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Kayla Butcher had been considered overweight since she was only eight years old due to the fact that she grew up in a “toxic, sick home” that fed her with mostly junk food along with her five siblings. By the time she reached 23, Butcher reached the point of weighing 400 pounds. That’s when she decided to turn her life around.
According to Cosmopolitan, Butcher finally lost a total of 186 pounds since last year. When she was growing up, she said, “Swiss Rolls and Zebra Cakes were my downfall. We never had limits on what we could eat.”
Butcher is happy with the development that she had done to herself. However, she realized that drastic weight loss, especially of such a high amount, leads to the formation of excess skin. This now haunts Butcher not only as a reminder of her overweight and unhealthy past, but also of its unsightly image.
Butcher, who’s from Canada, said, “Everything is loose, saggy, wrinkly, and deflated.” There’s possibly twenty pounds of skin hanging on her right now. She thought that it looked like an “apron.” She said, “It hangs and moves around, and it makes me look and feel way bigger than I truly am.”
Although Butcher did track and played floor hockey while she was growing up, the excessive eating still caught on her, especially when doctors diagnosed her to be clinically depressed at the young age of 14. She ate food as her coping mechanism.
Butcher said, “People like to say I made the choice to be fat on my own [but] this was definitely not a choice of mine. There were drug dependencies and addiction, as well as far too many issues between my parents that they did not keep from the kids.”
The stress she endured from living at her troubled home forced her to leave when she was only 16. Her weight got worse when she entered college when she had to quit softball, break up with her boyfriend, and fail a couple of her classes.
Butcher took three years before she realized that her weight was the one that’s bringing her down. She said, “Gastric bypass made losing the weight easier and more possible, but it's more a mind game than anything else. It's like quitting your drug of choice cold turkey."
Then, the result of her weight loss had become tangible. Butcher said, “I am more self-conscious now at 189 pounds naked than I ever was at 376 pounds. I look and feel like a balloon that has lost all of its air a week after a party.”
The surgery, which was considered cosmetic, wasn’t covered by the Canadian health care. But if the patient was experiencing rash and other irritation, Canada will happily cover it. She now created a fundraising campaign to cover $10,000 for the skin removal.
