my coming out story

 My weight loss journey

 

Recently I shared a picture of myself in a fancy dress. on Facebook that made my inbox blow up. I tend to not check Messenger too often, but I happened to notice it and was quite surprised. Some people even sent me messages on WhatsApp.

May 2022 and July 2023

You see, over the past year and a half, I’ve lost a lot of weight. About 30kg (that’s 66 lbs for those of you who don’t like the logical ease of the metric system 😉) Weight that I had gained during the two years Corona lockdowns.

People asked me how I lost this weight, and I started to tell them of my journey of ‘healthy eating, intermitted fasting and lots and lots of exercise.’ You know… the really boring stuff. But that is how I lost the weight. One person even asked if I had Photoshopped the image of myself. My first reaction was “WTF?” and then it actually made me giggle and I felt rather flattered. You think I Photoshopped myself? That’s quite the compliment. The answer is: I really look like this.

A perfect example of how
disproportionate my arms were

Then someone asked me a very different question. They asked me: How did I get my stomach to be so flat… and that, my Darlings, is a different story. You see, I had a little help with that because it was impossible to do on my own.

One of the things that people rarely talk about when it comes to drastic weight loss is what your body looks like after you lose a lot of fat.

Parts of my body looked a bit like I was accidentally wearing the wrong-sized skin. Some people have bingo wings, or chicken wings under their arms, I had straight-up Pterodactyl wings.

 

There are some people who have magic elastic skin that just snaps back into place when you shrink in size. I, however, am not one of those people, and I was stuck—like many other weight loss people—with a lot of loose skin. It was quite horrible, because not only did I feel I actually started to look more unattractive the more weight I lost, but my skin is also very sensitive, so it actually caused me a lot of discomfort too.

I knew loose skin was a problem for me. I’ve lost a lot of weight in the past, which kept it off until the Corona Lockdowns. The skin was a frustration from the very beginning, but I managed to hide it reasonably well. Having it removed is costly, and I would just tell myself ‘at least I lost the weight.’

This time around was different. I’m older now and my skin was just so sick of my shit, it had given up completely. Even my breasts, that had withstood breastfeeding and previous weight loss with a reasonable amount of grace, just gave in to an excess of skin, and became sad and droopy.

No matter what you do, you can’t exercise away excess skin. You can fill it up with something else (like muscle), but it doesn’t go away unless you have it cut off. I don’t care what the fitness guru’s out there say… they are lying. And since I am neither capable nor interested in HULKING OUT and filling my arms with huge muscles, my only option was surgery.

Technically I had too much skin all over my body (even my legs suffer), but the worst were my arms, my lower belly, and my boobies. And those were the parts that brought me discomfort in daily life. I still hate my legs, but at least that’s just an ego thing and one I can sort of hide.

The extra skin made it difficult to buy clothing because my proportions were way off. If you look at the picture that I shared above, you can imagine that sleeves were my freaking Nemesis. I would end up buying coats at least 2 sizes too big because otherwise, my arms wouldn’t fit.

Shopping for clothes overall was pretty stressful, because it felt almost impossible to find something that would fit me right. I was often struggling with a combination of parts of a clothing item being oversized (and thus very unflattering) and parts being too tight.

The tenderness of my skin also caused some discomfort with certain types of fabrics (I hated wearing jeans because of the waist part that just never felt quite right—it either felt too tight or the jeans would literally slip down and fall off my backside. I couldn’t wear belts either, because then it would be too tight again)

On top of the unsightly skin, I was also blessed with a weird lump of fatty tissue around my shoulder/ neck area, which is labeled by the oh-so-flattering name of ‘buffalo hump’. It made me feel like freaking Quasimodo. All this made me look a lot bigger than I actually was.

At age 47 I’m in the middle of my perimenopause and my own little midlife crisis, so this is when I decided to have something done about it. We were doing okay financially, and I was in the right mental state. 2023 was the year I would finally have all that hated skin removed.

My operations were split into 2 sessions. On July 5^th I had the excess skin of my stomach and breasts removed (reducing my breasts by over a cup size) For good measure I had the muscles of my stomach put back in their original place since my pregnancy had created a gap in my abdominal muscle wall of about 5 cm (2 inches for the metric system challenged). My second operation was on September 5^th taking the excess skin from my arms and removing my Buffalo Hump.

believe it or not, I actually weighed
less here than in the next picture

Now, if you think that having skin removal is a good way to lose weight, think again. Yes, they take away several kilos of skin (in my case 2.7 kg—almost 6 lbs) in total, but you get lots of fluids that take up that space in return, and I’m actually dealing with the aftermath right now where I’m about 2 kg (4 ½ lbs) heavier than I was pre-operation. I haven’t been able to do my normal exercises for the past 4 months, and I have been on a higher-calorie diet (healthy calories, I didn’t start binge eating sugars and fat) for my recovery.

This really shows the difference without
loose skin

The funny thing is, before my operations, people would come up to me, study me, and ask: “Did you lose weight?”. I lost about the weight of the average 9 year old child… so, yes, you can say I lost weight.

Now that I’ve had my operations people are coming up to me completely shocked about how good I look and how much weight I lost. And I am literally heavier than I was before. That’s how  much difference it makes not to walk around with all that extra skin. I’m swollen and bloated, and I still look about 15 kg lighter than I did before.

 

Am I butthurt that the surgery seems to be getting all the credit for all my hard work? Absolutely. But I’ll get over it 😉

If you are the type of person who has lost a lot of weight and also struggles with this weird skin suit that I was left with, I can absolutely recommend having surgery. It has changed my life and has made things like ‘shopping for clothes’ such a hassle-free experience. It’s also done absolute wonders for my ego.

I don’t know if it’s helped with my oversensitive skin yet, because I’m still very numb everywhere, so time will tell. But I used to not be able to wear shapewear but now my compression garments are very much like shapewear and they feel fine, so I’m hopeful.

For those of you wondering if it hurts: That’s a difficult question to answer because it’s different for everyone. I didn’t feel a lot of pain in my stomach area. There was a bit of discomfort and I hated not being able to stand up straight for several weeks (which gave me some back pains). My breasts and arms were a different story. They hurt a lot. Still do to this day—especially my arms. Recovery was rough. If you ever consider these kinds of operations, make sure you take your time to recover and that you have people who have the time and energy to help you out. I especially hated how helpless I was with the second operation. Not being able to use my arms was hell.

If there is any interest, I don’t mind blogging about my experiences with either or both surgeries.

Anddddd there you have it, Folks: that is my weight loss journey in a nutshell. The kilos I lost all by myself by making healthy life choices. The aesthetics I had some help with. 

If you want to have this kind of surgery, you need to do the work first. You need to be at your ideal weight or at least close to it because if you don’t, and you go on losing weight after your surgery, you will end up with more loose skin. This is not an easy way out, this is a last resort.

I will never have that perfect Barbie body. Some people will still consider me a big girl… they have done this all my life, even when I didn’t weigh very much at all.

As a 6’ woman with a curvy build, I would have to spend my whole life dedicated to my weight in order to achieve that ‘perfect’ skinny look that people seem to want. To be honest, I probably still wouldn’t get the desired effect, since my bone structure will always have those ‘child-bearing hips’ (that didn’t help me with childbearing one bit) That’s not even what I was trying to achieve with this journey. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life worrying if I look good enough. To stay healthy I have to watch my weight for the rest of my life. I was cursed with a crappy metabolism, so in order to maintain a normal weight I have made some drastic changes in my life.

I will never not watch what I eat, and I will always have to exercise. And that’s not too bad, it will allow me to grow old reasonably fit and healthy.

On top of weight loss, I wanted to feel good in my own skin and be able to buy clothing in a size that would actually fit me all over. I have achieved that, and I am happy with it. I worked very hard for this.