When Katie Corio reached her thirties, her feelings around her breast implants changed. A bodybuilder, trainer and fitness model from San Diego, she had undergone breast augmentation at 24 — a surgery that seemed to be routine for her developing career, for which she was often in bikini tops or sports bras.
“I was young, and I was hungry, and I wanted to progress in the industry. Everyone was getting implants, and it was almost something that people expected you to do,” she said in a video interview.
Eight years on, though, the silicone implants she’d had placed under the muscle felt heavy and cumbersome, especially during pectoral exercises, Corio described. She felt she’d gone a size too big, and she’d lost sensitivity in her nipples following the surgery.
“It was getting so uncomfortable, and I felt like my body was like, ‘Okay, time to remove them. They’re just too much now,’” she said. Significantly, she also learned in 2019 that the type of textured implant she had was getting recalled by the manufacturer for its links to a rare type of lymphoma, making her anxious over her health.
In a series of Instagram and TikTok posts in February, Corio told her combined half-million followers across the platforms that she was going to get her implants removed. She underwent the procedure, called breast explant surgery, in February and put up an 19-minute video about it on YouTube afterward. The reaction—mostly supportive, but partly critical—was immediate and strong, with one Instagram reel getting more than 14 million views.
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