Bullied for her weight for years, Chantae Alexander was thrilled to finally meet someone who loved her and all of her 400-plus lbs. So Alexander was shocked when her husband started calling her ‘fat’ after she dropped close to 200 lbs. to save her health.
“As I lost weight, insecurity built in my marriage,” Alexander explains in this exclusive clip from Wednesday’s episode of Skin Tight. “My husband would say mean things, and the smaller I got, the more he would say, ‘I think you’re going to leave me.’ ”
“But it wasn’t until I lost 173 lbs. that he was like, ‘You’re fat.’ But he never called me fat when I was plus-size.”
Alexander, 26, knew she couldn’t keep the negative weight of her husband around.
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“After that, I made a decision that this was for me, this was for my health, so I got a divorce, and I started working out even harder,” she says.
“I got married to my husband at age 22, and he liked plus-size women, and I kept gaining weight that I didn’t really want,” she explains. “My weight was starting to affect my health, and my body hurt all the time. I had to do something, I had to make a change.”
Hitting 422 lbs. was Alexander’s breaking point, and she decided to get gastric bypass surgery to finally get her weight under control.
“Gastric bypass pushed me to workout five to six days a week, three hours a day. I was like, ‘I’m going to workout til I fall out.’ ”
Over 11 months of intense exercise and strength training, Alexander dropped a whopping 222 lbs., and regained the energy to start dating again. But now, a total of 242 lbs. down, she’s embarrassed by her excess skin, and it’s stopping her from fully opening up to a new relationship. She’s ready to get skin removal surgery and find the confident woman inside.
Skin Tight airs Wednesday nights at 10/9c on TLC.
This article originally appeared on People.com
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