If you missed them…
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
New Grief? Who dis…
The grief and regret were kind of unexpected.
Because how do you say, “Some days I wish I hadn’t done it,” when you made the decision with full intention? When it wasn’t coming from hate or desperation — but from empowerment?
Here’s the truth: I don’t actually know if I’d go back and change it.
Sometimes the thought crosses my mind, but I also know I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.
I would not be who I am, where I am without any of what has transpired over the last four years.
It’s not that I hate my post-surgery body.
It just feels unfamiliar sometimes — and I miss the ease of feeling at home in my own skin.
When the “shelf” shows up or I feel that weird tightness, I’ll literally think,
“Damn… I miss tucking in Felicia and moving on with my day.”
And yet — I know that version of my body wasn’t built to last.
Not because of the loose skin, but because it was sustained by “healthy lifestyle” rules that were really diet culture in disguise.
When I was in it, I lived in this weird in-between space.
I wasn’t chasing my old body anymore, but I also hadn’t made peace with this new one yet.
Some days, the regret of that hit hard.
What made it even harder was feeling like I shouldn’t feel that way.
Like, “You chose this. You don’t get to complain.”
Or, “You coach other women on body image — how can you still be struggling?”
The guilt of still having thoughts.
The shame of still caring sometimes.
The mental ping-pong of “you should be over this by now.”
Yeah. That part.
But what I’ve learned since then is that regret doesn’t mean you did something wrong.
It’s just your brain’s way of replaying the past through the lens of what you know now.
(And this is where the reminder of: “You made the best decision you could with the information you had” stays tucked away in my back pocket.)
And guilt thrives in silence.
So I started talking about it — letting it breathe instead of burying it.
The truth is, I wasn’t just feeling regret.
I was grieving too.
Grieving my old body.
But here is the crazy thing - the body I was missing was a body held together by rules, programs and constant restriction - not my natural body. It wasn’t really the body I would eventually want to live in for the rest of my life (once I realized diet culture wasn’t for me) - it was the body I’d been taught to want.
That was part of the healing too.
Not resisting the hard emotions. Not pretending all is well on the body image front when it’s not.
Just naming it. Letting it breathe. (And now it feels healing to share it all.)
Until I allowed myself to move through this and process it, I could not see ANY of this for what it was — I was blind to it.
Once I slowed down enough to really look at it, I could finally see the full picture.
The stress, grief, and yes — some of my own habits — played a role in all of this. The late-night snacking, the extra wine, the constantly trying to feel better. I wasn’t broken; I was coping.
But I also can’t ignore that the surgery itself changed my body — the structure, the fat distribution, the way it responds now. It’s part of the equation too.
Some of what I experienced was just biology doing its thing; some of it was life, stress, and healing colliding all at once.
Once I stopped making myself wrong for it and got curious instead, I could finally slow down, listen, and meet myself with compassion again.
And truthfully, I’ll never know what my body would’ve done without the surgery, the move, or the shifts from perimenopause. Maybe it would’ve changed anyway. Maybe this was always part of the path.
Either way, this work — learning to meet my body with awareness and compassion — was inevitable. Bodies change. Seasons change. The only constant is that I choose to show up for myself through it.
