Her fat gain was as serious as cancer.
A Texas woman who couldn’t shed belly fat no matter how hard she tried was flabbergasted after learning that she actually harbored a 17-pound stomach tumor.
“I was in so much shock,” Amanda Shoultz told WFAA about her alarming affliction. “It was very eye-opening.”
The flabby fiasco began in January when the 29-year-old Dallas native started gaining fat around the midsection.
Shoultz initially chalked up the waist gain to getting older, but grew concerned after her stomach started to look like it “was bloated all the time.”
Despite adopting a strict exercise routine and eating habits — which included giving up lactose and gluten — the aghast gal saw little improvement.
“I started working out more. I was dieting more and, oddly enough, I was losing weight but I was gaining inches in my stomach,” Shoultz told “Good Morning America.”
Alarmed at her slim-possible predicament, the poor woman reported to the doctor in August for a checkup. They ran several blood tests, which didn’t show anything out of the ordinary.
However, Shoultz was not convinced, so she went to the gastroenterologist, where a CT scan revealed a 12-inch-wide tumor growing around her right kidney and adrenal gland. The patient was officially diagnosed with Liposarcoma, a rare cancer strain that forms in a person’s fat tissue. The diagnosis was difficult to detect as she presented no other cancer symptoms aside from her “rock” solid belly bulge.
“My mom said you could have punched me in my stomach and broken your hand it was so hard,” lamented Shoultz.
Hoping to remove the carcinogenic growth before it affected the woman’s vital organs, doctors scheduled her for surgery six days after her diagnosis, WFAA reported.
During the two-hour procedure, doctors made a foot-long incision down Shoultz’s stomach and extracted both the tumor along with the affected organs.
That’s when they discovered that it weighed 17 pounds — as much as a seventh-month-old baby.
“When I woke up, and they told me it weighed that much, I remember being like I think I misheard you because of the medication I’m on,” recalled Shoultz, who went from weighing 125 pounds pre-op to 108 pounds following surgery.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to undergo any other treatment as the cancer hadn’t metastasized to other parts of her body.
In fact, her biggest problem now is regaining the weight that she lost from her misinformed diet and exercise regimen.
“Once I left the hospital, my stomach was back to normal,” explained Shoultz. “Now I’m just eating all the food that I missed when I gave it up for a year in order to put some weight back on.”
Shoultz hopes that her case can help convince others to literally follow their gut when it comes to health.
“We preach it at the hospital, don’t die of doubt,” she said. “No one else is going to need to fight for you, so fight for yourself and find a care team that is going to care for you through the journey.”
In the complete converse of Shoutz’s case last January, a UK teen who was praised for her rapid weight loss discovered that she had an 11.8in tumor on her ovary.