‘My mum shamed me into getting liposuction’, tells Katie McMahon

KATIE McMahon spent years fighting her weight - even having lipsuction to create a better version of herself. And then she stumbled across the real secret to a beautiful body.

I HAD liposuction when I was 18 years old.

While some people choose to have weight-loss surgery for their own totally valid health and/or cosmetic reasons, my reasons were based in shame.

I was fat, and I hated being fat. I hated my body, and I had surgery to get rid of it and replace it with one that wouldn’t embarrass me every time I looked in the mirror or stood on a scale.

That was a decade ago, and this is the first time I’ve told anyone I’m not very close to about my surgery.

I’ve been too embarrassed to talk about it, because I’ve felt like I’m supposed to be “above” that kind of body shame.

I’m a feminist who is always telling people how beautiful THEY are at any size, shape, condition, and age, and I truly believe that all bodies are “good” bodies. So why can’t I extend this level of acceptance to myself?

Katie always felt ashamed of her body as a teenager.

When I look at pictures of my four-year-old self wearing shorts, sleeveless tops, and polka-dot bikinis, I try to remember what it was like to not feel fat.

My mum has told me that as a baby, I was happiest when I was naked, playing in the sandbox and crawling around the backyard without a care in the world.

So there must have been a time when my body was just a body to me and not a reflection of my inner “goodness” right?

That boggles my mind, because in my mind my inner and outer selves are so inextricably linked that they feel like they came that way.

The trouble began just before my 10th birthday. My mum took me shopping for a new bathing suit, and in the dressing room, she casually mentioned my “thunder thighs.”

Stricken, I tried to figure out what she meant: Was she saying the earth shook when I walked on it, and it sounded like thunder?

When she saw my face, she realised how upset I was and tried to comfort me by assuring me I would outgrow my “baby fat,” but the damage was done.

I looked at my body in the full-length mirror, pushed out my stomach, and pinched the flesh around my belly button with my hands. Suddenly everything about my body felt wrong.

What was I to do about this? If I stayed the same size, I would obviously be “fat,” which I was old enough to know meant “bad” in my family.

And what if I got bigger? The thought filled me with terror, which, along with my “baby” fat, increased as I got older.

Katie’s mum recommended she get liposuction as a way to manage her weight.

My mum continued to bring up — and try, unsuccessfully, to manage — my weight throughout my adolescence, mostly through constant criticism.

My dad was around to witness this (at least until my parents divorced when I was 17), but he was silent about, and sometimes complicit in, my mom’s hurtful comments.

She was diabetic and, even though she was relatively thin, struggled with her own body image, and she projected her anxieties onto me.

When I was 11 or 12, my parents told me they were afraid I would become diabetic too, and they put me on a diet.

I wasn’t allowed to eat pizza, chocolate, soda, butter, ice cream, cheese, or basically anything I liked. I was signed up for basketball, soccer, softball, and swim team, all of which I loathed and was terrible at.

In desperation, I started secretly hoarding my “forbidden” foods. I would binge on them when no one was around, then immediately beat myself up for doing so.

By the time I was 14, I was eating all the time, whether or not I was hungry.

I ate when I was bored, angry, frustrated, or sad, and kept eating until my stomach felt like it was going to explode. I didn’t know how to stop.

Mother-daughter shopping trips, which used to be pleasant experiences, had become almost unbearably painful.

On one such outing, when I was 16, we stopped at my favourite plus-size store. On this day, I couldn’t find anything I liked that fit me, and I became overwhelmed with frustration.

My mum and I walked out empty-handed and sat down on a mall bench as I tried not to cry. That’s when my mum asked if I had ever considered liposuction, the surgery where they basically vacuum fat out of different parts of your body.

Katie was horrified by the idea, but thought there was no other way to control her weight.

That knocked the wind out of me, and I started to openly sob. “Sometimes dieting and exercise don’t improve the parts where you need the most help,” she said, trying to be helpful.

She told me that she’d had liposuction herself after giving birth to me — something I hadn’t known before — and that she was happy with the outcome.

She advised me to “think about it” and said she’d pay for the surgery as my high school graduation present.

Even though I was enormously disturbed and hurt that she would even suggest that I have lipo, I also immediately felt that a part of me badly wanted it: Mum also hated her looks once, but she did something about it. Maybe I should, too.

My mother didn’t bring lipo up again, but I kept thinking about it. I was ashamed of my body, and it felt like I couldn’t keep my weight down, no matter what I tried.

When a friend’s bulimia landed her in the hospital, I didn’t worry about her, I envied her — not only because she was thinner than me, but also because she was getting help.

Being fat wasn’t getting me the right kind of attention — I wanted to be worried about and cared for, not criticised and shamed — so I tried going in the other direction, physically.

I ate lettuce all day and started smoking cigarettes, which I had heard made people skinny.

When I couldn’t control my cravings, I binged on huge amounts of food and then threw them up.

Over a few months, I lost significant amounts of weight and gained it all back more than once … and not one person said anything to me about it, as I had hoped they would.

I just ended up sad, frustrated, and still fat. I couldn’t handle it anymore.

Read the rest of Katie’s story at Rookiemag.com