This isn’t a confession, but it is context.

I’ve gone back and forth on whether to share this. Not because it’s a secret, but because the world has a way of twisting women’s health stories into morality plays. This one isn’t that. It’s just the truth or at least my version of it. This isn’t a confession, but it is context.

There’s no polite way to tell people you’ve had half your stomach removed.

It doesn’t belong in small talk. You can’t slip it between bitching about the weather and a coffee order. There’s no emoji for it, and I bloody love an emoji. There’s no tone of voice that makes it sound normal. And when you do say it, people pause for just a second too long before the questions start.

So, aside from my closest circle, I mostly didn’t say it.

Not because I’m ashamed. I’m absolutely not. But because people make it strange. They want a before and after, like a home reno update. They want proof of my new discipline. They want reassurance that I still eat cake, and they want reassurance that I am 100% nutritionally perfect because “should you be eating that, given you’ve had.. surgery..” like the lifesaving procedure I had is a dirty word.

But the truth is more straightforward and less satisfying. I had bariatric surgery for my health, not for anyone’s gaze, and definitely not my own. I couldn’t care less about the space I took up. Readers of my substack from years ago will attest to that.

By the time I made the decision to have surgery, my body was no longer quietly coping. Breathing had become hard work. My fatigue had a sound like a low hum that followed me everywhere. I was coughing through my sleep, through meetings, through life. My lungs were losing patience. My oxygen levels hovered in the kind of territory that makes nurses frown.

I wasn’t chasing a smaller body. I was trying to stay in the one I had and not die. I had surgery because, without it, my lungs would have given up.

But survival stories don’t sell well.
Half the world thinks you’re a lazy cheat.
The other half thinks you’re an accomplice to diet culture.
You learn quickly that there’s no way to win that argument. You can only shrug your shoulders and choose to live anyway.

Choose life, lol.

My surgery was well over a year ago, and it didn’t fix everything. No magic happens where you have surgery and wake up healthy. It took six months before surgery and another six months post op of hard work, pain, nausea, and more to get to where I am today. And it is still work today and will be every day. Surgery is a lifelong decision to choose life. Not a single day in the future will I be able to relax where nutrition and exercise are concerned.

I’m not thin. Food continues to be a challenge. But this surgery gave me a break in the weather to start again.

I say starting again because you have to relearn everything. How to eat. How to move. How to feel hunger without panic. How to sit with emptiness, literal and otherwise.

I also had to learn how to walk again without tripping over my now too-fast feet.

Despite all this, I have luck on my side. My background in nutrition, exercise and rehabilitation meant I already knew how to rebuild a body. I just never expected it would be my own. And even with that knowledge, it was brutally hard. Getting up off the couch felt like climbing a mountain when you’re initially living on 200 calories a day. Knowing what to do and having the energy to do it are two very different things.

Most people don’t start this journey with that kind of roadmap, and they shouldn’t have to. That’s part of why I’m here now to make the rebuilding a little less lonely, a little less guesswork.

It’s not the “easy way out.” It’s the hardest kind of out that breaks you before it lets you rebuild.

And somewhere in that rebuilding, I found movement again. Real movement. Not punishment or penance. Not an apology to my body, but a chance to start again.

That’s the part people don’t talk about enough. The quiet, ordinary joy of being able to walk without pain. To lift something heavy and feel strong instead of trapped. To take a deep breath and not feel like you’re borrowing air from someone else.

So yes, I had surgery.
No, I won’t show you before and after photos.

I don’t owe anyone my medical history.
But I owe myself the truth of what it took to get to live today.

And I know it’s wacky. But I have a deep calling to help other people find that joy of choosing life.

Because there’s a whole community of us, stitched, healing, and figuring it out in real time.

We don’t need more transformation stories. We need the truth. We need trainers and coaches who understand what a post-surgery body really feels like. What fatigue really means. What strength actually costs. Because I haven’t found a single surgeon who performs this surgery with lived experience to guide their patients properly.

As a bariatric patient I had all the specialists helping me, but none of them really knew what I was going through.

And so, as a former personal trainer and nutrition coach, I want to say that even though I used to be strong and fit, it doesn’t take much to get sick like I did. I believe my experience on both sides of the fence can help, and so quietly in the background, that’s exactly what I will be doing.

I will share what I know, with people in my situation. I’m building a space for pre and post bariatric patients. Slow, strong, real world fitness for bodies that are fighting hard to survive. If that sounds like you, or you’re otherwise interested, you know where to find me.

This isn’t a confession, but it is context.