180. "I Feel Like I've Been Teleported Into Someone Else's Body": Adjusting After Body Change

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What happens when your body changes, but your brain hasn’t caught up yet?

Someone recently described the experience after skin removal surgery as feeling like they had been “teleported into someone else’s body.” And honestly, I don’t think there’s a better way to say it.

Big body changes are not always the clean, triumphant before-and-after moment people imagine.

Sometimes it is weird, emotional, or disorienting.

Your clothes fit differently, but not always in the exciting way you expected. Your body may be swollen, sore, tired, and healing. Old cravings or food noise might creep back in, and suddenly you start asking yourself, “Am I going backwards?”

And on top of all of that, you may feel pressure to be grateful, confident, and fully adjusted to this new version of yourself.

But body change does not work that way.

Your body can change faster than your identity, nervous system, and self-concept can keep up with.

So in this post, I want to talk about three things that can help you move through the messy middle of body change: understanding that your body is prioritizing healing over aesthetics, giving your brain time to catch up to your new body, and lowering the resistance that can make an already hard season feel even harder. 

1. Your body is prioritizing healing over aesthetics

Here's the first thing I want you to remember: after a major surgery or big transformation, your body has exactly one priority, and it isn't your waistline. It's keeping you alive.

Major surgery is a trauma, and your body treats it that way. Before it can even think about body composition, it has to:

• Close the wound and prevent infection
• Rebuild tissue
• Bring down inflammation and swelling

All of that is metabolically expensive. So the fatigue, the water retention, the swollen incision, the appetite changes… those aren't signs you're failing. They're signs your body is doing an enormous amount of work on your behalf.

This is why I often tell patients to stay off the scale for the first couple of months (sometimes I'll happily have a spouse hide it). Instead of chasing a number, your job is to give your body the best nutrition of your life so it can heal.

And if you're someone whose food noise crept back in during a medication pause: please hear me. That is temporary. The moment your body heals and you're back on your tools, things settle again. You cannot undo years of progress in a few weeks or months. It's not possible.

2. Give your brain time to catch up to your new body

Even after you heal physically, there's a second adjustment that nobody warns you about: you don't just wake up emotionally adapted to your new body.

I think of it like a baby learning to move through the world. They move slowly, with curiosity, experimenting every single day. You can give yourself that same grace. Once you've healed, start gently putting yourself back into the world:

• Try clothes on at the thrift store once a month and notice the sizes shift
• Sit in spaces that used to feel uncomfortable
• Move your body in ways you couldn't before

I'll never forget going back to an amusement park I'd visited years earlier. The first time, the little train ride seat belt wouldn't close and I had to climb out. It was one of those moments that just sits in your chest. Years later, same ride, same scenario… and it fit. That's when it really landed: my body had changed, even though my mind hadn't fully caught up.

Your body can change fast. But your identity takes longer. 

What if you treated this as a relationship instead of a race, where your only job each day is curiosity about what your body can now do?

3. Lower the resistance

The last piece is the one I'm proudest of in my own life. There's a simple formula: pain × resistance = suffering.

The pain is real in the discomfort, the frustration, the swelling. But resistance is the part that says, This shouldn't be happening. I should be further along. I'm going backwards. And that resistance is often what makes a hard season unbearable.

So instead of fighting it, try to:

• Welcome it — "It is not a problem that this is happening right now."
• Observe it — look at the facts neutrally, without catastrophizing
• Allow it — let the discomfort exist without making it mean danger

Healing is rarely linear. There are big leaps, then long stretches where nothing seems to change. When you notice your resistance spiking, that's your cue to pause and get curious rather than pile on shame.

Your body isn't a machine you command. It's a relationship you build. And if a friend were going through something hard, you wouldn't say "snap out of it". You'd ask how you could help. You deserve that same softness from yourself.

Two questions worth sitting with

When you notice the resistance creeping in, these two questions are a good place to pause. I'd encourage you to journal on them, or just let them roll around in your mind this week:

• Can you let discomfort exist without making it mean danger?
• Can you trust your body before you fully understand it?

Most of us are quick to treat discomfort as proof that something's wrong. But discomfort and danger aren't the same thing. And you don't have to fully understand your body to start trusting it again.

When to ask for more support 

If you work through all of this and still feel stuck, that's not failure either. That's information. Significant change often calls for support, and a good therapist can walk this road with you. Your emotional and mental health matter just as much as the physical, even when no one else can see it.

The goal right now might not be optimization. It might just be reconnection and learning to trust your body before you fully understand it.

For more on navigating the messy middle of body change including healing, scale spirals, food noise, and learning to trust your body again, listen to the full episode on The Obesity Guide. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Disclaimer: The transcript below is provided for your convenience and may contain typos, errors, or grammatical inconsistencies, as it has not been professionally edited or proofread. Please enjoy it as-is and read at your own discretion.

Please note: The content shared in this podcast and blog post is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider for personalized medical guidance.  

 Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I don't know if you're gonna be able to hear this today, but the birds outside my window as I record this are so beautiful. I was watching a video the other day online, and they were joking that you know you're in your 30s and 40s when suddenly you become obsessed with birds. And I've always liked birds, let me say that in my defense. We did not have a lot of animals growing up because I'm really allergic to cats and dogs and all the things, but we did have a little cute bird. And so I've always liked birds. But I love in the morning when you are waking up and you're hearing the birds start to chirp, and you hear it throughout the day. It's just, ugh, it's so beautiful. And if I eat lunch outside and I hear that, truly one of the best parts of summer. All right. Today, we're gonna talk about changes that you go through as your body transforms. I'm answering a message today that someone wrote me after they had skin removal surgery, but this applies to anyone that's had a body change. Now, I'm talking about on the way down. This could also apply on the way up, this applies, frankly, all the time. And this is something that it's not something that everyone wants to talk about, but it's every single patient that I have encounters this. Here is what a coaching client wrote in. "Could you do an episode on body awareness and adjustment post-surgery? So many of us in the group," that this person's referring to, have recently dealt with surgery and recovery. I feel like I've been teleported into someone else's body. I'm tired. I feel like my body is refusing to use a single calorie or release an ounce of fat after my pre- and post-surgery, uh hiatus. I've been back on it for two weeks, and it immediately calmed the food noise that crept back in. But it's hard to kick out the lingering sugar cravings, and I feel like I'm drifting backward. It's not rational, of my thigh is swollen at the incision point and all down my knee, and it has made my clothes fit weird. Whine, whine, whine. I'm genuinely recovering and walking better, but I can't get my usual number of steps. If you have thoughts about chilling out through this process and what to expect in terms of timeline, that would be helpful. Just a thought. I'm grateful here for your wisdom and love your podcast." First of all, I always wanna say thank you for writing in. I really appreciate when you guys submit questions, when you answer emails. I really love that because I get to hear what's going on for you. And this is something, again, that I hear all day long in my clinic, and I myself am firsthand going through this as well. This sentence from the message, I feel like I've been teleported into someone else's body. I don't think I could have written better words to that. And I wanna go over today several aspects of what I think needs to happen after you've either had a surgery or maybe you've lost 100 pounds or there's been some big transformation in some capacity in your life. It doesn't even have to be physical, to be honest, but that's a little bit what we're focusing on today. Here's number one. Your body is prioritizing survival, not aesthetics. We have to remember this. We just have to normalize that there's not only a physiological change that's happening, but also psychological. We have wildly unrealistic expectations for healing. And I know this because people will plan to go back to work like a week after having skin removal surgery in the abdomen where they had a 360 incision all the way around, where they also had breast work done. It blows my mind these surgeries are major. They are not these little small interruptions, and the body interprets this as trauma, and it requires enormous energy and resources. First you're dealing with swelling, inflammation, fatigue, altered appetite. You have water retention. You're not able to move as much. These are not signs of failure. The body's first job after surgery, it's close the wound. Don't have an infection. Rebuild tissue. Keep inflammation down, keep you alive. That is task number one. And only after that do you have the capacity to optimize body composition and things like that. Your body's not betraying you. It is literally saving your life. We need to realize that healing is really metabolically expensive. We can't expect your body to just go through significant surgery and immediately pivot back into fat loss mode. To be honest, I think that after you've had a surgery like that, I don't even want someone on the scale, for a few months, or really worrying about body fat. I want your top priority post-surgery to be getting the best nutrition of your life to help that wound heal. I hope that you are on your protein game after that, that you are so on that, that you're getting enough fiber in as well, so that, God forbid, if you're on pain meds, that things are still moving, right? Because opioids will cause that, that slowing down. I want you to be hydrating and getting protein and doing all those things. I do not want you focused on what the scale is showing. I sometimes will tell my patients after these surgeries, "You're not allowed to get on the scale until two months from now." And frankly, I would love it to be three to four months, but I can't hold all the people and all the things. I remember one patient, she was just really afterward struggling with surgery, with, thinking about getting back on the scale, things like that. And I said, "Listen, do I have your permission to have your husband hide that scale for two months?" She said, "Yes." I said, "Great, let's go ahead and do it." I need you to think along the lines of how can I really protect myself during this place, now, I wanna give some just gentle reassurance around holding the medication piece. This is one of the most feared parts of going through this 'cause the food noise returns temporarily when the medications are paused, and it is really emotionally activating for people. I want to respect that, and I wanna say why. You, your whole life, have struggled with this. You finally found a tool that gave you some results, and you're thinking, "Oh my gosh, now it's all lost. It's all gone." Listen, the minute you're back on the medication and when your body's able to heal from surgery, all these things, you will be just fine again. In the grand scheme of things, this is not the longest amount of time. I need you mentally to realize this is not gonna be the rest of your life that you're gonna have that food noise and it be untreated. This is a few months in there. The brain calming down after you restart that, that's really important. That should reassure you, okay, things are gonna be okay. And cravings after surgery when you've had these interruptions, that does not erase your progress. You cannot, in a few months, that you've gained over years. It is not possible. So the minute that thought error creeps up, "Oh, everything's gonna be gone," you tell yourself this is nonsense. If you've been doing your list of 100, if you've been acknowledging how far you've come, you cannot reverse everything in a few weeks or months. It is not possible. Do not let someone else tell you such. There's something else massively medically going on if within a one to two to three-month period you're reversing what you did over three to five years. Not possible. Okay, so that's number one, that your body needs to literally rebuild tissue and is doing a massive marathon on your behalf to keep you healthy and to rebuild. And in the end, great, I hope your body's in a different state because that's why you went into surgery. But at the end of the day, It is doing so much work. Number two, we are in a culture of instant gratification, but you don't just wake up emotionally adapted to your new body, the way I like to think about it, it's with babies. Those first few years, they're first a baby, and then they turn into a toddler, and then they're a little kid. They're learning slowly with experimentation every single day. They're not just suddenly knowing how to walk. They're not just suddenly knowing how to open things or what to do. If you ever spent time with a baby, I'm gonna take you back to when Toby was one to two years old. He's going around there trying to open everything they're trying to stick in their mouth. They don't know what's what, I need you to have that same level of curiosity with your body. I need you to think about, "Okay, I couldn't do these things before. Let me go to..." This is after you've healed surgically, okay? Give yourself three, four months. Start to go to the thrift store. Try some things on once a month. Go in there and see, wow, the sizes are different for me now. Go to an amusement park over the summer and sit in the little train caboose thing that goes around. I'm talking from my own experience here. I remember years ago, it was mortifying. I went to an amusement park with my son, and I don't know if... I think I told this story on the podcast, but I'm like, don't cry. These stories are so emotional. Me, my husband, and my son, who was, I don't know, was he two, three? I don't know how old he was. But we get onto this little train ride, and the seat belt doesn't close, I had to get out. It's one of those, shame things that just sits in your chest. So I do all these years of work, and I forget if it was last year or the year before, I go to that same amusement park, same trauma scenario, and I get on that little train, and it fits. First of all, I realized how absolutely ridiculously small that thing was. No wonder it never fit before. So I was like, "Why was I beating myself up before? This is ridiculous. It hardly closes on my husband that's like a size zero." You know what I mean? Moment of realness. But the point is, I put myself back into some scenarios to realize my body is different. I feel no different in the mind, but my body is different. That was a really good moment to see. You need to walk into different spaces. You need to hug people. You need to rediscover the world. This is not an instant gratification thing. Literally go to the park. I don't care if you don't have kids. Go to the park by you, walk up and go down the slide. This was really good for me to do all these things. You need to redo all these things because many of you, if you're like me, first of all, you never did them, never in your lifetime. Even as a kid, they might have been uncomfortable. So need to realize I'm more able-bodied than I ever realized. My body feels differently. You're gonna start to get some appreciation for what your body can do and not just how it looks. But I need you to embody the change. This is gonna happen gradually, let's say you get an injury, you rehabilitate it slowly. You don't overnight suddenly your shoulder's okay. When you learn a new language this happens slowly over time, and behavior is a language. How your body's behaving, what you tell it, what it tells you, this is a two-way communication that's gonna take time. People expect after surgery or big weight loss that they're gonna instantly create this emotional embodiment that, "Oh, I'm there." Cause you always thought in your mind that if you're gonna look in the mirror and it's gonna be different, you're gonna be okay. You brought your same brain with you though, the nervous system still needs time to reorientate. So what if you gave yourself a few years instead of a few weeks, What if this became a relationship instead of a race? I don't have to get to this place where I'm totally comfortable. It's, "Hey, today, what's one step that I could do in that direction? Your body changed quickly, but your identity did not. So sometimes people feel disorientated because their external body changed faster than their internal self-concept, and that's okay because they will merge with time if you allow it, if you don't make it a problem instead of demanding this immediate comfort of your new body, what if your only job was curiosity? That was the only thing that you woke up every day for the next year, and you were like, "I am going to get curious what my body can do, what it's gonna tell me, how I can honor it best." You really treated it like you were the most in love with this person in the world. You know when you're in a new relationship, and you spend a lot of time... I'm just thinking about when I met my husband. You spend a lot of time thinking about, "Well, what do they like, and what could I do?" And w- and they're doing things for you, and it's this really beautiful time of wanting to know what that person likes because you like them, and they like you, and you're d- you know, you're, like, trying to figure this dance out, right? You can do that with yourself. You don't need this to be an external partner. Uh this past month in the, book club that I've done over the summer with Amanda Sabicer we've been reading the book Having People Over by Chelsea Fagan, and a big aspect in there... Uh, again, spoiler alert if you haven't read the book, okay? At the end, she talks about friendships and how it really takes energy for these friendships and how we don't have scaffolding for friendships in the same way that we have it for romantic partnerships, think about with dating, all right, I go on a date, we go to a restaurant, you go to a movie. It's very understood. But with friends, you need to create those things because it's not necessarily a one-size-fits-all as far as how that looks. I want you to think about self-love with your body and relationship with yourself. There's no roadmap on it. No one sits there when you're growing up as like, "Listen, here's what needs to happen. You need to look at yourself in the mirror and say you love yourself, and think about one thing you love, and then be grateful for one thing that day." No one, takes you through these formulas, you have to figure that out yourself, but you have to bring curiosity into that process all right. Here's my last thing. Resistance amplifies suffering. There's a formula: pain times resistance equals suffering. Let's dissect this for a second. You have pain. I'm talking emotional pain, physical pain. I don't care what it is, but you have pain. The resistance to it is that it's always gonna be this way. This shouldn't be happening. I should be further along. I'm going backwards. Why isn't my body responding? The more of that you do, you get more suffering. When I say pain, it's discomfort for what is happening, that there's pain, that there's frustration, all that multiplied by resistance. This shouldn't be happening. I wanna be further along in a different place. If you want less suffering, we've gotta decrease the pain, and we've gotta decrease the resistance. How do you do that? You welcome things in instead of fighting them. You observe instead of catastrophizing. You allow instead of demanding. How can you welcome it in? How can you observe it? How can you allow it? This takes time. Welcoming it in is as simple as saying, "It is not a problem what is happening right now." I recently here went to several events. I'm just gonna leave this all, again, very vague when I start talking about my stepkids. But to me, it was very awkward, a lot of what was happening with the other side of the family. And I observed for several days in myself how weird I felt, I just wanna use the word discomfort. And I even said this to my husband. I said, "Wow, these past few days have really been a master class in how you can feel very uncomfortable and it's okay." It was not a problem at all. I think old me would've eaten over it. And in fact, within a few-day period, I said no to five different times like a Culver's, a fries and a burger at 9:30 at night when we were coming back from an event. And just, like, there were all these things all over the place, and I was like, "No," because I don't need to eat a bunch of food right before I go to sleep. This is not even about hunger. Everyone else in the car was hungry. But the point is there was no resistance to what was happening within my body, and I was like, "That's okay to feel awkward a few times in the year. There's no problem with this." If I had fought that, if my resistance was really high, the pain would've been so high, I would've had even more suffering 'cause I would've tried to be eating more food or I don't know what to do to feel better when it really is not a problem to feel that way a few times per year what's the observing? Literally, I just sat there and I was like, "Here are the facts of the situation. Here I am. There is no problem with you standing here or doing this or doing that." Just looking at it very neutrally. There's actually nothing bad happening right now. This is a lot of what I'm thinking in my mind. My body's having a certain reaction, but actually nothing bad is happening a lot of the time, we perceive a lot of things in our body that are not happening in the real world. A lot of us live amazing lives, but our brains still kinda go to town, the allowing part, this is the part I'm proudest of when I think about the scenario, that I didn't need to eat over it. That's the allowing that I can change over time how that goes. Okay? So can you welcome it in? Can you observe? Can you allow? Can you let the discomfort exist without making it mean danger? That's the main thing, can you trust your body before you fully understand it? That's a big one, right? And healing often it feels slower than we want, and it's more nonlinear than we expect. So again, people really think three to four months out it's gonna be this whole new world. And in some ways it is. In some ways it is. In a lot of ways it's not. I recently here saw a bunch of people, this happened in like a four-day period, that I had not seen, I think since 2020. So about six years. And all of the people said, "Oh my God, you look good." And what I realized is, oh these people saw me over 100 pounds ago. But in my mind I wasn't clocking it, okay? I feel like the pandemic just washed away so many years. And so if you weren't really close with someone, you didn't see them over those years or you didn't start to see them again then the years after, it kind of made super clear who you really were or were not friends with. I dunno if I'm the only one that went through that. But anyway, so I'm seeing all these people and I'm realizing, oh yeah, I've been doing all this work and those people have not been in the loop. They're catching the external, but what I wanted to say is, what feels even better is how I feel on the inside so like lots of moments to wax poetic, but the slower part is that was over years for me. Now they're seeing it and they're thinking, oh, there's this external change, but it's not linear. There, there's been these moments where I've just had like massive change occur all at once, and then there's times when you feel like nothing's changing for a really long time. And whenever you notice that this resistance is getting high, that's the time to sit back and to examine things. And I don't want you to shame yourself with, wah, wah, wah. "Oh, I know I shouldn't be feeling this." There's no right or wrong. Let's not ever again make it wrong for you telling yourself, " I should be more grateful, da, da, da." The reality is like, why am I experiencing this? It's 'cause I think it should be happening in a different way. And that resistance usually ends up holding you back more. But it's okay. If you need to stay in that spot for the rest of your life, it's okay. But sometimes we might choose to not stay there and have a different outcome, but then we have to pick something different, and usually it's picking curiosity I would venture to say that maybe the goal right now is not optimization, but the goal is just reconnection. ' Cause your body's not this machine that you command. Again, everybody always thinks this, but it's really a relationship that you build. And if you were in true relationship with your body, you would decrease this resistance because you wouldn't get mad if you had a partner that was going through a little bit of a depressive time. Maybe they just lost their parent or something really significant happened. You wouldn't say, "You know what? Snap out of it. Like to-today you're not gonna be thinking that anymore." You would say, "Gosh, that's a massive change that they've gone through. I wonder how I could help them." You feel for them, right? There's a lot that goes into that. Imagine if you had that same approach to yourself, you would have an entirely different relationship. This takes time. You are not alone. Re-listen to this episode if you need some perspective again, how your body is trying to keep you alive, this instant gratification is really just not the way, they're gonna developmentally happen over time, and that if you put more resistance on yourself, the suffering really goes up. If you need some questions to journal on, I think these two that I said here, can you let discomfort exist without making it mean danger? And can you trust your body before you fully understand it? Those might be two really good questions to journal or just to think on more the last thing I wanna say here is that a lot of significant changes will often require therapy. And I bring this up because some of you will be able to listen to this episode, and you get a comment or two, and you're like, "That's it. It's great, and things are moving for you." And if you get to a place where you are stagnant, you're like, " I'm stuck. I'm stuck. I'm stuck," please seek out the help of a therapist. There are tools that can help with moving you forward on this journey. They can walk with you. I really do believe in a very comprehensive approach. If you notice, "I can't get past a certain area," that's when you get help. You would do the same thing with your metabolic health if you notice blood sugars just aren't going down, or you are trying to do all the things in the world to gain muscle, it's not working. You would get different help. I want you to think about how you're feeling mentally and emotionally matters just as much. I don't care that it's not physically visible. It still very much so matters. So if you need to get that help, please do that. Reach out to your medical team and see if they have resources for you. I hope that this episode gave you a few thoughts to help you to either have acceptance for where you're at or a few different ways that you could think about things. That marks the end of today's episode. Friendly reminder, if you're wanting to do the September 30/30 round, I would go ahead and register 'cause we're soon gonna be closing registration on that 'cause we need enough time to send the workbook to you. This might be the last time that I run this program. I don't think in 2027 that I'm going to run it again. I always reserve the right to change my mind, but if you've been sitting on the fence or if you've done a previous round, and sometimes people come back and do different rounds depending on what they need, this would be the time that I would encourage you to do it. All right. I hope you all have a great rest of the week, and we'll talk soon.