May 11th, 2012: Yesterday I had my first inquiry from a misguided individual regarding excess skin that’s left over after you lose a lot of weight. “…are you worried about that…” something to that effect. This is both a victory and an aggravation. It’s a mild victory that offset the gaining of a pound back to 267.
If someone’s wondering about how I’ll deal with excess skin, well, then I must have lost enough weight that it’s noticeable. It is noticeable, but other than progress photos, I don’t walk around shirtless very often, so honestly, nobody outside of me ought to worry about whether I worry.
The truth is, like everything else that sucks about obesity, I also fret about the excess skin. I haven’t lost enough weight to have bags of it attached to me, but I expect that might be the case at 189 lbs. Weird, huh, it’s almost like you can’t win for losing. Either way, it seems like my body is always gonna look disgusting. Obviously, picking the lesser of the evils, I’ll take the excess skin – I can always have it surgically removed if it’s that big of a deal. I’ll cross that bridge when I come it.
Questioning someone who’s in the process of losing a major amount of weight if he’s concerned about excess skin is not best-practice. You already know the answer, and you just made that person’s day just a little bit more of a challenge. I like to try to remember that unless a dude is pointing a gun at me, or is across the ring from me, my job as a human is not to introduce unnecessary challenges into somebody’s day, but rather, to make his life a little more smooth and happy.
May 11th, 2020: Excess skin and skinny-fat. I crossed those bridges, and so does everybody who drops a bunch of weight. You go from morbidly obese back to a healthy weight and weird shit happens.
I still have vestiges of a hard-drinking, heavy-eating lifestyle. I’ve got stretch marks on my abdomen that, if you look really closely, spell out the phrase “Body by Budweiser”.
To get to 189 lbs., I lost 161 lbs. That’s the equivalent weight of an entire human, and not a small one. In boxing, a 161 lb. dude has to lose a pound to make the middleweight limit. I fully expected bags of pointless excess skin like bat-flaps, love handles, all of it. Fortunately, the only obvious indication to this point are those stretch marks. I had excess skin, but it seemed to disappear a lot quicker than the fat layers underneath. Where the fuck did it go, I wonder?
I have to think that the rate at which I lost the weight, sometimes as slow as snails traveling uphill through peanut butter, had much to do with it. My body seemed to compensate as I went. I’ve alluded to it before, where I would lose weight, but look the same for some weeks; then other weeks I wouldn’t lose weight, but my body seemed to become more compact.
I’m not skilled enough as a scientist, nor do I have the time or the desire, to experimentally determine any factors of that nature, but it is food for thought. I’m also free to just put that thought in the “it’s just an is” box, or the FM (fucking magic) box, or the book of beliefs.
I thought I might discuss skinny-fat in this post, but the more I thought of it, I think it’s such a complex subject that I’ll address it later. Definitely another bane in the life of the diet/fitness obsessed.
Standby and/or remind me for future skinny-fat posts.
