Melissa Gilbert - The Dancing With The Stars runner-up has revealed that she is currently in recovery after undergoing a two-hour operation to have her silicone breast implants removed on Tuesday.
Prior to the operation, Melissa Gilbert slammed surgical breast augmentation in an interesting piece entitled A Tale of Two Titties that she posted on her blog on Dec. 31, 2014.
The 50-year-old actress and director revealed that she has been struggling with accepting the size and appearance of her breast throughout her life. "I spent a great deal of my life almost completely flat chested," she wrote. "Unlike my friend and co-star Alison Arngim, who grew enormous boobs when we were teenagers, mine never really came to fruition."
Melissa Gilbert revealed that in her early years of acting, she was under pressure to alter her appearance to have the "Jessica Rabbit-esque figure" - as she describes it. On set at just 17 years old, Melissa says she was made to wear a padded bra, as well as a corset and a girdle. She claims to have even had cleavage painted on her body and her nose shaded on the sides not to look "so wide."
"What are we telling young women and girls?" she asks, after criticizing the media overemphasis on the bodies of female celebrities and the proliferation of cosmetic surgery adverts.
According to Melissa Gilbert, all these pressures, including the fact that her ex-husband referred to her breasts as "Socks full of marbles with knots at the top", forced her to decide to have saline breast implants.
Although she says the surgery went great and had the desired effect of raising her self-esteem up again, Melissa says she started to think twice about her breast implants after reading that they have to be replaced periodically.
"I had spent most of my life pressured to look a certain way and I believed the hype. The height of this obsession with my outward appearance culminated with my appearance on the dancing show," she writes. "It was all about spray tan and glitter and glamor and what other people think and being skinny, way too skinny!!"
After an accident that she describes as a "rude awakening" when a 300 pound patio collapsed on her head, Melissa says "It was like a light switch going on."
"The shallowness of my existence at that point brought me to my knees. I had to change."
According to Melissa, three years after the incident, she is still changing and growing. No doubt the implant removal surgery marked a momentous progress on her journey to change.
The actress cautioned everyone thinking of undergoing any sort of elective plastic surgery to research about the process properly before going for one. "Love yourself. You are perfectly beautiful. You are enough," she writes.
Melissa Gilbert's blog post has gone viral on the internet. Fans of the actress have taken to social media to wish her a speedy recovery since she revealed that her surgery was successful.
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