The Tech3 rider crashed in the latter stages of FP2 in the season-opening Portuguese Grand Prix and suffered numerous fractures, including to his back and jaw, after hitting an unprotected tyre barrier.
Espargaro required surgery on the three vertebrae he broke in his back, and his jaw had to be wired shut for a month, forcing him onto a liquid diet.
Speaking in his first appearance since the crash during the Dutch GP weekend, Espargaro revealed that he was losing over two kilos of muscle weight each week while his jaw was wired closed and called this “the worst moment” of his recovery.
“The worst time was those four weeks after I exited the hospital. I had my mouth completely closed,” he said.
“For four weeks I couldn’t eat, so I was just drinking soup and losing 2.5 kilos per week. This is insane. I was losing two kilos of muscle, not fat, because I didn’t have fat at the beginning of the year.
“You have a lot of pain and everything, but you look into the mirror and say ‘I will need to recover all of this.
“How much work did I do to gain three kilos in the winter? How much work will I have to do to gain eight, nine kilos?’
“That was a bad feeling. I looked into the mirror and it was not my face, not my body. I didn’t recognise my body and that was hard.”
Source: Autosport