The actress no longer gets Botox or filler and tells PEOPLE she’s never been happier
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Melissa Gilbert‘s days of chasing youth are behind her.
The Little House on the Prairie star, 57, first got her start in showbiz at age 9 when she landed the life-changing role of Laura Ingalls Wilder on the beloved TV series, which ran from 1974 to 1983.
Gilbert continued acting into adulthood, finding success in TV and films, but as she got older, she felt the pressure to stay youthful.
“I grew up in an industry that values the outside considerably more than the inside, and I was caught in that wheel of trying to stay young,” she says in the latest issue of PEOPLE.
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Over the years, Gilbert — whose new book Back to the Prairie: A Home Remade, A Life Discovered is out May 10 — got Botox, fillers and plastic surgery, but that all changed when she had a midlife reassessment.
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“I finally woke up and went, ‘What am I doing? I look like a carrot top, and I’m not happy,'” she says. “My mindset was, ‘You have to stay thin. You have to be seen in the right places, wear the right shoes and drive the right car.’ That was so drilled into me by all the outside forces. But it never sat right.”
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After marrying her husband actor Timothy Busfield in 2013, the couple moved to Howell, Michigan, where Gilbert embraced a more natural lifestyle.
“I cut off all my hair and quit doing Botox and all that stuff,” she says of a decision that Busfield, 64, strongly backed. She also experienced a “reawakened love for the outdoors.”
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Since then, the pair have settled into a peaceful life at their mountainside cabin in New York’s Catskill Mountains.
“I was always trying too hard to fit the mold that someone else wanted,” says Gilbert. “I’m finally happy in my own skin. I’m so grateful and relieved and so much happier.”
