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Lessons from 100-lb weight loss: dignity, respect and love [USAToday.com]

 

I was yet to turn 40, and my body was already breaking down.

It had been a few months since I hurt my back carrying groceries. The injury would not heal, hampered greatly because I weighed close to 600 pounds.

I had ignored my morbid obesity for years — even after I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. I shrugged and took pills, but still refused to change my diet or embrace exercise.

That changed one day in February 2015, when I was reporting a column at Mercy Medical Center and had to stop from the pain. Sweat soaked my clothes. My heart hammered in my chest, despite the fact that I had taken only a few steps.

I looked so pained that my friend, Gregg Lagan, the Mercy spokesman, offered to get me a wheelchair.

And that was the moment. A wheelchair. I was 39 years old and needed a wheelchair because I was too fat to walk and do my job.

After I stopped panting, I called my doctor and made an appointment. It began a series of appointments with a nutritionist, physical therapist and lots of work with my psychiatrist and psychologist treating my ongoing struggles with chronic depression and anxiety disorder.

I decided to write about it on a whim, really, not out of any sense that people would care. In fact, I figured people would openly mock me in the comment forums, on Twitter and whatnot. That is the way of the social media age.

But something strange, wonderful and completely unanticipated — by me, at least — happened. People let me know this story, what was to become the popular Des Moines Register blog Making Weight, wasn’t just about me. This column may draw on my experiences, but many of the 1 million obese Iowans saw themselves in my writings. I’ve received thousands of emails, phone calls and letters from people cheering me or telling me their own struggles. Many wrote in to say they started their own journey because of what they read.



[For more of this story, written by Daniel P. Finney, go to http://www.usatoday.com/story/...t-and-love/84324174/]

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