Former Southland Stags prop Dayna Cunningham on dramatic weight-loss surgery that ‘saved’ his life

Former Southland Stags prop Dayna Cunningham has undergone a dramatic weight-loss transformation.

Dayna Cunnigham was initially hesitant about sharing his personal journey.

The rugby-loving Southland dairy farmer doesn’t want to come across like he’s telling people what they should do. But he feels obliged to open up publicly. He knows there will be people “in a hole” struggling both physically and mentally. As he did. He wants them to know they aren’t alone and there are ways out.

“People need to understand that they are not failures - life is tough. But it doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity to make a change. That might be just one change in your daily routine.”

Cunningham admits having to a lonely sort of feeling a couple of years back. On the face of it, he was a jovial character who more often than not sported a smile and shared a jokes. In some parts, it was a charade at that time. He didn’t enjoy being in public all that much. Behind that wide smile was a person who wasn’t comfortable with who he was.

Cunningham weighed 172 kilograms and struggled with the way he looked and felt in public. “People don’t know that, my best mates didn’t even know that. So, it is a pretty lonely place to be in.”

“I can’t imagine how many other people there are out there feel like that.

“For them to know they are not the only person thinking like that is probably pretty important.”

Dayna Cunningham has lost 74kg since December, 2021.

After a lengthy playing career - which included a stint with the Southland Stags - Cunningham has turned his rugby focus to a coaching career. But there was a point when Cunningham dreaded entering rugby clubrooms after games. “I couldn’t stand going into the clubrooms in my number-ones because I knew if I was in there, I’d just start sweating. Just dripping with sweat because you are big.

“I hated it. But on the outside, people would see this person that’s always happy.”

At the time, Cunningham was on blood pressure medication and had been told he probably needed to start using a sleep apnea machine. Tests showed he stopped breathing 18 times per hour when sleeping. “That could be 15-20 seconds at a time. That’s not healthy, so that was a big wake-up call for me.”

“I’ve got young daughters, and I want to be around for them.”

He says he lacked energy, and most afternoons he felt like he needed to go to sleep. “Between 2pm and 4pm, I was a zombie. I was nearly falling asleep driving.”

But what hurt the most were odd comments from his daughters, as well as the thought of a couple of good mates.

“It was not their fault at all, but they would say, ‘Dad, we don’t want to eat like that because we will end up fat like you’. That hurts, and you ask, ‘How do I become a positive influence?’”

Cunningham lost two close mates before they reached 40; one to cancer, the other to motor neuron disease. Both would still be here if they had the opportunity, Cunningham says. They were simply dealt a shocking hand which they couldn’t do anything about. Cunningham felt he, too, was on track for a potential early death. The difference is, he had a choice he could make.

Cunningham knew he needed to do something, although he did struggle to see a way out. He tried on different occasions to make changes to his lifestyle, but would often take one step forward and then three back. Cunningham now concedes he tried to turn his life upside down all at once, and the dramatic changes often lasted a matter of weeks.

“I would set myself up to fail - it wasn’t sustainable. I tried to overhaul my life in the space of a few days.”

It was during a conversation with a friend that he started to take the thought of weight-loss surgery seriously. That friend had gone through the process. “All of the things he was saying that he was experiencing, the reasons why he got it done, it sounded like I was listening to myself. All of it rang true.”

“To see the change and fresh start he had, I thought, ‘I’ve got to seriously think about this’.”

Cunningham did some further research, and in November 2021 flew to Christchurch for a meeting with a surgeon and dietitian at a weight-loss clinic. By the end of that appointment, he was told gastric bypass surgery was the best option. He was also told that there was an opening for surgery in a month’s time if he wanted it. Reality started to hit. Cunningham had a decision to make.

On December 18, 2021, he underwent surgery. At the time, outside of his partner, he told no one what he was doing. He hid it by telling people he was getting a hernia operation. “Initially I thought, ‘I don’t want anybody to know about this. What are people going to say? What are people going to think about me if they know that I’ve cheated?’”

“I thought people would say, ‘You took the easy option with the weight-loss surgery’. That’s why I didn’t tell anyone.”

It was that Christmas, when the usual big spread was laid out, when he had to come clean to some of those close to him. “People thought I was weird eating yogurt on Christmas Day, because that’s all I could eat. People were hoeing into this massive Christmas feed, and I was having a sachet of yogurt.”

Essentially, Cunningham’s stomach has gone from being the size of a jug of beer that you’d get at a pub to the size of a walnut.

He lost 8kg in the week after surgery and has now lost 74kg in total since December 2021. He has gone from 172kg to 98kg in a remarkable transformation. Cunningham now spots a person loading a 5kg bag of potatoes into their shopping trolley and wonders how he once carried close to 15 of those bags on his frame.

“Two things; it’s changed my life, and it’s saved my life,” he says when reflecting.

The jeans Dayna Cunningham used to wear before losing 74kg.

As he started to tell people what he had done, there was some relief. He acknowledged he could not control what other people might think. His journey is his own journey, and that’s now what matters to him.

Cunningham says he was lucky to have supportive people close to him. He suggests that people who are going through the same thing find people that they can trust. “It’s often hard for them to understand how they can help, as they don’t know what they don’t know if they aren’t struggling with being big, or never have.”

“I’ve always had great supportive mates, and those guys and their families have been awesome once they knew what I had done. I’m very lucky to have those guys around me. And that’s another thing rugby or sport gives you - life-long connections and friendships.”

He says he had some special and amazing people come into his life before he had surgery - including his partner, Erin Roberts.

“While Erin was also never aware of what I was going through within myself, as I had never talked to her about it, they have been a huge support for me.

“The positive relationship and routines around food and exercise have been influential in my journey so far.

“I never spoke to them about it until I had made my decision because I never wanted anyone to feel like they had caused me to make that decision. But to feel like I had people around me that cared deeply, and I knew I could trust, was a huge thing for me.

“I know it wasn’t easy to see such a big transformation so quickly, but their selfless support is something I will always be grateful for and may never be able to repay.”

Dayna Cunningham with partner Erin.

Following the surgery, Cunningham turned to a psychologist to help get a better understanding of his relationship with food.

He admits he was an emotional eater - and still could be, if he let himself. He dealt with stress through foo, and says he would do a lot of his eating late at night. A marriage break-up added to the stress and, in turn, that late-night eating.

Cunningham has come to the realisation his eating stemmed from his childhood. Although he stresses he isn’t blaming anyone for that. He was brought up in a hard-working dairy-farming family. They would often eat together late at night when his father came in off the farm. It was a time when you only left the table once everything was eaten, Cunningham says. Those habits, he says, have stuck with him throughout his life.

While the weight-loss surgery has changed Cunnigham’s life, he points out it’s not a silver bullet. “If you go and get surgery and change nothing else, then you’ll end up big again.”

“It’s definitely not a silver bullet; you’ve got to make changes in your life. But it is a fresh start.”

Eating was previously an activity for Cunningham, without him having any consideration of what he was eating. His view of food has since changed - eating is not just an activity, but the act of obtaining is needed to fuel him throughout the day. He’s had to change some ingrained habits.

Cunningham used to wake up every night at the same time within a 10-minute window about 1am. He couldn’t get back to sleep, so would get up and eat something. “It wasn’t a routine I liked; it was a routine my brain was in.”

“That still carried on after surgery, when I would wake up. It was horrendous because I would lie in bed telling myself, ‘Stay in bed, stay in bed, stay in bed. If you get up, you are going to eat’.

“They are real battles. It’s just being conscious about that and knowing I’ve got to be very strong with myself.”

“For a fair while after surgery, I thought I had cheated and taken the easy option. But now being this far through the journey, surgery is the easy bit. Because you’ve got to do the best you can to make changes, and these changes need to be for the rest of my life.”

Cunningham says the role his dietitian and life coach played post-surgery has been massive for him. “Identifying and changing behaviours around why I gained weight in the first place was a big step in this journey.”

“[It] enabled me to learn sustainable habits and improved my relationship with food. Kendall, thank you!”

Cunningham feels like he’s got his life back. He doesn’t plan to become a regular long-distance runner, but enjoys being able to get out and go for a run.

In November, he will line up at the Queenstown Half-Marathon. It will be one month shy of two years since his gastric bypass surgery. “When I finish it, it’ll be a big moment for me. I’m actually worried about how I’ll react. That’s a massive milestone for me.”

“I don’t necessarily want to become a half-marathon runner, it’s just a box I would like to tick.”

Dayna Cunningham lost a remarkable 74kg.

Cunningham does have aspirations to further his rugby coaching and potentially coach fulltime one day. He has been heavily involved at a club and representative level in Southland and is building a strong coaching CV.

The former tight-head prop was an assistant coach with the Pirates-Old Boys club which won Southland’s Galbraith Shield this year. He has now taken over as head coach for the 2024 season.

There was a point when Cunningham pondered whether his size could hold him back in his coaching quest. Would he subconsciously be overlooked for roles because of his size?

“Does the size I am now positively impact my opportunities? Maybe it does.” He knows he is a better coach because of his journey. Not that that was the motivation behind getting surgery.

Cunningham says he used to “coach at a distance” because he felt he couldn’t move fast enough to be in good positions and coach. “I’d blow the whistle, and everyone would come for a chat because it was easier for everyone to come to me. Now I can run around the paddock.”

“Being able to run around the training paddock and give feedback on the move, you also notice more because you are closer to the action. It’s things that other people take for granted.”

It hasn’t just been a rollercoaster ride physically for Cunningham on the back of the dramatic weight-loss. He’s had to work his way through the mental challenges attached to such a massive change. Even down to the point where Cunningham - or ‘Bacon’ to most of his friends - wondered about losing his identity. He’d always been the biggest person in a room in the past.

“I hated being big, but it was part of my identity. If I wasn’t Big Bacs, then who am I? So, I had to get my head around that.”

Cunningham acknowledges weight-loss surgery won’t be the best approach for everyone. Although reflecting on his own journey, he believes more investment in the public health system - with regard to offering the procedures - could help ease the burden on many other areas of the health system.

“A mate of mine said to me - and I would be the same - ‘If I won Lotto, I’d pay for one person a year to get it done, knowing what it can do’.”

“I guess it’s like mental health - people don’t talk about it because of the stigma that goes with it. But the more people that talk about it, the more people will be happy to talk about it.

“Because when you are struggling about your size, and how I was feeling, how many people feel trapped and feel they can’t do anything? You move into that mental health space.”

“This is my journey, and the reasons I did it [are] for me, and my kids. I just didn’t want to be another young man dying.

“There is a way out for people, and surgery is not the only way out.”

This story was originally published on The Southland Tribune and republished with permission.