I lost 85 kilos but my friends prefer me fat

Not everyone was happy with Abbie’s makeover.

It took a single heartbreaking moment with her six-year-old daughter Maddy to make Abbie Lonsdale realise something had to change. “Maddy came home in tears, telling me she’d stuck up for me all day because everyone was picking on her for having a really fat mum,” reveals Abbie, 36, a Queensland aged-care nurse.

“It broke my heart. I knew this was my problem and I didn’t want to make it hers as well.” Tipping the scales at 140kg, Abbie, then 25, took charge by walking daily and using weights. She also swapped cakes and pies for fruit and salad sandwiches. But she kept her new routine secret because she feared her nearest and dearest wouldn’t support her.

She was right. As the weight fell off, her 10-year marriage crumbled and her husband left. “He just didn’t feel secure with me anymore,” she says. “He used to say to me when he walked out the door, ‘You will never meet anyone with that fat baggy skin like yours.’ That’s what made me start saving my money to get surgery.”

It would be eight long years, however, before Abbie got her chance to feel beautiful again. Last year, having shrunk to an incredible 55kg, Abbie travelled to Thailand with the help of Bodyline Patient Care for breast augmentation and surgery to remove excess skin. Finally able to show off her body, she even braved the bikini her children bought her to celebrate. “They’re like, ‘Mum, you look beautiful!’ And it’s the first time we have gone swimming together.”