TW: weight gain and loss, dieting, weight loss surgery.

2020 was the year I went wild with cosmetic things. I started using acids and whatnot on my face (good decision). I got my teeth whitened (very painful). I also had liposuction.

Why did I do it? Well, as so many people who have undergone hormonal treatments will know, the weight stacks on, and it doesn’t necessarily unstack when you stop. My weight gain started after a hormonal injection backfired and my pain spiked along with my dress size. Following that, I moved to the Depo-Provera shot, which didn’t do a whole lot for me on average (sometimes it worked brilliantly, sometimes it had no effect at all), and didn’t exactly slow my weight gain.

When I finally stopped getting the injections, the weight continued to come. I ate as well as I could, although cooking and meal prep was hard due to pain. Similarly, I was active whenever possible, but constant bouts of pain and illness made getting into a proper exercise schedule impossible. Whatever I was capable of doing, it wasn’t enough to successfully combat what the hormones were doing. It was as if my body thought some Frostpunk-style winter apocalypse was incoming, and it needed to shore up my fat reserves to ensure that I survived the coming terrors. Had that been the case, I’m sure I would have been appreciative. As this is pre-apocalypse Australia, I was not.

I want to be clear about a couple of things here. First, I support people having plastic surgery for any reason they want (leaving aside the issue of Bond villains trying to destroy the world). Second, I am not anti-fat. Third, I am pro body positivity.

With that in mind, let me explain why I chose surgery when it became clear that the normal methods were not working.

I don’t see my scars or my extra weight or my hormonal acne as a badge of courage or a testament to what I have been through. I’m not saying others can’t – whatever empowers you, friend – but I don’t. I would be just as brave and strong without them. Instead, they are visual reminders of the daily impacts endometriosis has had on my life. It has taken my freedom to be spontaneous and do things I love, my ability to live pain-free, and negatively impacted my career. With the weight gain, it meant I couldn’t wear the clothes I owned and loved. It took away a body that was familiar, and that I liked the shape of, and gave me a body that was strange and uncomfortable. I didn’t enjoy the sensation of my thighs rubbing together when I walked, or my tummy rolling when I sat down. I felt heavy, physically and emotionally. When I opened the wardrobe and could only wear a fraction of what was in it, I felt hopeless. When I looked in the mirror, I saw endometriosis looking back at me.

I love women in all their bodies. I don’t think beauty is determined by size or shape, and I don’t think beauty is the most important thing. But I didn’t love my body that way, and I didn’t feel beautiful. I felt sick – not because of the fat, but because of the endo.

To be extra clear: I wasn’t actually fat when I chose to get liposuction, and I don’t think fatness (or any other size or shape of human body) is inherently bad. It wasn’t my size that was bothering me. I’d gone from a very slim size 8 (prior to diagnosis) to a slim size 10, to a perfectly average size 12-14 by the time I had lipo. For context, I’m 178cm tall. My frame could carry another few dress sizes before people would start to view me as fat, I think. That wasn’t relevant to my thought process. It was the changes in my body, combined with the reasons for them, that had me so upset. The actual size and shape was not the issue.

So, left in a situation where my body was making me sad, but I couldn’t do anything about it, I chose to seek help. The doctor I saw was great (I went through Cosmos Clinic, and I will write more about my experiences in my next post). He was realistic about what we could achieve, and talked me through my options. We considered Cool Sculpting, which freezes away stubborn fat, but I wanted to lose more than Cool Sculpting would allow, and I wanted to lose it faster. I may still consider it for my arms, which I did not have liposuctioned, and which I don’t feel the same kind of heavy, anxious depression about.

I left the appointment with hope, and it made me sure – I wanted to go ahead with it. I wanted my body to change.

And I did.

In my next post, I will write about my experiences of liposuction – what the operation was like, what the recovery was like, and the thing I’m sure readers are most curious about: my results.

Note: I am very open to people commenting on this article. However, if your comment is to tell me that I’m lazy for not being able to lose weight, or that I wasn’t trying hard enough, or that I took the easy way out, I encourage you to consider whether the time making your comment could be better spent doing almost anything else. Similarly, if you want to tell me that my decision regarding my own personal body makes me a fat-shamer or a bad feminist, you have fundamentally misunderstood the post and my reasoning, and I encourage you to read it again.