@eirrann.eth

Confession: I read this article about Rosie O’Donnell getting a facelift after losing weight, and it hit me in a place I wasn’t expecting. I’ve been on Wegovy for a couple years now. Not as a vanity project. Not because I wanted a shortcut around discipline. More because, after years of feeling like something in my body was screaming all the time, an endocrinologist at a VA weight management clinic helped me understand that “willpower” had long since stopped being my actual problem. Before Wegovy, I could eat a full meal and still feel genuinely, aggressively hungry. Not “I could snack” hungry. More like my body had completely missed the signal that food had happened. After the first injection, it felt like a cloud began lifting from some hidden room in my subconscious. For the first time in nearly a decade, I didn’t feel hungry. That was honestly emotional. My peak weight was around 320 lb. I’m now plateaued around 280-285. So I’ve lost roughly 35-40 lb, or around 11-13% of my body weight. The VA doctor at my recent annual checkup said she was pleased with that progress because it had helped me get and stay just below the “morbid obesity” line. For my height, that threshold is around 285 lb, so I’m not far below it, but I am below it. That matters. Because when people talk about weight, they usually talk as if the body is a simple moral ledger. Eat less. Move more. Try harder. Stop making excuses. But bodies are not spreadsheets. Mine came with a long chain of causes. I grew up in a family where my mother was a pastry chef, and her invitation to work through life’s difficulties was often: sit at the table, eat something fresh-baked, and talk it out. That is a loving memory, but therapy in recent years has also helped me understand how it hardwired stress-snacking deep into me in ways I often don’t even notice while it’s happening. Then there was the Army. I herniated discs in my lower back in my early 20s, back when I could still push through and exercise anyway. Over time, that changed. Desk work became the norm. My arches fell in my late 20s, which led to the discovery that I had been wearing insufficiently supportive shoes for years. By my late 30s, my back had deteriorated, regardless of my best efforts. Radiculopathy started affecting my lower body. And now entering my late 40s, even ordinary physical activity can turn into a negotiation with pain. I also don’t think we should ignore the society we live in. My family eats relatively healthy food. We don’t do much fast food. We don’t eat out often. We don’t rely on ultra-processed food. And yet we still live in a world where multinational megacorps hire brilliant scientists and marketers to make food as appetite-stimulating and habit-forming as possible. So no, I don’t think this was ever just about willpower. The next step is Zepbound, which I should transition to in a couple months. My doctor wants to see whether its compound formula can help me break through the plateau and get to a weight where exercise becomes less likely to injure me. That’s the part people don’t always understand. For some of us, the goal isn’t to look better in vacation photos. It’s to be able to walk farther without limping. To bend over in the yard without triggering days of back pain. To be able to do normal human things without my body punishing me for trying. I have a 50% VA disability. I’m not expecting to become some super-athlete. I’d just like to get light enough that movement can become part of the solution instead of another way to hurt myself. The math is clarifying and brutal. At my height, getting below the BMI obesity threshold would mean getting under roughly 215 lb. From where I am now, that’s still about another 65-70 lb. That is a lot, and I will probably experience life-changing differences if I can even make it halfway there. But for the first time in a long time, getting even close to that doesn’t feel metaphysically impossible. And that’s where the Rosie article got me. Because she was writing about weight loss, loose skin, surgery, feminism, shame, choice, and the strange psychological negotiation with the mirror. And I realized I’ve been so focused on pain, mobility, and metabolic health that I haven’t really let myself think about the aesthetic or emotional aftermath of losing a significant amount of weight. I’m lucky in one very dumb and very male way: I have a long full beard that keeps me from even knowing whether my jowls have started to sag from weight loss. If my face changes after even further weight loss, I can probably just keep hiding behind the wizard curtain and pretend I planned it. But the body keeps receipts elsewhere. I’ve already noticed skin on my midsection that used to be filled out by fat starting to sag lower as the weight comes off. If I lose a lot more, I have no idea what that will look like or how I’ll feel about it, let alone how I will adjust my clothing habits to compensate. And I guess that’s the confession: I started this process mostly wanting my body to stop hurting itself. I wasn’t thinking about aesthetics, identity, loose skin, aging, vanity, masculinity, surgery, or any of that. But weight loss isn’t just subtraction. It reveals things. Some of them are medical. Some are emotional. Some are absurd. Some are skin-deep, except skin-deep turns out to be a lot deeper than people like to admit. For now, I’m grateful Wegovy quieted the hunger noise. I’m grateful the VA doctor understood this as a medical problem before I fully did. And I’m grateful for the beard. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2026/05/27/rosie-o-donnell-facelift-surgery-poem/90274859007/

9 replies

8 recasts

28 reactions