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"  I was a fat kid, born fat to my petite European mother, who had been a fit model in the &amp;#039;60s. My chubbiness worked for me. I could fall down in front of our apartment building on NYC&amp;#039;s ultraskinny Fifth Avenue and bounce right up, unharmed. Compared to my older brother, I was treated with kid gloves: I never had to do chores, wash dishes, babysit, because my parents thought I already had enough to deal with, what with my gigantic size. Most obsessed of all was my mother. When I was 13, she got me my own private aerobics instructor. But by 15, at 5&amp;#039;8&amp;quot;, I was an adult size 16. I didn&amp;#039;t mind it so much, really. I didn&amp;#039;t want to deal with boys or sex or going to parties and all that. I was really happy playing video games, reading, baking brownies with my best friend, and watching movies. The only problems occurred when I was out in public, and then it was the men who were the cruelest, not the girls. Grown men. Once, on my way to school, two guys walked toward me, and, from about 30 feet away, I could hear their soft, high-pitched singsong: &amp;quot;Fatty! Faaaaatty!&amp;quot; By 16, I&amp;#039;d had enough, and I spent a year and a half weighing every single thing I put in my mouth, eating salads with no dressing, climbing the StairMaster for an hour a day, doing countless sit-ups. I hit 155 pounds, and considered myself normal looking\u2014except for my stomach. While the rest of my body shrunk down, my waist remained a stubborn inner tube of flesh. I felt deformed. And I still hadn&amp;#039;t kissed a boy. The thought of talking to one absolutely terrified me: I was fat; boys made fun of me\u2014that was the way it was. Senior year of high school, a solution presented itself. It was creative and unorthodox, but also totally insane: I fashioned a girdle out of duct tape and old panty hose. Yes! Sometimes when I pulled the tape off at the end of the day, skin would come with it, leaving scars that stuck to my hips and rib cage for years. But at last I could wear a T-shirt in public. I had a figure\u2014a nice one. My mother, terrified that I was going to hurt myself (not an unfounded fear, considering I passed out once or twice), made an appointment with a plastic surgeon. I&amp;#039;d been dreaming about liposuction ever since I read about it in Jackie Collins&amp;#039; Hollywood Wives, my favorite book at age 10. &amp;quot;Yep, that&amp;#039;s not going anywhere,&amp;quot; the doctor said when I lifted my shirt to display the inner tube. A week later, I was under anesthesia and on the operating table. This was the &amp;#039;90s, the stone age of lipo; surgeons flooded the area with saline, then sucked out the fat through a large cannula. Recovery was awful. I woke up swaddled in my constrictive bodysuit, and in a really bad mood\u2014a common side effect of anesthesia. But a nurse stared me straight in the face and said, &amp;quot;Wow, you&amp;#039;re a really good-looking girl.&amp;quot; The way she said it\u2014seriously, almost to herself more than to me\u2014made me think she meant it. It was the first time anyone had ever complimented my looks. After three weeks of intense pain and constant fantasies about my new body, I unzipped my bodysuit and got an unpleasant shock. My stomach looked almost exactly the same\u2014a little slimmer, maybe\u2014save for one thing: a huge dent, like a dog bite, right beneath my belly button. My mother confessed that she had run into the operating room as I was being wheeled in to tell the doctor &amp;quot;not to do too much.&amp;quot; From the looks of it, the doctor just stuck the cannula in at that one spot and pulled it out. I played on my mom&amp;#039;s guilt for a full year, and then she allowed me to get a second operation. My new doctor was French, handsome, and blunt. I got the exact same &amp;quot;Yep, that&amp;#039;s not going anywhere&amp;quot; line, but in a French accent. Plus, &amp;quot;What a mess he made!&amp;quot; What endearing honesty. At least he said he could fix it, which was all I cared about. This time, lipo worked. (&amp;quot;We sucked a lot of fat away,&amp;quot; the surgeon said.) The next day, my face broke out in a violent, lumpy red rash which my derm diagnosed as rosacea: &amp;quot;It happens sometimes after the body&amp;#039;s had a major trauma to it, like a car crash.&amp;quot; It had never occurred to me to wonder what exactly was actually occurring during surgery, while I lay unconscious. Later, I&amp;#039;d see a video on TV of the same tumescent liposuction procedure. The violence of it\u2014the cannula shoving violently in and out of a stomach swollen with liquid\u00AD\u00AD\u2014was horrible. But it didn&amp;#039;t stop me from getting my arms done the next year, when I turned 20. I don&amp;#039;t remember much about this one\u2014how I got my mother to agree to it, who the doctor was, what happened before or after. I do remember the recovery was easier than with my stomach. Three lipos in three years, all before I had even graduated college. I felt like I looked okay\u2014not the freak I once thought I was. But weight was still a constant issue, as was my wonky-looking stomach. The divet was still very much there, and on top of that, one side of my waist indented more than the other. Exercise did nothing to balance it out. And while I might have looked great in clothes, I never wore a bikini, and I never let a boy see me naked with the lights on. Over the next eight years, I did everything from endermologie (a deep-tissue, machine-based massage) to mesotherapy (a big, painful, $3,000 mess of injections of a so-called fat-dissolving compound, which peppered my stomach with odd, circular bruises and did absolutely nothing to the fat). I tried seaweed body wraps, a roster of famous diet doctors, trendy detoxes, and celebrity-trainer workouts. By 29, I was a size 4 and 136 pounds. But my stomach, that stomach, was still there: a misshapen reminder both of who I had once been, and who I still couldn&amp;#039;t be. A bad breakup triggered the next surgery. The difference between lipo circa 1998 and lipo circa 2009 was shocking; the procedure was cheaper, faster, better. And\u2014most important\u2014I didn&amp;#039;t need my mother&amp;#039;s permission. I plonked down my entire savings, $10,000 (a lump sum I got as an advance for a book I was ghostwriting) for Manhattan-based surgeon Bruce Katz, MD. When I showed him my stomach, he just smiled kindly and said, &amp;quot;Yes, I think I can help you with that.&amp;quot; Katz&amp;#039;s specialty, laser-assisted lipo uses a cannula with a laser at its tip: The beam of light ruptures fat cells, the contents of which are then easily vacuumed out through the cannula. Also, I was awake for the entire procedure. Katz would ask me to get up from the table every so often to see &amp;quot;how everything hangs.&amp;quot; Up. Then down. Then up. Then down. And it worked. By January 2011, I was finally okay with my stomach. But I couldn&amp;#039;t stop thinking about my thighs. I&amp;#039;d gained a little weight; they look a little fleshier than before. And it was so easy to take care of the last time.... Impulse in check, though, the first appointment I made this time around was with my therapist\u2014not a surgeon\u2014in search of approval or absolution. Am I crazy for even considering this again? &amp;quot;I think in your case, when you had it done when you were younger, it wasn&amp;#039;t in your control, and that must have been so frustrating,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;So now that you&amp;#039;re older and you can do it the way you want to do it, without any sort of familial repercussions\u2014no guilt or shame\u2014but privately, of course that&amp;#039;s tempting.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s when I mention to her it&amp;#039;s my thighs I want done. &amp;quot;But your legs are tiny!&amp;quot; she says, surprised. &amp;quot;Plastic surgery can become incredibly addictive. I don&amp;#039;t think you&amp;#039;re crazy, but I definitely think getting lipo on your thighs is crazy. &amp;quot; I make another appointment with Katz. He pinches my legs and says, &amp;quot;Nope. Nothing I can do about this. The fat is under the muscle. The only way to get rid of it is with cardio.&amp;quot; For a second, I don&amp;#039;t understand. What does he mean, &amp;quot;No&amp;quot;? But his refusal\u2014the first I&amp;#039;ve heard over the course of four operations in a dozen years\u2014gives me pause. The surgeries on my waistline solved a problem that had no other clear solution, but it&amp;#039;s startling to realize how accustomed I&amp;#039;ve become to throwing money and a cannula at my every body issue (an attitude I may have inherited from my mother, who, despite discouraging my own revisions, has a surgery count nearing the double digits). Now, after a few weeks of daily visits to the gym, my developing muscles remind me that change can be achieved by myself, all on my own\u00AD\u2014on this particular problem area, at least. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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