Meet The Woman Who Lost 130kg And Now Needs To Raise $55,000 To Remove Her Excess Skin

When Jennifer Sheehan was 25-years-old, she was on the brink of depression, weighed 205kg and had an uncontrollable eating addiction.

Working as a childcare worker at the time, Jennifer, who hails from Condell Park in NSW, was astonishingly chowing down on a milkshake every morning made with one litre of milk and numerous scoops of ice-cream, two large McDonalds meals for lunch and a 500g pack of cooked pasta, thickly coated with cheese for dinner.

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And while Jennifer suffered a stoke in her sleep that year, which left her with minimal vision in her right eye, it wasn’t until one year later, in 2006, when Sheehan was involved in a car crash, that she got the wake up call she so desperately needed.

“On that morning, I was involved in a major car accident, which ended with me driving head first into a traffic light pole. I was driving a van and upon impact, the car crumbled in on me and literally sliced my right leg open, deep enough that my bone was exposed,” Jennifer told Yahoo7 Lifestyle.

Jennifer was at her heaviest ever (216kg) and in a coma for two weeks. She ended up losing almost all the muscle from her right leg, was in-and-out of the operating theatre six times and received several blood transfusions.

Five weeks after the accident, she was still in hospital, she couldn’t walk and it dawned on her the severity of her injuries.

“I thought, I’ve been given a second chance, I’m not going to waste it. I pretty much grabbed the bull by the horns as they say and I started to make a change in my life. Getting my weight under control was the first thing that I had to do,” she said.

“It took me three years to actually get up and start walking properly - to what would be deemed as normal. I was still heavily assisted with a walking aid.”

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The young woman’s destructive eating habits stemmed from years being bullied and taunted about her weight.

When she was seven-years-old, Jennifer was ridiculed by her class for her 40kg frame. Her weight continued to catapult and at 12-years-old, she already weighed 100kg and was a size 18.

Just before she left school, Jennifer’s Year 8 class were told to measure their BMI, weigh themselves and share the results with everyone. She was 18-years-old, 140kg and a size 24/26.

Two years after her car crash, the 28-year-old was still in-and-out of hospital with infections, with each hospital visit lasting between two and four weeks. It was during this time that she met Canadian man Ron in an online gaming forum.

”I didn’t actually send him a photo of myself until probably six months after we started talking," she said.

"At that point we said ‘you know what lets meet up’. What I didn’t know was that he actually Facebook stalked me so he already knew what I looked like. So when I eventually sent him a photo he said ‘I’ve known that you look like that for months and I said ‘and you still hung around what the hell’s wrong with you?’"

At 30-years-old, using crutches and weighing in at 180kgs, Jennifer packed her bags and moved across the world to Canada to be with Ron, telling her family it was only a three-month trip.

Within four months the pair were engaged and her three-month stay turned into two years, but when Jennifer's grandfather sadly passed away in 2011, her homesickness took over.

"He saw how much I was struggling so he said to me 'you know what how about we move to Australia lets give it a couple of years, if we like it we stay, if we don’t we come back'," she said.

Two weeks before they were due to return back to NSW, the couple sent Jennifer's family a surprise wedding invite in the post.

"My family didn't know that we were moving back to Australia until two weeks before we were due to arrive and that’s when they received our wedding invitation."

Two weeks after returning home in 2012, the pair were married and when they decided they wanted children, Jennifer knew she needed to lose the weight.

“That’s when I decided to get the gastric sleeve,” Jennifer said.

“So I had 75 per cent of my stomach removed."

Since then, Jennifer, who is now 36-years-old, has gone from a size 38 at her heaviest to anywhere between a 12 and 16, depending on the store and cut of the clothing.

The young woman has surpassed her weight-loss goal of 95kg, is now at 86kg and is on a mission to loose 10kg-15kg of excess skin she has left.

“I’ve been working out six days a week. I’m up at 5 o’clock every morning. I go to the gym for an hour before work. I leave the gym at 7am, I’m home at 7:15am, I jump in the shower, grab some breakfast and then I’m at work," she said.

“In the afternoon, I leave work at 5 o’clock, I’m at the gym at 5:40pm for another hour and then I get home and then I’ll go out for a walk with my husband.

With such an extraordinary weight loss feat, Jennifer has unfortunately been left with a lot of excess skin, which her doctor will need to remove in three separate surgeries, coming in at a whopping $55,000.

“It’s really uncomfortable, I’m always getting skin infections and with sweat it’s really smelly and I’m conscious of it,” Jennifer said.

“I need to have it done just for health reasons. Because it’s too extensive he needs to break it up - that’s why I need three surgeries.”

Jennifer has set up a GoFundMe page in the hope of raising the money, where she has shared pictures of her body for the first time.

“I’m a very private person. Nobody has seen me naked except for my mother and my husband and those photos to me are very confronting,” she said.

"It’s completely out of my comfort zone.”

For now Jennifer is continuing on her healthy eating path, is working as an employment relationship coordinator in a disability employment service and is hopeful that one day soon she will fall pregnant with her first child.

"I’m still hopeful although I’m pretty sure It’s not going to happen," she said.

"We started looking into IVF last year because we’ve been trying for about five years and nothing."

To donate to Jennifer's fund, click here.