A Surgeon Quoted Me $20,000 To Fix My Stomach After Losing 100 Pounds. Here's What I Did Instead.

By Daniel Ashcroft | The Vitality Edit

I remember sitting in the consultation room thinking the number couldn't be right. Twenty thousand dollars. Just for my stomach — not my arms, not my chest, just the loose skin hanging off my midsection after I'd spent two years losing it. The surgeon said it casually, like he quoted that number ten times a day. For him, he probably had.

The weight came off slowly, over about two years — cutting out the takeout, getting serious about the gym, the usual. I'd lost 105 pounds by the time I hit my target. I thought that was the hard part. I didn't realize the scale was only telling half the story.

For a long time I didn't even have the right word for what I was looking at. I kept telling myself it was just "extra skin," something that would firm up eventually if I stuck with the gym. It took embarrassingly long to admit it wasn't going anywhere on its own — it was loose skin, plain and simple, and no amount of extra cardio was going to change that.

I tried the things you'd expect first, before I ever got near a surgeon's office. 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. At some point I stopped bothering and just accepted that lotion wasn't going to touch this.

So I did what most people in my position do. I looked into surgery. Which is how I ended up in that consultation room, hearing a number that made "just live with it" sound like the more realistic option.

Twenty Thousand Dollars, Or Nothing At All

That consultation was the moment it stopped being something I could put off thinking about. Twenty thousand dollars I didn't have, for a procedure with weeks of recovery I couldn't take off work for. On one side, an operation I couldn't afford. On the other, drugstore lotion that had already proven it did nothing. I remember driving home feeling genuinely stuck — like there was no option between "spend everything" and "accept it."

I didn't book the surgery that day. I went home and, for the first time, actually looked into whether there was anything real in between those two options — instead of assuming the surgeon's office and the drugstore aisle were the only two places to look.

What I Found When I Actually Looked

The first thing that changed how I thought about this: there's a real difference between hanging skin folds and deflated, crepey skin, and most people — including me at the time — lump them together as one hopeless problem. Folds that hang, the kind that need to be physically excised, really do need surgery. Nothing topical touches that. But a lot of what men my size end up with isn't that. It's skin that's lost the fat underneath it and gone thin, soft, and crinkled instead of sitting flat — and that kind of change responds to something a lot less drastic than a scalpel.

I came across Suverta while going down that rabbit hole — a Reddit thread comparing surgical and non-surgical options for post-weight-loss skin, not an ad. What stood out was that it didn't pretend to replace what I'd been quoted for. It was upfront that if you're dealing with real hanging folds, this isn't a substitute for surgery. But for the kind of thin, crepey looseness I actually had, it claimed something a lot more specific and a lot more believable.

The first thing I noticed had nothing to do with the skin itself. 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 with anything topical.

By week four or five, the texture had changed before anything else did — my stomach felt firmer, less thin and papery when I ran a hand over it. It wasn't dramatic, and it definitely wasn't a $20,000 result. It was just quietly, consistently different than it had been a month earlier.

Where Things Stand Now

I'm about four months in now. I still have loose skin — I want to be straight about that, because anyone who tells you a $50 cream erases what two years of weight loss left behind is lying to you. What's changed is the texture. It's firmer, less papery, less of the thing my hand would catch on when I got dressed. The mirror check I used to do out of habit has mostly stopped being a thing I do.

I never went back to that surgeon's office. Maybe I will eventually, if the budget ever makes sense. But for now, the gap between "do nothing" and "spend $20,000" turned out to have something real in it — I just hadn't looked for it yet.

I'm not saying this will work exactly the same for you, or that it's the right call if what you're dealing with is genuinely hanging skin folds — for that, surgery is still the only real fix, and nobody honest will tell you otherwise. Skin, timelines, and starting points are all different.

What I can say is that for skin that's deflated and crepey rather than hanging, there's a real option between the surgeon's office and doing nothing. I just wish someone had told me that before I sat through that consultation.