Butt Hurts from Losing Weight

December 11, 2011

Dec 11

I’ve been on a diet for six months now (26 weeks if you want to get technical) and have lost 24 pounds. Now the thing about losing weight is that you expect all sorts of positive benefits from it. For example, being able to reach your feet easily to trim your toenails without contorting sideways like a circus pretzel.

At the onset of your diet, you dream of wearing shorts again without being embarrassed. At five feet tall it doesn’t take a lot of extra weight to be an embarrassment in summer clothes, and god help you if you wear shorts and want to sit down without anybody seeing your thighs spread out. If you can’t hide under a tablecloth, you nonchalantly lean against the nearest wall or tree to avoid such an embarrassing position.

Then there’s your feet. While you expect your belly to bulge and your thighs to spread out like a water balloon about to pop, you don’t expect your feet to outgrow your shoes. Yes, even the shoes don’t fit anymore when the pounds start piling on. I’ve got a closet full of skinny shoes, boxes full of skinny shorts and skinny pants, and a rack full of skinny dresses.

I pulled a t-shirt out of the drawer yesterday thinking to wear it, and my face scrunched up like old scrooge when I saw how small it was. Surely I had never been able to wear something so tiny? It looked like a kid’s shirt. I took it down to my husband and held it up and asked in wonder, “Did I really used to be this little?”

No husband should ever be in a position to answer questions about his wife’s weight. He can’t win no matter what he says. Bless his heart, he came up with the perfect reply: “Sweetie, it must have shrank in the dryer…” He truly is a gentleman!

My husband has taken a keen interest in my diet especially as I’ve been so successful with it. When you’re short, 24 pounds coming off makes a very big difference in how you look, and it makes a HUGE difference in how your clothes fit. My pants, at the moment, are falling off. I’ve been holding them up with a tied sash or safety pin, lacking any decent belts. Even then they want to inch down and he’s taken a great delight in giving them a tug when I walk by.

I had gotten tired of having no clothes to wear and had just bought two new pairs of pants before starting the diet, so I’ll have two brand new pairs of fat pants when it’s all done with. Then I can take a photo of me in the fat pants like they do on the TV commercials and post it on the internet. I don’t want to buy skinny pants yet because I expect to lose more inches before I settle into my happy weight, which will hopefully be the weight I was when I met my husband. Yes, I know you’re laughing at me but that’s the goal.

Everybody knows the benefits of losing weight such as fitting into your skinny clothes again and lower blood pressure. My systolic blood pressure (the top number) came down about 15 while my diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) came down by 15 as well. This moved me from the prehypertension stage into the normal blood pressure range just from losing 24 pounds.

There’s a downside, however. What nobody tells you is that there is a downside to losing weight. My butt hurts when I sit down and so do my upper thighs. The pain feels like bone pain. It goes far beyond what you’d expect from sitting on a hard chair and it happens even when I’m sitting on a soft, cushy sofa.

My first instinct was to panic, thinking that I’d contracted some sort of bone cancer, brought on by losing weight or spurred into overdrive from the loss of calories or vitamins. I’d never experienced a pain like this before and it did not feel normal, even though pain for me is normal as I have arthritis and other painful maladies that whack you as you get older.

Thank god for the internet, though. I plugged in “my butt hurts” or some similar key phrase into Google and was amazed at the number of similar stories that popped up from people who were dieting. I was not alone and my butt pain was normal. No big scary bone disease, the most likely culprit was the fact that I’d lost 24 pounds. (Warning: If you go looking for the butt hurts stories on Google, you better input “butt hurts after losing weight” because if you just put in “my butt hurts” the results will be rather graphic and not related to weight loss.)

So here we’ve got a downside of losing weight, you lose your padding and suddenly your leg bone and your butt bone pushes right up against the chair with no padding in between, and consequently your butt hurts. The suggested fix is to do exercises that build up your thigh muscles and tighten your butt muscles. Note that there are other more serious issues that can cause bone pain so you might want to go to a doctor and rule them out before assuming it’s the weight loss.

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