s hustler mentality turned the table for her and became one of Crystal’s strongest propellers towards success.

Even growing up with fewer food options but rice and pak choi and not having the crave for junk food was a cool reverse privilege! As her mum used to say: Don’t let where you come from keep you down.

Sharing the spotlight with the right choices

Being in the spotlight, especially the flashy lights of the pageant stage, could give so much power and influence over someone else’s view about herself. But to Crystal Lee, she made sure she is that strong influence to many young women—for the better!

Recognizing that weight and diet are dicey topics in the world of pageants, she’s sure to always remind people that getting into a competitive weight should be temporary. Staying the course in one’s health journey is always primary.

Looking Inside

But in medicine—or even outside the scientific discourse—we are learning how it is so much more important to look inside when it comes to health. In my last podcast episode with Dr. Nathan Bryan, we even went to the cellular level. Whatever’s happening deep down will always manifest outward!

Our beauty queen here in this latest episode shares the same: Beauty, diet, weight loss, habits, and lifestyle changes—it all starts with looking deep inside. Your desire, goals, action plan, wherever you’re starting from, all of it has to come from that honest voice within you.

And the same goes for the compliments or validation that you’ve been waiting to get or hear. We often forget or don’t realize that the most important of them all is the one that comes from YOU.

In health, wellbeing, or not, it’s about you and your body. It’s about you and how you feel inside and out.

Show notes

00:52

Being Asian-American comes with a lot of confusion baggage. But my parents were my double-edged sword: supportive and critical. Her mom’s hustler-mentality advice: Don’t let where you come from keep you down. Be strategic about using your culture, your gifts in a smart way.

02:29

I suffered a lot from ‘imposters syndrome’. I was working so hard, fiercely moving and hustling but on the surface, I have to look calm. And nobody sees that. All my role models told me to be well-rounded but I realized that spiking in your own category is what actually differentiates you.

04:36

I thought I was one person before the pageant, and after the pageant, I felt like I completely transformed. Being fifteen and flustered into an environment where everyone is feeding you with positive feedback made me so hungry for a challenge. Yes, it was a huge ego boost but in a helpful way. There aren’t enough activities for young women to get that same boost in a healthy way.

07:33

Pageants are super contentious now. I understand where critics of pageants are coming from. However, the fact that pageants are still something that young women want to compete in makes the pageant worth having. Women who want to do it don’t have to explain themselves. They could get the same desire, autonomy, and agency that we all want women to attain in competing in these pageants.

09:46

Diet is a delicate subject when you want to compete. You have to have a cognitive switch and clarification within yourself that losing more weight when you’re already at a healthy weight is because you’re just getting into a fighting shape in a specific, specialized, niche period of time in your life. Don’t conflate your sense of self-worth with that number on the scale. When you do that, that’s when an eating disorder can set in.

14:08

For women with eating disorders, oftentimes it’s about control. Food intake is the one thing that they can control to get the external validation that they wanted to hear. Learning to lose weight the healthy way is one of life’s greatest skills that everyone should know.

15:25

We need to shift away from the thinking that the shape of your body is equal to your relationship and knowledge of food.

16:03

There’s infinite conventional advice out there for you to switch back to healthy habits but most of them are one-way preaching advice. Most of them are great but don’t take into consideration where you’re starting from. Look inside, look at the life you’re living and be honest with yourself. Start with the very first step that makes sense realistically for you.

18:15

Recognize where you’re starting from. Focus less on the outcome. Just know that you want to be healthy. Identify your tangible action steps. As long as you’re taking the right actions, trust that you’re making progress. That outcome is going to come.

19:30

We are living at a time now where people want to spend money on getting to a new level of self-actualization. People are not afraid to try new things.

22:18

The Healing Power of Belief: There’s a lot of undiscovered connections between the mind and the body. Our beliefs, mindset, and thoughts are the filters that we use to evaluate the world around us. Believing in or thinking about something develops emotions and those emotions can signal biochemical changes in our bodies.

27:00

The energy that we put out in the world matters for the people around us. We can participate in somebody’s healing and growth by giving them good energy.

29:26

My Best Medicine: Relationship. Finding a loving spouse and partner who has been a mirror of the things I want to be. Be careful who you choose as a life partner because this person is going to be the largest determining factor to your success and happiness in life. You could also be that person through yourself.

Get to know Crystal better and the amazing work she’s doing at crystalalee.com and be sure to check out her videos and all that she’s been up to these days for YouTubechannel and IG @chrystalclues.

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