Our annual Most Worth It list recognizes the most-loved aesthetic procedures—from noninvasive tweaks to the gold standard in surgery—as chosen by RealSelf community members like you. This story highlights one or more of the 44 Most Worth It honorees for 2022; you can see the full list and learn more about patients’ favorite procedures here.
I’ve been overweight my entire adult life. I’m five feet, four inches, and at my peak, I weighed 250 pounds. Actually, I probably weighed closer to 260 pounds at my highest, but I just stopped weighing myself. In my late 20s, I finally ended up losing about 60 pounds with diet and exercise, and stayed at about 190 to 200 pounds for the next 10 years. My BMI was always on the cusp of being high enough to qualify for bariatric surgery, but I finally got approved and had a vertical sleeve gastrectomy in July 2018. I had no complications, the recovery was easy, and by November of that year, I had lost another 50 pounds.
I was at my lowest weight ever but was now dealing with a whole other bag of insecurities. The entire time you’re overweight, you keep thinking, if I lose weight, I’ll look the way I want to, but that wasn’t the case. I had now lost about 100 pounds, and my skin showed it. Everything looked fine when I was wearing clothing—I was lucky that with the way my skin fell, especially around my abdomen, I could basically tuck it in. But that’s not what I saw when I looked in the mirror. I thought that if I kept working out, it would help, but two years passed and I saw no improvement. And that’s when I finally had to wrap my head around the idea that the only way to make my body look normal was to surgically cut off this excess skin. It’s hard to get to that point, to understand that no matter what you do or how hard you work, your body isn’t going to bounce back.
I work in healthcare, so I really did my due diligence researching surgeons. I had countless consultations and was very interested in learning about the different techniques the surgeons were suggesting. For example, I wanted a tummy tuck and Brazilian butt lift, but Dr. GIancarlo McEvenue was the first doctor who told me he wouldn’t do a BBL unless I had a full circumferential body lift. He explained that because my skin was already saggy, simply adding more fat would make it droop more and I’d be unhappy with the results. Given his excellent credentials, recommendations, and before and after photos—not to mention the very good feeling I had about him—I decided to have him perform the surgery.
Everyone had their own opinion about my decision to undergo plastic surgery. Some people were extremely supportive, and some would tell me I didn’t need it. That’s when I would show them how I could pull six inches of skin off my waist and explain that after I had worked so hard to lose the weight and maintain it, I didn’t want to stop this journey when I was still unhappy with how I looked. Ultimately, I chose to appreciate the people who were supportive and simply avoided the people who had negative opinions about it.
On March 4, 2021, I underwent a circumferential lift, breast lift, and BBL. The surgery was about five hours long, and I had somewhere between five to six pounds of skin removed. The recovery was definitely harder than the recovery from my gastrectomy. The pain topped off at about a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10, but the hardest part was the constant feeling of tightness, like you’re always wearing a corset. And while things improved week to week, I still experience swelling and feel that tightness, even though the surgery was five months ago. I think that’s really important for people to know. I’ve seen so many message boards where patients think they’re going to be at 100% a month or six weeks out, but no. This is major. Your body is putting itself back together. That being said, people get very worried about the scar from a body lift, and I was too—I didn’t want a scar around my entire body—but mine is so low that even when I’m in a bikini, you can’t see it.
Lymphatic drainage massages made a world of difference during my recovery, when it came to minimizing swelling. I had two of them per week for the first 13 weeks, and I’m thinking about starting them again, more so for aesthetic purposes. I was happy that I was financially prepared for not only the surgery but also all the things that go along with the recovery process. That’s another piece of advice I’d give people considering this: there’s the cost of the surgery, yes, but there’s going to be an additional investment, in terms of things like the massages and compression garments (which I still wear at work) and other things that will help your recovery that you need to be ready for.
It’s also important to be realistic. I was older, I’d lost 100 pounds, I had stretch marks, and my skin elasticity wasn’t great. So trying to compare my end results and what my body looks like post-surgery to a 20-year-old who’s never been overweight just isn’t realistic. It’s important to do research and look at pictures, especially of people who have a body type similar to yours, but everyone is an individual and is going to have a different outcome, and you just have to be realistic about the end result.
Undergoing this surgery has changed my life tremendously, and I have zero regrets. I’m 40, and I just wore a bikini for the first time this summer. I can buy clothing based on styles I like, not just what fits. But there have been some mental challenges for me. Some people do this type of surgery because they’re trying to get back to a body they once had. But I’m now seeing a body that I’ve never had, and that definitely makes for a different emotional experience. It does give you a sense of validation though. I worked so hard to lose the weight, and for a long time, that hard work wasn’t reflected in my appearance. Now I finally feel like it is.
