After my weight loss my old photos feel like a different person
Just before Covid hit, I was in my late twenties, living alone, newly single, and enjoying a job promotion. I felt like I was settling into life, working out who I was. Part of that identity, whether I realised it or not, was physical: I was fat.
Then Covid hit, and things only got worse. By 2021, I was close to 20 stone. I felt so physically uncomfortable that something had to change. I didn’t want to risk repeating the same cycle – losing weight, then putting it back on with interest – so I booked weight-loss surgery.
Fast forward to now and I’m over 10 stone lighter. Physically, I feel healthier and happier. But what I didn’t expect was for my life to change faster than my sense of self could keep up. For years, I had been “the fat one”. Suddenly, I wasn’t.
I’m still confident, still loud, still extroverted, but something has shifted. There’s a strange contradiction — I’m more confident than ever, yet also like I’m figuring myself out all over again.
After my weight loss my memories don’t feel like me
Part of the reason, I think, is that I look completely different to the person I was for 30 years of my life. Even my memories don’t always feel like my own because the person in them doesn’t feel like me. Without a way to process that, those memories just sit there, disconnected.
We often think of photos as simple records, moments captured and stored. But they’re more than that. They’re how we build and maintain a sense of who we are. They give continuity to our identity, and when that continuity breaks, something feels… off.
Looking back at photos from before my weight-loss can feel like looking at someone else’s life. I scroll through them, trying to recognise myself, to reconcile the version of me I see now with the version that existed for decades.
But while I look back on old photos obsessively, others react differently. Research from memory curation platform Popsa – whose CEO Liam Houghton talks about helping people make sense of their thousands of photos – shows that 47 per cent of people actively avoid photos from certain periods of their lives, and nearly a quarter avoid images where they look different. When our photos don’t align with how we see ourselves – or how we want to see ourselves – we look away.
Whether you can’t look, or can’t stop looking, I think it reflects the same behavioural theme – our photos are less like archives and more like diaries, telling the story of who we are. Depending on how that story feels, we either return to it or avoid reading altogether.
Social media only reinforces this, especially now GLP-1 and other weight loss medications have surged in popularity. Platforms are full of before and after pictures, curated milestones, carefully selected moments, but those aren’t the images that really build a sense of self. For me, it’s the photos of me at my largest that I wish I had more of.
Photos help bridge the gap between life and memory
We’re taking more photos than ever but most of them sit untouched in our camera rolls unorganised, unvisited, and ultimately unprocessed. And when everything is saved, nothing stands out.
That’s certainly true for me. My Instagram shows a polished version of my life, but my camera roll tells the full story. It holds everything: hospital photos, early recovery days, tiny plates of food I could barely manage, and now screenshots of outfits I want to buy. They’re the ones I share with the people closest to me when I reflect on the journey. They fill in the gaps that the highlight reel leaves out.
Maybe that’s why the concept of memory curation Houghton has spoken about resonated with me. It’s not about creating new, polished “this is me now” narratives. It’s about making sense of the ones we already have.
When your life changes quickly, whether through weight loss, illness, grief or any major shift, your identity doesn’t instantly update. There’s a lag… and photos help bridge that gap. They allow you to revisit, reinterpret and gradually reconnect with your own story, piecing it all together, one photo at a time.