Because she had been trying unsuccessfully to lose weight for a long time, Dina Frank underwent gastric bypass surgery. She shows how she lives with it on YouTube – without sugar-coating it.
You have been uploading videos to YouTube for six years. You now have around 9,500 subscribers. How did you come up with the idea of opening a channel on the video platform?
Dina Frank: That was actually one of many painful attempts to somehow lose weight. I was also looking for a hobby. So I started uploading weight loss videos to YouTube. I thought public pressure would make me more likely to stick to the guidelines. Of course, that only worked for four weeks or so. But I just enjoyed making videos so much that I kept doing it.
In 2019 you decided to have a gastric bypass. How has this influenced your YouTube channel?
Frank: The focus of my channel became very nutrition-oriented again because that’s what people wanted to see. In the meantime, I try to offer opportunities for exchange on my channel. I used to desperately search for such platforms. That’s why I upload a Q&A video (Question and Answer) once a month. Because for people who eat a normal, healthy diet, what I eat seems totally unhealthy. Because of the gastric bypass, I have to make sure I eat a protein-rich diet. That means a lot of cheese, a lot of meat, a lot of fish. But little fruit, few vegetables and few carbohydrates. Even some nutritionists don’t understand this. That’s why it’s even more important for people who have had gastric bypass surgery to talk to each other.
So do your subscribers also have high expectations of your videos?
Frank: It is important to upload videos regularly. I get a lot of feedback and people demand that I deliver. But I always encourage people to give me feedback. I think constructive criticism is good and important because you learn a lot from it. Everyone is allowed to criticize, but not insult. Luckily I get relatively few hate comments. If I receive a message like this, it will be rigorously deleted. This harms the algorithm, but I simply don’t want to offer a platform for that.
Do comments like this bother you for a while or do they leave you cold?
Frank: That depends a lot. Of course, I try not to take it too much to heart. That should also be the goal. But of course you can never completely ignore it. Especially if the comment hits the mark for me. Everyone has their areas where they are sensitive. And when someone stranger allows themselves to make comments even though they don’t even know you – that really upsets me. It’s best to just stay friendly. Because that’s what annoys these people the most.
The more private things you share with the public, the more vulnerable you become. How do you decide what to share and what not?
Frank: I always ask myself if I would be embarrassed if my family, my friends, my employer or other people I care about saw this. And of course I would never give out personal information like my address or anything like that. I only show what the public sees anyway. I also wear a bikini in the pool, so I can do that in front of the camera too. But finding out these limits for myself was also a development.
How important is it to you that your subscriber count grows?
Frank: Of course I look at what topics work on my channel, i.e. what interests people. But it should also be my channel. Most of the videos I make are either about mountain tours, recipes or gastric bypass surgery. These are three very different areas and that is not good for the algorithm either. But I don’t care because it makes my channel more personal. Sometimes I still have creative blocks. Especially when I pre-produce videos. I have to do that sometimes when I know I won’t have much time soon. Then I start Googling and try out some wild recipes that I’ve never made before. That is of course a small risk. I can’t try the food at the end of the video and then say that it doesn’t taste good. (laughs)
Not only do you upload a video to YouTube twice a week, you also do a dual degree in administration at the same time. Isn’t that going to be too much?
Frank: Not too much, but it is a lot. When I come home from work in the afternoon, I haven’t done any exercise or shot or edited a video. But I’m also a person who gets bored easily. Also, the channel is a hobby, not a job. It wouldn’t be profitable as a job either. The hourly wage would be well below the minimum wage. But the greatest thing for me is when people write to me saying that I motivated them or helped them with my channel.
To person: Dina Frank is 29 years old and comes from the Kempten area. In her free time, Frank enjoys going to the mountains or filming and editing videos for her YouTube channel “PrimaDina”. She had gastric bypass surgery in 2019 and has lost 60 kilograms since then. She speaks openly about these and other topics in her videos.
2023-09-24 06:19:26
#Dina #Frank #Allgäu #hobby #YouTuber
