How I Lost Half My Body Weight

Weight loss surgery, exercise, and determination helped a WebMD user shape up.By William Streetman
WebMD Magazine - Feature

Four years ago I was 54 years old and weighed 404 pounds. Being overweight was something that sort of crept up on me. In my early 20s, I wasn’t fat -- I played softball and soccer with pickup teams and rode my bicycle.

Then I got married, had kids, and started a career. I was traveling, building my career, and overeating, over-drinking, not sleeping enough, and not taking care of myself. I didn’t exercise because I felt too heavy to do it, and those destructive cycles just took over.

Weight Loss Surgery for Obesity

The first weight loss surgery Garrick Pedersen underwent nearly killed him. Doctors placed an elastic band around Pedersen's stomach just below the esophagus to restrict how much food he could eat. Pedersen, who weighed close to 300 pounds, began to lose weight almost immediately after the surgery. "I was overjoyed," says Pedersen, 52, a lawyer in the San Francisco Bay area. "I felt better. I looked better." What's more, very small portions of food left him feeling full. Then came trouble...

Read the Weight Loss Surgery for Obesity article > >

I was so big that I couldn’t fit in theater seats, and I couldn’t attend sporting events. I was deathly afraid of asking for a seatbelt extender on an airplane, or going to a restaurant and getting stuck sitting at a booth. My cholesterol was high.

One Saturday, I talked to my business partner about how we needed to take better care of ourselves. We were both out of shape and overweight -- and I realized this was the 20th weekend in a row we were saying this. I thought to myself, "You either mean it or you don’t. Which is it?"

I had tried to lose weight for about 20 years. My sister had suggested gastric bypass, and I had a cousin who had the surgery. So I researched the different kinds of surgeries, met with a doctor at a weight-loss center, and everything just fell into place.

I had gastric bypass surgery on Oct. 4, 2010, a procedure called Roux-en-Y, where the doctor cut the top part of my stomach to make a small pouch and rerouted part of my small intestine.

I couldn’t eat like I did before. If I ate too fast or 1 ounce too much, I would throw up. I looked at gastric bypass as a tool that allowed me to eat to fuel my body and not for pleasure. I couldn’t eat six Big Macs anymore -- nor did I want to. Instead, I ate a lot of little meals throughout the day, focusing on the vitamins, minerals, and protein my body needed.

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