Jen Larsen weighed over 300 pounds before her weight-loss surgery in 2006. Today she’s thinner, but not necessarily happier. (
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I was 5 feet 7 inches tall and I weighed 308 pounds. I was terrified I’d never stop gaining. I tried diets and felt like a failure every time all the weight came piling back on top of me as soon as I shifted my attention for even a moment. Every time I tried to diet I ended up twice as large.
So when I found out about weight-loss surgery, it sounded like a miracle. You’d go from fat to skinny with just a single three-hour procedure. You’d be cured of being fat. So I signed up, and I was shuffled swiftly into the operating room by the medical-industrial complex. To be fair, they did say, “Do you think it’s a magic cure?” and I lied and said “Well, of course not!”
Really, I had no idea.
Seven months later I had lost almost 100 pounds. A year and a half later, I had lost almost 180 pounds. Weight-loss surgery turned my guts inside out and my life upside-down. Weight-loss surgery changed everything.
Some things I had expected, but hadn’t thought too much about. There are side effects they warn you about — nausea, diarrhea, gas, extra skin — but when you weigh 300 pounds and are convinced that you’ll never be happy until you’re skinny, those warnings mean less than nothing. What’s some gas against not feeling like you should be ashamed of being fat?
Then there are the side effects they don’t tell you about. My face changed so much I didn’t recognize myself. And even though I lost the equivalent of an entire person, I would stand in front of the mirror and still loathe my body.
What I really didn’t expect, though, was the emotional fallout. It blindsided me.
I thought that once I had lost enough weight, the boyfriend who had stopped desiring me sexually would suddenly want me — except he still didn’t.
I had the sudden, unexpected fear of telling my mother I had done something as drastic as get weight-loss surgery, because I didn’t want her to think I was trying to avoid ending up like her, obese her entire life. Except that was really what I was doing, wasn’t it? I was ashamed of being such a coward and thinking such awful things.
There was the shock of being on the receiving end of male attention that wasn’t hostile. Male attention that was admiring. It terrified me, because I had only previously experienced mockery and incredulity from men who thought I had an ill-conceived and completely hopeless romantic interest in them.
Skinny, I felt more vulnerable than I ever had before, even when I was at my highest weight — like I had more to lose, and more to hide, and more to be embarrassed by.
When you reach your goal weight, that number in your head at which everything suddenly is supposed to be fixed, it’s also supposed to mean that you’re done, and everything is perfect, and you’ve got a happily ever after.
A part of me really believed that. That I’d run the race and win the medal and be able to retire happily.
But my weight was a fig leaf concealing all my real, underlying issues: my depression, my anxiety, my insecurity. The scars from years of being a fat person in a world that is often flat-out hostile to fat people.
I say all the time: It’s easier to be thin than it is to be fat. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s easier to fit in and feel like you can keep your head down and be ignored if you want to. I don’t regret getting weight-loss surgery, but I regret so many other things. That I spent so long hating myself, that I wasn’t strong enough to try to fix my emotional issues instead of running away from them. That I was foolish enough to secretly believe there was a happily ever after to be handed to me.
Seven years have passed since my surgery and I’ve only just started to work on those problems. I’ve gone to therapy. But with so much distance from the person I used to be, I have an extraordinary perspective. An objective view of those so-unhappy years. From here, I can see that I used to be a coward. Someone who lied about being angry, lonely, upset, and pushed away the people who loved me.
I refuse to do that anymore. I don’t want to compromise and lie and hide. To the people in my life, or to myself. And that has begun to transform my life, and my relationships. I’m a better person, and I’m only just now really beginning to believe that I can be a good person and have something to offer — entirely apart from my size and my weight.
Jen Larsen is the author of “Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head” (March 2013 from Seal Press).