Body dysmorphia roller coaster

Fun fact

Before the surgery, you don’t believe how big you are, and after the surgery, when the weight starts to peel off, you can’t see the changes and keep thinking that you are still really big. Sad but true. Body dysmorphia at its best!

Before

A lot of people after bariatric surgery would tell you: I knew I was fat. But I never thought I was THAT fat! They say it when they see a pic from their past and they face reality. It seems as if the head didn’t want to acknowledge the dimensions of the body it had to live with. For some reason, we always thought that we were smaller than we actually were.

Do you remember when clothes shopping? You bought jeans hoping they would stretch a little, and they shrank in the washing machine. So they went directly to the back of the closet and you hoped that you would forget about them soon.

After

After the bariatric surgery, you face a very different problem. For some reason, you see yourself as a monster that is so big that you shouldn’t be allowed to walk in the street, and even if the scales tell you that you have lost 20 pounds, you can’t see it. It is objectively a lot of weight and it has to be visible. But your brain is fixed on the idea from the past and refuses to accept that things are changing.

And they are changing so fast that it is hard to believe. It is incredible. The first weeks after the surgery I was losing a pound or two a day. Yes, every day! As I had the incision with staples on my tummy, I wore leggings and I was in total shock when I put on my jeans after a month. Wow! Ok, I had to admit that something must have changed because they were loose. Never happened before.

Why is that?

Extreme cases of body dysmorphia are anorexic girls who consider themselves fat even when their bones are poking out all over their bodies. Obviously, after bariatric surgery, you are not this case, but I swear that after a year you will find bones you had no idea that could show up.

If you never thought that sitting could become painful, beware! Coxis and butt bones will make your life miserable 😀 In a good way. We were used to have a good padding on the butt, but it will disappear. Inevitably, it will happen almost to everyone. If you love your butt, make a funeral ceremony, it will be gone after some time. And from now on, sitting on anything hard will become a nightmare. It is ok for a while, but after three hours, you will be fidgeting and not knowing how to put yourself. Personal experience.
Well, nothing in life is free, so we traded our butt for all-over weight loss. Seems fair to me. Anyway, it is much easier to buy jeans in size 6 than 16. At least here in Europe. And also the visual part is way more appealing.

We have been telling ourselves for so many years that we are fat, that we don’t fit, that this is not large enough, that we need something bigger, more sturdy chair to sit on, you name it, that we believe it to the core of our being.

But wait, in my case, I lost some 80 pounds! It is a lot of pounds if you ask me. The thing is that my brain is still confused. I am confused to such a level that sometimes I don’t recognize myself in the mirror. The other day I felt uncomfortable in a store full of mirrors because a woman was looking at me… and… it was me in the mirror. Crazy, I know.

I have the same problem when I need to buy some clothes. I come to the store and my legs automatically walk me to the large sizes section. Um, not anymore. So I redirect myself to the normal sizes… and I am completely lost, because if you ask me what size I am now… I don’t know!

I see clothes that I like, but my brain tells me/screams at me that no way, forget about it, in your dream, you will look ridiculous in this. And if I convince myself to try it on, it is sometimes even too large and I have to ask for a smaller size. This is very common after the surgery.

Taboo topic

Sadly, people don’t want to talk about this. It is a somewhat weird experience. I think they are ashamed. If you admit that even though you lost 80 pounds, you dropped 10 clothes sizes, you see yourself the same as at the beginning. People from outside would tell you that you want to make yourself interesting and that you are an attention seeker and you ask them for praise. (you opted for the easy way out anyway, so…)

I wish it was as easy as this. I have to admit that this thing takes up a lot of space in your head. You have no idea how to deal with it. Your body is changing so fast that you have no way of keeping up with this all. If somebody asks you how much you weigh, you have to think about it a lot because it is every day different. Are you giving them the correct number anyway?

Help needed

I am incredibly grateful that I could have the surgery, I was given a second chance in my life and I am really doing my very best not to mess things up. But I wish we were given more support around this topic. Sure, we have the nutritionist (for a while), and the endocrinologist to check our vitamins and minerals, but at least in my case, I didn’t have any psychological help.

I wish I had it. As incredible as it seems, the surgery is not only a killer procedure for your body, it is a major abdominal surgery, and even if it is a laparoscopy, it is no fun. But what it means for your mental wellbeing… that is really something.

It is a rollercoaster of emotions, raging from euphoria to deep misery, laughter optimism, and deepest depression in one single afternoon. Nevertheless, you are doing your absolute best and pretending that all is fine and you are functioning as if nothing. But the reality is very far from that.

I wish people from the outside knew about this. The surgery is so incredibly hard and it shifts everything in your life. Not only what you eat or how much. It shakes to the core of your being everything you were used to doing, being, thinking, believing. Everything is different from one day to another and you are trying to cope with all these changes. It seems as if you stepped on ice hidden under snow cover. Hard to maintain some kind of balance in such a situation.

Did you know about this? Or is it a completely new situation for you – in case you haven’t had the surgery yet, prepare! Or did you go through the very same process as I did? I think you did. Maybe not so horrible, but maybe even worse, who knows. Let me know. I am really curious about your experience on this topic.