Loose Skin

Some of this may not be pleasant. If the show Dirty Jobs makes you squirm, you might want to skip this entry.

Here's something that doesn't seem to occur to a lot of people in regards to dieting. That something is loose skin.

Um...the title of the post probably gave it away, didn't it?

I'm perpetually mystified by the number of people that crawl from the shadows saying they had the surgery (or more often, their sister/cousin/in-law/mother/aunt/friend had the surgery). It seemed that half the ward I was recovering in when I had the surgery were post-ops.

And when I hear that people who want to have the surgery are sometimes 50 pounds overweight...that's all? Really?

I started out at around 458 pounds. On my last weigh-in on 10/9/2009 I had lost 190 pounds. That's going from "super obese" to just "obese".

But one of the newer demons someone in that position has to confront is loose skin. People losing twenty pounds got nothing on me. Taking dramatic measures to lose the equivalent of a large bag of dog food? Why?

What I have isn't just the wobble under the arms that you find some older people tend to develop, or the small flap under the arms from moderate weight loss. Not just stretch marks on the sides, or the slight bit hanging from an oversized panniculus from, say, childbirth.

Losing the weight that I've recorded means that under my arms aren't just hanging loose skin but rather wings. See this? I can do that without the suit. Just me in freefall with the arm flab flapping in the wind. Not that I've actually tried it. That would be crazy.

The panniculus...an apron of fat hanging off the stomach post weight loss...is a constant reminder of my dietary mistakes. It's big. Like you can take handfuls of it and not find any muscle definition. I don't wear button-up shirts because it's awkward to tuck the shirt into my pants over this thing. It gets rashes. It has a life of it's own.

I am a bassett hound. Ever see one of them? When I turn around, I stop and two seconds later the rest of me stops. I swim in skin. If I get into a pool I wouldn't be able to dive below the surface because of the bouancy of the excess skin. On the plus side, I could probably survive most body shots from a small caliber weapon.

These are just some of the thoughts that pass through my mind when getting dressed in the morning. I avoid looking in the mirror for fear of seeing more than I have to.

It. Sucks.

There's surgery available. There's a couple things working against me, though. One, it's classified as a cosmetic surgery. It's for looks, not necessarily health reasons.

Two, insurance companies are evil.

Three, I'm told I can't even consider the surgery until I'm at least a year out from the surgery.

Four, I don't know when or if I'd have the sizeable copay that my current insurance company supposedly would charge for the surgery if they were to decide I could get it in the first place. Remember point number two.

It's tough. I know I did this to myself. It's my fault. And I have a constant reminder of my misdeeds. Every time I pass a mirror, every time I tug my sleeves down to hide the stretched flesh, every time I press on my skin and see my fingers sink and sink into the surface. And it's extremely depressing.

I sometimes wonder how much this excess skin weighs, and wonder if the surgical removal of the skin would see another five, ten...twenty pounds?

If anyone tells you that the skin is flexible and will heal, they're not dealing with this kind of weight loss. I already had one plastic surgeon tell me that there's no way the skin would ever "heal". Skin has a certain amount of resiliency, but nothing like what I'd be asking it to heal from in this case. The connective tissue has been ripped to shreds.

"Exercise! Build up some muscle to fill that space!"

I have been exercising. First, the amount of skin to fill would mean I'd have to become a professional bodybuilder. That would be excessively difficult given my new digestive challenges and the fact that a pro body builder consumes something on the order of 4,000 calories a day. Plus there is a significant genetic factor to how much muscle you can build up.

Also muscle is more dense than fat (the claim that muscle is heavier than fat is bull. A pound of feathers and a pound of sand are both a pound...) so it would take a lot more muscle than fat to fill the skin.

In other words exercise isn't the key to helping this flab.

Right now it looks like I'm stuck with this current...look. I'm stuck with the daily reminder and the pained wince when I glimpse myself in the mirror.

It's another thing to cope with, I suppose.