'I didn't sit for five weeks': Influencer lifts lid on gruelling procedure behind 'perfect' body

Warning: Graphic content

We’ve seen the shape countless times, on countless different women.

Impossibly tiny waist, full hips, big, perky butt and skinny legs.

It’s what I call the Instagram hourglass, a body that looks like Jessica Rabbit swapped her red gown for a five-hour iPhone bikini shoot and a few thousand followers.

Many spruik gym selfies as being behind the curvaceous look, but it turns out, the secret to that figure is probably less gym time and more recovery time.

An increasingly popular surgery is being credited with the logic-defying figures, and one Aussie influencer is on a mission to lift the lid on the surgery known as BBL or, the Brazilian Butt Lift.

Miss Zedd underwent the procedure that takes fat from the waist and abdomen and injects it into the buttocks and hips in 2018.

The effect, of course, is that while the waist is reduced, the hips and bum are enhanced with the very fat cells the surgery removed - a reallocation of resources if you will.

The influencer showing the BBL, warts and all

It’s a fairly intense procedure intimately documented by Melbourne influencer Zilla, or Miss Zedd, in an online YouTube series.

“What I try and do with my channel and page is make sure people are well-informed because there are so many young women who make rash decisions,” she tells Yahoo Lifestyle.

“The way that I wanted to do it was in a way that would let people see every aspect of the surgery. Including in-theatre, the breakdown, the leaking, every part of it.”

She tells Yahoo Lifestyle she has been undergoing procedures of various levels for over a decade, and at 29 years old today, she got off to a young start.

“I’ll go in for anything, I’m very comfortable with my surgeons,” she shrugs.

This procedure, she admits, was the biggest she’s undergone, and with so little information available online about the somewhat vilified surgery, she took it upon herself to share the experience in all its gore and glory online.

The takeaway? It may look pretty on Instagram, but the aftermath of surgery sure isn’t.

The good, the bad, and the truly ugly

Zilla’s comprehensive coverage shows the surprisingly rough procedure itself, in which needles are inserted to remove the fat, then redeployed in the required areas.

The unusually graphic and honest coverage was deliberate, Zilla tells Yahoo Lifestyle, as she is all about demystifying surgery and showing all of its unflattering angles.

Zilla’s videos show the 29-year-old breaking down four days post-surgery as she is unable to sleep thanks to the double pain of a pair of glutes absorbing new fat cells, and an abdomen sucked dry of a huge chunk of them.

“It’s definitely not comfortable,” the YouTuber told Yahoo Lifestyle. “You have to sleep on your tummy while you recover”.

Recovery can take between two and six weeks, for Zilla it was the latter.

“I didn’t sit for five weeks. You kneel or you lay,” she says.

Meanwhile, she had to wear a special garment designed to protect her waist after the liposuction, while the injections wept a mixture of fat, pus and blood.

Videos shared to Zilla’s YouTube show it all - with stained sheets and clothing, plenty of tears and sleepless nights vying for the most difficult moments to watch.

The takeaway

The overall experience is far from pleasant from a viewer’s perspective, but the bubbly and now very curvy Aussie says it was all worth it for how it made her feel in the end.

“When I got my BBL done I was like, ‘there’s no way in the world I would ever do this again’,” she admits.

“(I thought) this is madness, why did I do this. Regret.

“Then after you heal you don’t remember it. The brain just puts it to the back of your mind,” she adds.

She’s put her money where her mouth is too, undergoing a similar fat transfer breast augmentation in 2019, on year after the BBl in 2018.

She says the procedure has boosted her confidence ‘massively’, and wholeheartedly supports cosmetic surgery as long as people are informed.

“It’s the same as when girls get their noses done, they look in the mirror every day and they don’t like what they see,” she explains. “There is the ability to change that.”

“It’s not the solution obviously you can’t just magically fix everything. But, if it’s going to boost your self-confidence then I completely support it.”

Lifting the lid on a ‘secret’ surgery

Needless to say, most see the gruelling five-week recovery as a step beyond a rhinoplasty, and it begs the question of how much our physical form informs our happiness.

Zilla can’t be faulted however, on her forthrightness, something she says not every influencer can say for themselves.

“I know a lot of PT’s who have gone and had their AB’s sculpted at the same clinic that I’ve gone to and then they post about their ab programs, they don’t want to tell the fitness industry what they’ve had done,” she says.

Zilla says bodies like hers are sometimes down to genes, sometimes aided by a bit of photoshop magic, and the rest of the time down to some ‘hectic’ surgery.

As many may have suspected, she some influencers rock an itty-bitty waist thanks to an invasive procedure rather than thanks to hours in the gym.

What watching these videos will teach you, however, is that the surgery option is very probably the harder and more painful choice.

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