Thanks for sharing

How did I end up here?

Days to surgery: 49

It was my intention to do a blog to track my journey, but as there are so many already on here, I thought I might as well just post here. So I'll just post my two blog posts here and continue the journey from Realself from this point on:

The decision to proceed with a tummy tuck is not something that I've taken lightly. It is however something that I've had on my mind for some time, as I always knew it might be the only option.

See, almost 2 years ago now I set about losing a considerable amount of weight. Weight that had crept on through years of eating whatever I liked and using food as an emotional tool when I felt happy and when I felt sad. Regardless of the emotion, food was there.

The result was a final figure of 116kg, and a very unhappy man.

So here I am a number of years later, and after a lot of hard work and a new mindset, I'm now 30kg lighter and enjoying my new found freedom.

I can now buy clothes anywhere and they just fit. Jeans are no longer a nightmare to try on, and I can order a standard medium in almost anything and it fits perfectly.

However, despite this new found freedom there is still a part of me that is not quite right. I look in the mirror and even though the weight is considerably reduced, there are still the telltale signs of a bigger man - a man whose skin was stretched beyond capacity. Hence the tummy tuck.

When I started on this journey, it was always my greatest fear that my mid-section would not bounce back as well as I would like. And for many years, it was one of the main reasons that I wouldn't even consider really trying to lose weight because I'd always think, what will I be left with.

I'm sure this is something that many larger people struggle with. The eternal questions of 'is it better to be fat with taught skin, or thinner with a bit of loose skin'?

According to the medical profession, the latter is the best, but when you're the one dealing with this dilemma, commonsense doesn't always prevail.

However, luckily these days there are options at the end. There is liposuction and surgery to assist in the cleanup process. But of course, procedures themselves aren't without risk. More on my thoughts on that later.

For those that have made it to the end of this post, welcome. I'll be updating regularly in the lead up to and post surgery. This blog won't go into detail about my surgeon, where I'm having the surgery done of anything like that. It's just a place for me to share my journey, as reading other people's stories has also helped me