Warped Body Image Leads to Liposuction Obsession

By Daphne Weir for Elle.com

I was a fat kid, born fat to my petite European mother, who had been a fit model in the '60s. My chubbiness worked for me. I could fall down in front of our apartment building on NYC's ultra-skinny Fifth Avenue and bounce right up, unharmed. Compared to my older brother, I was treated with kid gloves: I never had to do chores, wash dishes or babysit, because my parents thought I already had enough to deal with -- what with my gigantic size. Most obsessed of all was my mother. When I was 13, she got me my own private aerobics instructor. But by 15, at 5'8", I was an adult size 16.

I didn't mind it so much, really. I didn't want to deal with boys or sex or going to parties and all that. I was really happy playing video games, reading, baking brownies with my best friend and watching movies. The only problems occurred when I was out in public -- and then it was the men who were the cruelest, not the girls. Grown men. Once, on my way to school, two guys walked toward me and from about 30 feet away, I could hear their soft, high-pitched singsong: "Fatty! Faaaaatty!"

By 16, I'd had enough and I spent a year and a half weighing every single thing I put in my mouth, eating salads with no dressing, climbing the StairMaster for an hour a day, doing countless sit-ups. I hit 155 pounds and considered myself normal looking -- except for my stomach. While the rest of my body shrunk down, my waist remained a stubborn inner tube of flesh. I felt deformed. And I still hadn't kissed a boy. The thought of talking to one absolutely terrified me: I was fat; boys made fun of me -- that was the way it was.

Senior year of high school, a solution presented itself. It was creative and unorthodox, but also totally insane: I fashioned a girdle out of duct tape and old panty hose. Yes! Sometimes when I pulled the tape off at the end of the day, skin would come with it, leaving scars that stuck to my hips and rib cage for years. But at last I could wear a T-shirt in public. I had a figure -- a nice one.

My mother, terrified that I was going to hurt myself (not an unfounded fear, considering I passed out once or twice), made an appointment with a plastic surgeon. I'd been dreaming about liposuction ever since I read about it in Jackie Collins' "Hollywood Wives," my favorite book at age 10.

"Yep, that's not going anywhere," the doctor said when I lifted my shirt to display the inner tube. A week later, I was under anesthesia and on the operating table. This was the '90s, the stone age of lipo; surgeons flooded the area with saline, then sucked out the fat through a large cannula. Recovery was awful. I woke up swaddled in my constrictive bodysuit and in a really bad mood -- a common side effect of anesthesia. But a nurse stared me straight in the face and said, "Wow, you're a really good-looking girl." The way she said it -- seriously, almost to herself more than to me -- made me think she meant it. It was the first time anyone had ever complimented my looks.

After three weeks of intense pain and constant fantasies about my new body, I unzipped my bodysuit and got an unpleasant shock. My stomach looked almost exactly the same -- a little slimmer, maybe -- save for one thing: a huge dent, like a dog bite, right beneath my belly button. My mother confessed that she had run into the operating room as I was being wheeled in to tell the doctor "not to do too much." From the looks of it, the doctor just stuck the cannula in at that one spot and pulled it out. I played on my mom's guilt for a full year, and then she allowed me to get a second operation.

My new doctor was French, handsome and blunt. I got the exact same "Yep, that's not going anywhere" line, but in a French accent. Plus, "What a mess he made!" What endearing honesty. At least he said he could fix it, which was all I cared about. This time, lipo worked. ("We sucked a lot of fat away," the surgeon said.) The next day, my face broke out in a violent, lumpy red rash which my derm diagnosed as rosacea: "It happens sometimes after the body's had a major trauma to it, like a car crash." It had never occurred to me to wonder what exactly was actually occurring during surgery, while I lay unconscious. Later, I'd see a video on TV of the same tumescent liposuction procedure. The violence of it -- the cannula shoving violently in and out of a stomach swollen with liquid­­ -- was horrible.

But it didn't stop me from getting my arms done the next year, when I turned 20. I don't remember much about this one -- how I got my mother to agree to it, who the doctor was, what happened before or after. I do remember that the recovery was easier than with my stomach. Three lipos in three years, all before I had even graduated college. I felt like I looked okay -- not the freak I once thought I was. But weight was still a constant issue, as was my wonky-looking stomach. The divet was still very much there, and on top of that, one side of my waist indented more than the other. Exercise did nothing to balance it out. And while I might have looked great in clothes, I never wore a bikini and I never let a boy see me naked with the lights on.

Over the next eight years, I did everything from endermologie (a deep-tissue, machine-based massage) to mesotherapy (a big, painful, $3,000 mess of injections of a so-called fat-dissolving compound, which peppered my stomach with odd, circular bruises and did absolutely nothing to the fat). I tried seaweed body wraps, a roster of famous diet doctors, trendy detoxes and celebrity-trainer workouts. By 29, I was a size four and 136 pounds. But my stomach, that stomach, was still there: a misshapen reminder both of who I had once been and who I still couldn't be.

To finish reading this article and find out how Daphne's liposuction obsession continued to play out, visit Elle.com.

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