- April 16, 2024
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In public, Carlynda Cofield looked like a new person. Weight Watchers and then weight loss surgery had helped her shed more than 325 pounds, from a high of over 500, and her friends congratulated her on her new look.
But when she got home, she would peel off her body suit — her compression garments — and look at her loose skin in the mirror. Her new look in public was just a façade.
“You could roll my stomach up like a burrito,” she recalled. “It looked like I had paper bags hanging on my legs. I went from one extreme to another. … I looked like a hideous monster.”
Thanks to skin removal surgery funded by the reality TV show “Skin Tight,” on TLC, her transformation continued to the point that now, she has opened a beauty salon called Lyt Lashes & Body.
“Business is doing great,” she said in a Dec. 8 interview. Many of her customers come to her regularly for beauty services, as well as for her inspirational attitude.
“I develop a rapport with them,” she said. “I’ve had a few come in crying, and they leave happy, because they feel better.”
Cofield developed her people skills at an early age. She was overweight — about 235 pounds — in high school, and other kids often picked on her, so she adjusted.
“When you get to that kind of weight, they gawk at you,” she said. “I’ve always been outgoing to compensate. I speak to them first and break the ice. It makes you more humanized than when they’re just staring at you. It’s formed my personality.”
Afterward, she got married (they’re now divorced), and Cofield also learned that she had a problem with her thyroid that had been causing her to gain weight so easily.
She started taking medication to help, but then she got pregnant and had her daughter in 1999, and her weight went up to 300.
And it kept climbing.
“It doesn’t happen overnight,” she said. “It’s a gradual thing. I was always focusing on the baby or my ex-husband. You get lost.”
She was contemplating weight-loss surgery, but her insurance didn’t cover it.
As she tried to improve her health, she realized that tracking her weight was another problem: She couldn’t find a scale that would register as high as she needed. Even the scale at Publix would only go up to 350 pounds, and she was beyond that.
She then heard of a feed store that had a scale that could accommodate her. It was something of a turning point.
“I remember being ashamed that, ‘Gosh, that’s the only way I can weigh myself,’” she recalled.
Her highest recorded weight was 480, but she knows she gained after that and estimated that she topped 500 pounds at one point.
Meanwhile, life was stressful: First, she became pregnant in February 2006. The family moved to Palm Coast from Miami in April 2006, and a month later, her ex-husband got into a bad accident.
Because of her weight, she was a high-risk pregnancy and had to deliver at Winnie Palmer Hospital in Orlando.
At one point, she put all her energy into weight loss. She became an expert in the Weight Watchers points system and spent a lot of time preparing her meals. “I made that my mission,” she said. “I went to the gym every day.”
But after a lot of success, she hit a plateau. For six straight months, she was stuck at about 304 pounds. She had people cheering her on, and she felt like she was letting them down.
“I wasn’t getting any results, and I gave up,” she said. “I gained it all back and plus some, to the point where I really didn’t move. I was barely getting out of bed. Every step hurt.”
She had to support herself by leaning on chairs to walk around the house.
“I had to have a shower chair,” she said. “I had to ride the cart in the grocery store. I had a walker.”
In 2013, Cofield knew something had to change. She felt she was not able to take care of her children like she wanted to, although she was doing her best and was involved in Girl Scouts.
Finally, her knees gave her such trouble that she applied for disability and got it. Being on disability meant that her insurance would pay for weight-loss surgery in 2015.
But she didn’t celebrate. She hated how she looked with all the excess skin, and it was causing problems of its own.
When she talked to a surgeon about knee replacements, he said he couldn’t perform the surgery because of the excess skin that was in the way. Insurance didn’t cover surgery for skin removal because it was deemed cosmetic. She felt stuck once again.
Then she heard about the show “Skin Tight.” She submitted her story, opening up the possibility of showing to the world the body beneath the body suit.
She waited for the reply.
“I’ll never forget,” she recalled. “I was driving on 40, on Granada, to see a friend in Ormond, and they called me and said I had been cast. I was so excited. I couldn’t believe I had been chosen. I thought, ‘Not only do I have a second chance at life with my weight loss surgery, I’m going to have the skin removed.’”
“I just care about each and every person that comes in here as if they’re my own mother, my sister, my child. When they’re with me, they walk out of here feeling loved. That’s the most important thing — that I cared about you.”
CARLYNDA COFIELD
The surgery, which was reported on in Season 3 in 2018, removed 10 pounds of excess skin off her stomach, one pound off each arm, and 10 pounds off each leg, for a total, of 32 pounds. The results: She now has an Instagram account (@Carlynda_SkinTight) to show off her new slimmed-down look. She also now has long scars on her stomach, legs and arms.
“I am blessed,” she said. “I have a lot of scars on me, but it’s OK. I know it’s all a journey. These scars are nothing; people have worse tattoos than these scars.”
After her transformation was complete, she reached a low of 165 pounds. She now is holding steady at 175-185 pounds.
Her next change was in her career.
Cofield has a degree in architectural technology, but she decided to pursue beauty as her next vocation, thanks to discovering eyelash extensions and loving the way they looked on her. Thanks to a grant by the Northeast Community Action Agency, she attended Flagler Technical Institute and got her facial specialist license, as well as an esthetician’s license.
She opened a business in 2019 and started doing eyelashes from her home. In March 2020, she began the process of opening a storefront, and today, she is located in the Coastal Centre, at 4750 E Moody Blvd., Unit 105, Bunnell, offering a variety of services. Visit www.lytlashes.com or call 386-243-5770.
“I just like to make people feel good,” she said. “When they’re in the beauty chair, you’re like a therapist almost. I like making people feel like they’re rock stars, whether it’s through a service or just talking to them. If they’re going through something, I can empathize.
“I love to project love on people. I think it’s more than just the service they’re getting from me. I hope that when they leave here, they feel good — and my joy.”
