Woman Shares Journey of Losing 50 Kilograms After Gastric Sleeve Surgery

A woman has revealed how she dropped 50 kilograms after years of branding herself the "curvy fit chick".

Lisa Jones, an entrepreneur with three multimillion dollar businesses, considered herself a "curvy fit chick". She said she would do quite a lot of exercise, and was conscious about what she was eating.

But, the Gold Coast woman was an emotional eater and found herself in situations "eating too much".

"As a result, I spent most of my adult life yo-yo dieting between one fad diet to the next, just trying to lose weight and stay fit and healthy but never quite getting there," she told news.com.au.

"I found myself between 70kg and 120kg my entire adult life."

Ms Jones had an old ski injury that kept flaring up. She was doing a star jump at the gym, came down and snapped her ACL. It required a knee reconstruction.

"I got a blood clot in the surgery after I had the knee reconstruction, and I ended up spending two or three weeks flat on my back at home," she said.

"I had to drag myself around the house. I couldn't put any weight on my knee at all. We had a set of stairs in the house. So I had to drag myself up and down them on my hands."

"I realised that being bigger was going to be a major problem as I aged. I suddenly had this awakening."

The awakening led Ms Jones to consider "extreme measures" such as gastric sleeve surgery. Up until this point, she thought it was something "really obese" people did -- something she didn't consider herself to be.

She now calls it the "easiest thing she had ever done".

Before her surgery, she had to wait 12 months for her insurance to go up a level. During this time she went on a "food funeral" to eat all the things she thought she'd no longer be able to. She put on 10kg in this time.

"But I eat everything. I am three-and-a-half years post surgery, and there is nothing I can't eat. I just can't eat a lot of volume," she said.

She said she wished she made the decision to have the surgery 20 years earlier, adding she was cross it took three GPs before she was given a referral despite her size.

Within eight months, she dropped 50kg. She was 65kg. Ms Jones said she was starting to feel on the outside that she did on the inside. However, she decided to continue on her transformation journey.

Ms Jones had plastic surgery, opting to have her loose skin removed. She also had breast augmentation, as well as her arms and thighs done.

"I don't think it's necessary to the journey but it was part of my healing. I now have the self confidence -- I have 45 staff and thousands of clients and now I can show up every day," she said.

"I feel on the outside how I always felt on the inside, finally. The plastic surgery was a piece of that for me."

Ms Jones has been public about her journey, saying sharing is a "unique part of who she is".

"Particularly as a business woman, I share everything very vulnerably. I feel that some women in particular are all about superficial layers and pretending everything is amazing," she said.

"And I am the opposite of that. I just like to call a spade a spade and be real about the fact that building multiple companies is exhausting, and being a mum is a thankless task and we empty out our buckets for everyone else and often we are at the threshold of burnout.

"So I am very open about the journeys I have been on."

She said she felt as though if she didn't talk about these things, other women wouldn't have permission to do the same.

Ms Jones says she knows of 21 people who have had gastric sleeve surgery after seeing her share her story publicly. Though, she suspects there is likely more.