As she proudly boasts on her social media pages, at 83kg, Simone Pretscherer is exactly half what she weighed 11 months ago.
Her amazing weight loss, which took her from an unhappy 169kg to 83kg in just under a year, seems almost too good to be true – and it was, for some.
Simone, 24, proud and happy of her achievement (and rightfully so), took to her social media channels to post about her amazing journey and routines, only to be met with scepticism and scrutiny.
Posing alongside an old photo of herself at her original weight, a newly svelte Simone in black work-out gear, outlined her inspiration story.
“I can’t even begin to explain in words what this accomplishment feels like. I set my self a goal that seemed so far out of reach at the time but I have stuck to it and with a lot of determination, will power, drive, motivation [and] compromise I have achieved my goal. Proud doesn’t even begin to describe this feeling!” wrote Simone in her Instagram post.
“This is just the beginning of a brand new and improved me, one who won’t let anything or anyone get in the way of achieving whatever I decide to put my mind to.”
But Simone didn’t exactly get the response she was hoping for.
“Two different girls sorry who you kidding?” wrote a user on her Facebook post, “Sorry but that’s not the same person … One, where has the extra skin gone which you would have and two your [sic] hiding your face with phone. Sorry people but it’s true”.
“Fake in every way, some people believe anything … different hair colour, different eyebrow colour, different cheek bones and the list goes on. That’s why the phone in the second picture tries to hide the face … apart from that; it can’t be done in 11 months,” wrote another.
These comments were amidst other comments of a similar accusatory nature, all of them suggesting that Simone was lying about her transformation.
“They said, ‘There’s no way that’s the same person. She doesn’t have any stretch marks or loose skin’. And obviously I do, I just didn’t think to show all of my loose skin in every post I put online,” Simone told news.com.au, “I’d actually shown my loose skin in a previous post a couple of months ago. And I’ve told everyone I’m going to be as honest and brutal about the side effects as possible. I’ve posted that photo before, so it’s not like I was only trying to show the glamorous side. I didn’t even think about it.”
“I don’t know why, but every single comment that called me out for being fake and a liar really bothered me far more than it should. I think it’s because it took hours of crying and debating whether to share my story online and for others to see, posting the first picture online along with my weight for the world to see what the hardest thing I have ever done.”
“Throughout my whole journey I have tried to be so honest about the whole experience and tell people it exactly as it’s happened so to be called a fake hurt a lot. And then when it came to posting about my lose skin well that was equally as tough. So here we go. I hope this helps all the ‘non believers’.”
To prove her critics wrong, Simone decided to post the ‘un-glamorous’ reality of her weight loss, and no one dared tell her it was ‘fake’ then.
According to her website, Simone achieved her amazing weight loss through a steady regiment of diet and exercise, as well as a trip under the knife for gastric sleeve surgery.
“I was always a very confident, bubbly, outgoing person. It was never looks-based. It was always for my health,” she told news.com.au, “I had no pressing health issues, but it was getting harder and harder to do day-to-day things. Even bringing in the garbage bin up our very steep driveway was difficult and that’s when it hit me that something needed to change.”
Beginning with the simple task of walking, Simone slowly built up her fitness.
“I wasn’t walking fast at all, but it was really hard for me at first. I would just walk the flat part of our local park. The hill bit was too hard. I just stuck to eating whole foods, nothing with a number on the back, and I tried to limit my portion sizes. But if I was hungry I would eat, it would just be something like a piece of fruit.
“I knew it could never be a ‘diet’ because that’s not something I could maintain for the rest of my life. If I felt like a piece of chocolate I would have one and I didn’t cut out alcohol. There’s no way I could live the rest of my life without carbs, sugar or alcohol.”
And now, Simone is practically unstoppable.
“I do gym classes like body attack and boxing. I’m on two netball teams and I play basketball and water polo. I’m currently training for a half marathon. I do bootcamp once a week and I work with a personal trainer once a week.”
“I’m willing to give everything a try.”
