Gastric Sleeve Hell-I Was Happier Fat

Nerina was desperate to feel confident again, but she will regret having surgery forever...

Staring in the mirror, I barely recognised the fat woman looking back at me.

Growing up, I’d been an athletic kid who’d loved swimming.

Even after I had my first four children, Dannielle, Brian, Here and Nathan, my body bounced right back.

But after my husband Joseph and I welcomed Jojo and Emily-Jane, I struggled to keep the weight off.

‘You’re still beautiful to me,’ my hubby would tell me.

But now a busy mum to six kids aged 17, 15, 13, 10, eight and one, I put my family’s needs before mine.

And when I opened my own bakery in 2015, I worked from 5am to 5pm every day.

A self-confessed workaholic, I never made time to stop for breakfast or lunch. Instead, my first meal would be dinner with the family each night.

What I didn’t realise was my body was going into starvation mode, storing the fat.

We always ate a balanced meal. Once the table was cleared though, I would gorge on a king-sized block of chocolate or bag of chips in front of the TV.

Though I’d tried countless diets, my polycystic ovary syndrome, which affects the hormones, also made it hard to keep the weight off.

Over time, I became more upset with my appearance. Weighing 146 kilos and trying to squeeze into size-28 clothes, I burst into tears, defeated.

So I went to see my GP who recommended a gastric sleeve.

Surgery’s not for me, I thought.

But the weight just wouldn’t shift. Two years later, I planned to take the kids out on a day trip.

‘You can’t come, Mummy,’ Emily-Jane, then three, said. ‘You’re too fat.’

Shattered, I realised I needed to change.