PODCAST: Shooting the Sh*t with Tammin Sursok & Roxy Manning
We’re all about bringing on guests who intrigue us, but also who we can relate to as women and as moms. So in this episode, we sat down with Tammin & Roxy, hosts of the “Women On Top” podcast, to talk about everything from parenting to eating disorders to body positivity on social media and more. Listen in as we chit chat over wine (lots of it) and totally fill our buckets with a deep, yet super fun convo that has some amazing take-homes. Pour yourself a cocktail, tune in and every time you hear “dry hump” - drink!
If you haven’t listened to the episode we recorded for Women On Top, make sure you check that out next: http://apple.co/3fcU4C7
WATCH HERE:
LISTEN HERE:
Q&A SESSION:
Why is your podcast called Women on Top?
Tammin & Roxy started with a list of 65 names and went through them all over a glass of wine and decided on Women On Top. It has a double meaning - take it as you like! When they decided to start a podcast together, Tammin had just had her second daughter and Roxy’s daughter was three and a half or four. Roxy was living her best life, while Tammin was breastfeeding and a complete mess. So the cover of their podcast is Tammin breastfeeding and Roxy drinking tequila wearing a t-shirt that says “Family Is Sacred,” which is the epitome of their show and who they are as moms.
How did you two meet?
Fun fact - Roxy revealed on our podcast that she was going through her website redcarpetroxy.com (she’s a red carpet host) recently and she realized she had interviewed Tammin years ago on a red carpet when Roxy was about eight months pregnant. They met (again) at their kids’ preschool in LA.
Tammin says she has no filter (makes sense why she connects with us so well!), so what you see is what you get. She talks about all the things that are messy when it comes to sex, family, relationships, kids, etc. She doesn’t like to hold back. So when she met Roxy and the verbal diarrhea started, and Roxy ended the sentences that Tammin began, Tammin thought it was the beginning of a wonderful friendship. This was about 4 years ago and they’ve been inseparable ever since. We think it’s a beautiful love story!
Do you fight? (we hate this question but a lot of people ask us…)
Tammin & Roxy both agree that they have, but it was not necessarily an argument but more of a discussion. Roxy goes a little passive aggressive and then Tammin gets a little needy, and rather than just backing off, Tammin takes full responsibility and confronts it head on in order to defuse the situation and logically work through it. But Tammin would never blow her lid with Roxy.
Through years of therapy, Tammin has been able to recognize when she has done something wrong and accept that she needs to apologize and be vulnerable and step into a place that doesn’t feel good for her because she actually did something wrong. So Tammin’s fights normally come from a logical side and involve real conversation.
Roxy typically doesn’t like confrontation (except for with her husband), and would prefer to discuss via text than in person or on the phone, but she always tries to offer up a secondary solution rather than just shutting something down. The minute there’s no emojis or exclamation mark via text, it’s obvious something is up.
We have girls who are 11 and 12, and we’re heading into a stage where eating disorders and mental health are huge. Tammin has opened up about her eating disorder and anxiety to the public, which is so helpful, so we asked her what she learned going through that experience and what insight she could give parents, mothers and women on how to handle it.
Tammin didn’t speak about her eating disorder for the longest time because she felt so ashamed of what she went through. It wasn’t until about two years ago, when she was getting so many DMs from younger girls, that she knew if she didn’t say anything, some girl was going to die. Tammin explained that at some point, it’s our duty to talk about our secrets because they can help other people feel less ashamed, and having secrets will keep ourselves sick as well. So she wrote a post, which she didn’t want to post it, but she did and she was shocked at the thousands and thousands of people who came out and the post went viral.
She was actually overweight as a child (250lbs at 13 years old) and she wrote a letter to her 13-year-old self and it really hit a cord. She was talking about what it felt like to be 250lbs and to be teased. Her eating disorder started because she was so ashamed about the space that she took up, so she stopped eating completely at 15/16 years old and got down to 99 pounds within 6 months. What’s even more f*cked up is that Tammin got cast as one of the leads on a tv show in Australia and she was on 110 magazine covers from the age of 16 to 20 years old because she looked a certain way. She was the cute, skinny, lovely girl, so of course she thought she had to stay small, because if she’s not thin then she meant nothing.
If you want to stop any disorder or addiction, Tammin says you have to either hit your bottom or you have to want it enough to stop. You cannot tell your daughter or yourself to just get better, that person has to want to stop. But what you can do is be the support that they can go to when they’re scared and when they want to talk about it. Tammin didn’t want to talk about her disorder with anyone, so even though everyone knew about it, know one talked to her about it. She was dying in front of their eyes but no one really knew what to say or do back then. She would throw up 16-20 times a day. She was so ill, and at one point she was hospitalized because she lost her stomach lining. It wasn’t until she met her husband at 22 years old that she decided she didn’t want to feel sick anymore. She hit her top and realized she wanted a different life and she wanted to be happy again.
So the advice she would give to parents who are dealing with a child who has an eating disorder, or if you’re struggling with an eating disorder yourself, is to evaluate your life and think about what you want. Do you want to be obsessing about food for another seven years of your life? Or do you want to laugh and go drinking with your friends and have sex with your husband because you like your body?
Once someone recovers from a terrible eating disorder, does it always follow them or are they free and clear once they finally overcome it?
Tammin doesn’t think you ever get rid of it, but for her it was never about the food, it was about feeling like she was worthy or good enough. When she lost the weight, she had a very pivotal moment in her life where she got everything she wanted because she was thin (or so she thought). She equated that being thin was her worth. So to this day, she still struggles with her worth in different parts of her life and questions if she’s a worthy mother, a worthy wife, worthy to be a good friend, worthy in life. That’s what it seeps into.
Roxy and Tammin are both in a pressure cooker of being and looking a certain way, so we wanted to know how Roxy feels about raising a daughter in this world.
Roxy worries about it a lot, particularly because living in Los Angeles and working in the entertainment industry (she’s a red carpet host and podcast host who interviews celebrities) means that she’s around it a lot and therefore her daughter is around it a lot too. She’s six years old now, but in 7 years (or less) she’ll be the age that Roxy was when disordered eating was present in her life (although never as bad as Tammin’s). In her tween/teen years, Roxy would not eat and get by on a rice cake in the middle of the day and maybe some vegetables at night. She also experienced body dysmorphia and would look at herself and think she was fat. The more she thinks back to that time (13-14 years old), she can’t help but be scared that her daughter will go through the same thing. As a mom, all you want to do is protect your kids and not let them experience pain. But that’s also a big lesson in parenting that Roxy has had to learn, that you can’t control everything, and you can’t control what their friends are saying to them at school.
Tammin thinks our world has to change. The messaging we’re constantly blasted with on a daily basis is “thin is good and overweight is bad.” She has an audition coming up and the role requires partial nudity. The first thing she thought about was what part of her body would be exposed. What part would she be okay or not okay with? But then she thought that if we saw ALL bodies and all body shapes on tv and film, then we wouldn’t even care about weight.
Tammin teaches her seven-year-old daughter that fat is just a thing. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it just is. If we equate it to being good, bad, sexy, not sexy, what men want, not what men want, that’s the problem. That’s what has to change.
Do you think the body positivity movement happening on social media, where we’re seeing all the different body types, is helping at all?
Tammin & Roxy think that some of it is helping and it’s a step in the right direction. Both women follow body positive people who show their cellulite, wrinkles and skin. They think it’s helpful because it opens up the conversation whether you like it or not. It puts it out there and normalizes it in a way that hasn’t been done before. When you’re rammed down the throat with one certain body type, and that’s the only thing that is acceptable or beautiful, that’s a problem. So it takes people to bravely show themselves as they are, not just physically but who they are as a person inside too. That is brave and that’s beautiful.
Social media polices women’s bodies a lot. TikTok takes down posts about cellulite (because so many people flag it because they don’t want to see it) yet leaves up videos of a “sexy body” where you can see her butt and half her vagina. There is a complete double standard and it’s not okay for our girls.
We need to have the conversation on social media and get to know all the different types of bodies for it to then be a non-conversation. Once we’ve seen all the cellulite, once we’ve seen all the mom bods, once we’ve seen all the stuff, then we’ve seen it all and it doesn’t matter.
MORE ABOUT TAMMIN & ROXY:
Celebrity actress Tammin Sursok and entertainment host Roxy Manning co-host a hilarious, honest and raw podcast called Women On Top that delves into the truths about being female, being a mother and the general chaos that goes with trying to navigate life with boobs, burp cloths, and the strong desire to have a life.
Tammin also blogs about unfiltered motherhood over on Bottle & Heels and Roxy has her own blog called Red Carpet Roxy.
Follow @womenontopofficial on Instagram, @womenontoppodcast on Facebook, and join the Women On Top group on Clubhouse.
Check out @tamminsursok & @redcarpetroxy on Instagram.