This is what ‘weight loss’ looks like in most of the media.

Usually, the ‘weight loss’ images we’re exposed to only involve models on TV advertorials, or smiling celebrities who’ve struck million-dollar deals with major names like Jenny Craig. There are brightly coloured crop tops, tiny shorts and stretch-mark-free tightly toned stomachs.

But a new series of intimate self-portraits by Brooklyn-based photographer Jen Davis, snapped over a decade, documents a much more hones

t weight loss journey.

Davis began the photographic project almost by accident: she was stuck for ideas as an undergraduate student in 2002,

The Telegraph

reports, and started taking photos of herself to kick-start the creative process.

The series soon became a quest to achieve a better understanding of herself and her size, Davis told The Telegraph — and last year, looking back over her collected self-portraits, she realised that she actually wanted to shed some of the extra weight she was carrying.

“I had this archive of myself from th

e last nine years and I realised how nothing had really changed. My body hadn’t changed. I thought, ‘I don’t want to wake up at 40 and be in the same body’,” she told The Telegraph.

So in August she had gastric banding surgery — and she’s since shed almost 50 kilograms. The photos in the series — which capture moods varying from introspective and lonely, to erotic — include images from before, during, and after Davis’ dramatic weight loss.

pic1.jpg

pic10.jpg

pic12.jpg

pic13.jpg

pic14.jpg

pic15.jpg

pic16.jpg

pic17.jpg

pic18.jpg

pic19.jpg

pic2.jpg

pic20.jpg

pic21.jpg

pic22.jpg

pic23.jpg

pic24.jpg

pic26.jpg

pic28.jpg

pic3.jpg

pic30.jpg

pic31.jpg

pic32.jpg

pic33.jpg

pic34.jpg

pic35.jpg

pic36.jpg

pic37.jpg

pic38.jpg