I Stopped Taking My Shirt Off For A Year After Losing 70 Pounds. Here's What Nobody Told Me.

By Daniel Ashcroft | The Vitality Edit

I remember the exact moment. It was July, a friend's pool party, and I was standing at the edge in a t-shirt while everyone else had already jumped in. I'd lost 70 pounds by then. I just hadn't told anyone the part where I hadn't taken my shirt off in front of people in over a year.

The weight came off slowly, over about a year and a half — cutting out the takeout, getting serious about the gym, the usual. Somewhere around month ten, I hit a size I hadn't seen since university. I thought that was the finish line.

It wasn't. The stretch marks I'd had since my heaviest years didn't fade the way I assumed they would. If anything, they looked more obvious — deeper, more wrinkled, more silver against the rest of my skin. For a while I genuinely thought I was imagining it.

I tried the things you'd expect. A tub of cocoa butter my mum had lying around. Bio-Oil, because it's what everyone recommends. Neither made a visible difference, and both left a greasy film that meant I couldn't get dressed for twenty minutes after a shower.

So I did what most people do. I just stopped thinking about it, or tried to. I bought looser t-shirts, stopped going shirtless at the gym, avoided the changing room when I could. It became a habit I didn't examine too closely.

The Moment It Actually Landed

The pool party was when it stopped being background noise. Watching my nephew try to convince me to jump in, hearing myself make up a reason not to for what felt like the tenth time that year — that's when it actually hit. I'd done the hard part. I was still hiding.

I didn't do anything dramatic that day. I just went home and, for the first time, actually looked into what was happening to my skin instead of avoiding the question.

What I Found When I Actually Looked

What I found out changed how I thought about the whole thing. As the fat underneath a stretch mark disappears, the skin above it loses the structure that used to hold it flat — so marks that had been there for years can suddenly look worse, not because anything new is happening, but because there's less support underneath them.

I came across Suverta a few weeks later, in a fairly unglamorous way — a Reddit thread about post-weight-loss skin, not an ad. What stood out was that it wasn't dressed up in pregnancy branding or floral scent. It was built around the exact mechanism I'd just read about.

The first thing I noticed had nothing to do with the marks themselves. It absorbed in under a minute, no residue, no waiting around half-dressed in the bathroom. That alone made it easy to actually stick with every day, which is apparently most of the battle.

By week four or five, the texture had changed before the color did — less tight, less noticeably ridged when I ran a hand over my stomach. It wasn't dramatic. It was just quietly, consistently different than it had been a month earlier.

Where Things Stand Now

I'm about four months in now. The contrast between the marks and the rest of my skin has faded enough that I stopped clocking it every time I looked in a mirror, which is really the only metric that's ever mattered to me.

I still have the marks. I'm not pretending otherwise, and nobody selling this kind of thing honestly can. What's different is that I took my shirt off at a barbecue two weekends ago without doing the mental math first — I didn't even notice I'd stopped doing it until afterward.

I'm not saying this will work exactly the same for you. Skin, timelines, and starting points are all different, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something they can't actually back up.

What I can say is that the part of my transformation I was quietly avoiding for over a year turned out to be fixable — not erased, just no longer something I had to think about every time I got dressed. If you're standing where I was standing at that pool party, it might be worth five minutes to actually look into why.