Weight-loss & The Echoes of What-Ifs

With great loss, comes great consequences.

Let's be honest. Women with ADHD hyperfixate and I'm sure weight-loss has been a massive focal point for more than the majority of us. We talk endlessly about the physical milestones of weight loss. Seeing the numbers drop on the scale, clothes shifting down a size, the before-and-after photos. But nobody talks about the actual ghosts left behind, the body dysmorphia and the feeling of no matter how much weight you lose, there will always be something else to feel insecure about. For me, it's a bit deeper than that. And the heavy question that constantly sits right in the middle of my chest is: could all of this have been avoided?

Living with combined ADHD, being diagnosed only recently, meant looking back at my entire life through a completely different lens. It meant realising that a lifelong struggle with binge eating disorder wasn't a personal lack of willpower. It was just a desperate, under-stimulated, brain hunting for dopamine wherever it could find it.

And that realisation brings a very specific and different kind of grief to deal with.

Chapter 01The Soundtrack of Rapid Change

Three years ago, I was morbidly obese and absolutely miserable. I couldn't make it to the shop and back without nearing a cardiac arrest. Booths in restaurants filled me with anxiety in case I couldn't fit, and getting on a train made me feel so self-conscious when my stomach nearly touched the seat in front of me. It is genuinely traumatic for me to think about it. I would never, and still to this day, struggle to look at myself in a mirror. I slowly edge into the frame but when I get about halfway into seeing my reflection, I bottle it and move away.

And so, I made the drastic decision to have a gastric bypass. Doing it in the UK, because I wasn't brave enough to go overseas. It was a massive decision and one I was happy to make, but unfortunately, the body remembers the trauma of surgery and rapid transformation. And it's not something you can ever really prepare yourself for.

I had the surgery, and lost nearly 10st in total. I'm still a size 16 but I'll take that over a size 26. I lost the bulk of my weight in the first 3 months, rapidly. And what I wasn't informed of, was all of the ailments and side-effects that rapid weight loss can cause. For me, it triggered pulsatile tinnitus, making every waking moment feel like I'm being chased down in a horror movie to a heart beat soundtrack. 24 hours a day, a whooshing heartbeat thumps directly in my left ear. It's quite the eerie background noise.

Then there is the physical betrayal. Chronic stomach pain flares up without warning, making me leap up in agony, accompanied by the unpredictable and slightly humiliating rumbling and gurgling of a digestive system altered by surgery. And god forbid I eat more than 5 bites of anything or risk 24 hours of running to the toilet. These are constant sensory disruptions that yank focus away from work with regular WFH requests and generally disrupt my peace of mind.

When the clothes come off, the visual reminder is right there. Scars and stretch marks trace my abdomen, and loose skin maps out the volume of the body that once was. Every accidental glance in the mirror brings a new shade of horror that I will never get used to.

Chapter 02What If?

So, could having the surgery have been avoided if I was just diagnosed with ADHD sooner?

The most exhausting battle started after my ADHD diagnosis and the realisation that ADHD is most likely the cause of my binge eating disorder. I think about this most when the pulse in my ear grows too deafening to ignore, when a sharp cramp twists through my stomach causing me to leap up, or when my hand accidentally brushes against a surgical scar or a particularly deep stretch mark.

In those moments, my mind spirals straight into hindsight.

What if I had known?
What if ADHD had been caught years earlier?
What if the right medication had been prescribed to regulate dopamine before my body reached critical mass?

If those pieces had fallen into place sooner, would my binge eating have escalated to the point of morbid obesity? Would the drastic step of surgery ever have been necessary? Would there even be scars to trace, loose skin to manage, a stomach that rebels against digestion, and a heart vibrating through my skull?

These thoughts actually plagued me.

Chapter 03Turning Down the Volume

And it's taken me a while to realise that the past is in the past. There's no going back to rewrite the timeline. Medication today unfortunately can't un-surgery my body or silence my tinnitus tomorrow.

But, acknowledging that connection between binge-eating and dopamine mining was the first step toward releasing the overwhelming bitterness and guilt I felt towards not being diagnosed sooner. My scars tell a story of survival, of a person who navigated an unmanaged spicy brain operating on zero, using the only survival mechanisms available to me at the time. The what-ifs will always echo, but learning to live in the present as well as looking toward the future, means turning down the volume on the past. And that's what I choose to hyperfixate on now.