It's taken a while for me to post.
Not long ago one of "Levicks lads" suggested there maybe a number of people that just read this forum and never posted. I am one of those people.
I remember not wanting to play for the school football team at age 9 because I'd have to get changed and have no top on for a couple of seconds "What if someone sees how fat I am!"
My parents would be amazed at how long I would spend in the swimming pool on holidays. This was because once in the pool I didn't want to get out. "What if someone sees how fat I am!"
I remember going on holiday with my family at age 11. I hadn't really been looking forward to the holiday, Spain was the destination and the highlight was the swimming pool, hooray. But, "What if someone sees how fat I am!"
One of my happiest memories of any holiday was when the holiday rep advised all parents to make sure their children wore t-shirts in the swimming pool because the sun was so strong.
P.E. in secondary school was always a big challenge. Every Thursday lunch time was spent trying to second guess what the P.E. teacher had in mind for the afternoons games lesson. If the weather looked bad then we might be inside, which meant we might be playing basketball, which meant there might be no bibs available, which meant one team might have to go skins, and I might be in that team, "What if someone sees how fat I am!"
Arranging lads holidays was a nightmare. Trying to convince friends that rock climbing and fell walking was more my scene was never easy. A two week stint in Majorca would be hell, "What if someone sees how fat I am!"
Through my teens and early 20's my weight would yo-yo to silly extremes but it didn't matter what I did I would always feel like a fat person.
Relationships with girls never seemed to cause to much of a problem but I always needed to wait until I thought they really liked me before my shirt would come off in front of them.
Last year I turned 29 and my life changed. I saw a program on the TV about gyne. This was the first time that I realised that I may not be that bothered about "What if someone sees how fat I am!" but more a case of "What if someone sees how big my breasts are!".
What a revelation. That's what was wrong with me, all this time I thought I was bothered about how fat I was but actually it was the size of my breasts that were causing the problem.
To cut an even longer story short I am 3 weeks post op with Levick and my attitude to the world is completely different. I don't think about the things I can now do because of my new flat chest, I don't necessarily dream of going swimming etc. It's different, I'm not really thinking anything. What's changed is how I feel.
I don't feel like a fat person.