Man, 61, Loses 95 Pounds and Treats Himself to ‘Life-Changing’ Plastic Surgery

Dale has made a lot of changes in his life over the past few years — both inside and out.

The 61-year-old California resident found himself at a turning point in his life after he got divorced, moved to a new city and met the man who would become his husband. Together, Dale and his husband, Jonathan, went on a health journey where they both lost a significant amount of weight (Dale lost 95 pounds and Jonathan lost 135.).

But that left both of them wanting to remedy the loose skin — and Dale also wanted to tackle his aging face.

“I was in that generation that you used foil and oil on your skin to tan up in Hawaii, and the more burnt you got, the better it was. Never heard of moisturizer. Everything in the world that was wrong is the way that I was operating. And I honestly thought it was too late,” Dale tells PEOPLE of his mindset before having a consultation about plastic surgery.

In doing his research for plastic surgery, Dale looked into doctors all over the world, from Thailand to Colombia. Ultimately, he didn’t want to risk leaving the country in case he had any complications. This narrowed his search down to a doctor in Las Vegas and Dr. Obaida Batal, based in Southern California.

Dale met with Dr. Batal about the tummy tuck but didn’t realize immediately that the doctor would also be the right man to do a facelift for him as well, another surgery on his to-do list.

“I just got tired of looking in the mirror and seeing somebody that I didn’t think I was, and I feel very different inside than I looked on the outside. I decided I wanted the two to match one way or the other,” Dale says of wanting to get a facelift.

He did his tummy tuck first with Dr. Batal in spring 2023, and while he says it mostly went off “without a hitch,” he did have minor complications where some of his incisions came open.

“There was no infection or anything like that, but it did open. We had to re-close. He kept an eye on it, made certain the scarring was minimal,” Dale shares, noting that the complication passed quickly.

Dr. Batal explains that the procedure he did on Dale was a “lumbar flap,” which he tells PEOPLE was a new technique.

“We moved the fat from his lower back and rotated it and fixed it underneath the muscle of the buttock, and we lifted it up and also tucked his abdomen,” Dr. Batal shares.

Dale was especially pleased with this technique because he says he didn’t fully lose his love handles and also didn’t have to do any skin removal on his legs from the weight loss. Jonathan followed in Dale’s footsteps and got his own tummy tuck following his weight loss.

And a few months later, Dale was back on Dr. Batal’s table to start the work on his face. The plastic surgeon started the procedures in June but spread them out so it wouldn’t be so harsh on Dale’s skin all at once. Between June and September 2023, Dale had a deep plane neck and facelift, forehead lift, blepharoplasty (upper and lower), fat transfer to the face, temporal lift and a chemical peel.

“If you look at his before [photos], you can see a lot of ptosis. We call that ptosis, which is the descendance of the tissue and lack of volume because he lost a lot of fat,” Dr. Batal explains. “Sometimes you can also lose some muscle mass, even in the face.”

For the blepharoplasty procedure, Dr. Batal explains that Dale was in a situation where he had virtually no fat under his eyes but a fat bag in his upper eyelid — neither of which was ideal.

“What we did in his case, instead of removing the fat bag [from under the eyes], which he actually needs, we moved those fat bag from the eyelid into the cheek,” Dr. Batal says. “So we go inside the eyelid and we actually move those fat bags, fix them above the bone into the cheeks, and then we remove the extra skin.”

Once the face, neck, forehead and eyes were done, Dr. Batal says he brought Dale back in for a slight “revision” because there was still a bit of “laxity” in the patient’s face that he believed he could fix with an additional small procedure.

“We later did a small revision by doing something called temporal lift. We extended the incision a bit because he still has some laxity in the mid-face,” the doctor shares.

The last piece of the puzzle was the deep croton oil peel, which Dr. Batal says is “the strongest peel ever.”

It must be true, because Dale tells PEOPLE that it was very “painful” but got the job done in bringing his skin to the level he wanted, anti-aging-wise.

“The deep croton oil peel is actually peeling a big layer of all this aged skin that’s been damaged by the sun exposure, the aging process. So you almost like burning it out,” Dr. Batal explains.

Dale jokes he “wasn’t expecting” the peel to be the most difficult of the process to handle, but it ended up being worth it because, he says, it was the “most important facet of the overall look of things.”

Now that he’s two years past his initial surgery, Dale is looking ahead to possibly “fine-tuning” a few things, like doing a little more fat transfer on his face and getting another peel to further refine his skin, but at the moment, he’s feeling great and more confident than ever about how he looks.

He no longer feels self-conscious about his appearance like he once did — and he can put behind him the moment (and person) who pushed him toward a facelift in the first place. Dale explains he had a negative experience with a doctor during a routine visit while he was in his late 50s, and the doctor told him he looked 20 years older than that. Frankly, those words hurt.

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“Those words rang in my ears for a very, very, very long time,” he candidly admits. And as I was losing the weight, I was looking worse and worse and worse. I was realizing I was looking in my 70s, at least in my 70s, and it wasn’t for any other reason than those years of neglect, a little bit of bad luck in the genetics department and the extreme weight loss.”

Dr. Batal has shared Dale’s journey on his social media, where commenters continue to weigh in about how fantastic he looks. People have left praising comments on both TikTok and Instagram, saying how happy they are for Dale’s transformation — especially seeing how big his smile is in all the “after” photos. The doctor tells PEOPLE that the “life-changing” journey has been incredible to witness on his part as well.

Indeed, Dale does have a lot to smile about these days, and he has Dr. Batal to thank for a lot of it.

“At this point in time, I’m top-to-bottom thrilled with everything,” Dale gushes.