Before she had accrued more than 700,000 Instagram followers and was known as fitness influencer “GetBodiedByJ,” Jenelle Salazar Butler was like many other women, going to great efforts to feel good about the skin she was in.
“My ex worked in a strip club and all the girls had these big ol’ butts and it was like ‘Whoa!’ you know?” she said while sharing her story on the Wendy Williams Show recently. “Something like that can make another woman feel like she’s not enough, like insecure and making you feel like you need more. Not just for your man but for yourself.”
So in 2010, she went as far as paying $2,000 to get butt injections in a hotel room from someone who wasn’t a professional. She could have opted for fat transfer, a relatively new procedure at that time, but she didn’t have enough fat on her body to do it. Because of that, she ended up getting silicone injections instead.
She went from a natural 40 inches in the hips to 42 because “I just wanted a little plump.” The results were initially good, and they aided her in building her following. But as the years passed, she found love, married and got pregnant, and found that her backside started to become a problem.
While pregnant with her third child, her first since having the injections, she noticed that things were going awry.
“My butt was just getting ginormous,” she said. “It was big as my belly. And I believe it’s because my body was doing a defense system. It was trying to fight from any infections to protect the baby, so scar tissue was just growing and growing to try and protect my body.”
Eventually, she gave birth and realized that her butt had grown too large. So she opted to have the injections removed and found out that the process was going to be more difficult than previously imagined.
“I thought this stuff was just going to dissolve over time,” she said. “I decided to remove it after it got too big. And because of that, I had complications with it. Most doctors cut at the top, near the lower back, full back, take the injections out and the silicone. The way that I was cut, he went down the middle under the cheeks and he opened me up like a book. He scooped the silicone out, but he also took out a lot of fat and tissue that I needed that was my natural stuff.”
Things went so left that she had infections and ended up with necrosis, a condition where the tissue dies, and her skin turned black. Because a lot of the tissue and fats were removed, Jenelle’s body has changed, and she has a lot less curve than she did pre-surgery.
“I have to wear a body shaper,” she said. “I have to get reconstructive surgery.”
Jenelle has shared her journey for fans through social media, from the before and afters to her recovery and life after the injections. And while it hasn’t been an easy last few months, and she’s still working to embrace the changes, as she told fans, “This Too has only made me STRONGER & taught me so much about my body & healing.”
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