Please Keep Trying!

To all those reading this blog who are only fifteen or twenty pounds overweight, please heed my warning, lose weight now or you’ll have a much bigger, and much more expensive problem to cope with later on.

Perhaps, like I thought, you believe you’ve mastered your weight issues. Perhaps you think, as I did, you have everything under control. And perhaps, unlike me, you can walk away from a significant weight gain unscathed. If you’re fifty or more pounds overweight, the longer you stay at that weight, as I did, the worse you’re troubles will be down the road.

The biggest issue facing anyone who’s lost massive amounts of weight is the loose skin hanging off the now lithe frame. For me, the skin issue has become the biggest problem facing me now, both emotionally and physically.

It affects me physically and emotionally by raising my pant size, despite my weight loss. Imagine dropping twenty pounds, and expecting to be able to slide a pair of size 10s on with ease. Then imagine realizing you actually went up a pant size. Then imagine breaking down in the store when your best friend solves this conundrum for you be stating, “Gravity’s a bitch.“, i.e. all the loose skin is falling down and collecting at the belly and thighs.

The gross bits are how the skin gets easily irritated and itches like hell. Or how it gets caught in a zipper. Or how I have to shove my tricep skin through the armholes of a shirt, not unlike stuffing meat into a sausage casing. Sounds putrid and nasty doesn’t it? It is, and it makes me feel all the work I’ve done is for nothing.

The problem isn’t the fat any more, it’s the skin. The skin makes me look like I’m wearing deflated inner tubes around my ass, belly and thighs. I have no idea if I can even lose any more weight or if what I think is weight is merely skin masquerading as pounds.

I can no longer gage my progress by the traditional means of scales, tape measures, body fat meters, and pant sizes; all have been massively skewed by the skin. One day, the scale shot up ten pounds, but my face and upper body were actually much, much thinner. WTF?!! Then, my pant size went up to a 14 when I was a 12, but my top size went down to a 6. All the while, my upper body dwindled and grew thinner. My calves and and triceps became more defined and I could see my ribs when I lay down and the skin flowed to the side.

The solution to this wholly damaging problem is surgery. Body contouring surgery to be exact.

In an eerie twist, a reader posted a comment about this very subject, which I was having an incredibly tough time with yesterday. I was researching surgery options yesterday and became upset with what I found. I’ll post my findings in a second part sometime this week. I’m having a really emotional time right now, what with feeling like a pile of overstretched balloons. I’m allowed to have a “fat” day; I’m calling in my “fat” day right now…