I was born in the late 70s and raised in the 80’s.

When obesity, especially in children, was uncommon.

I quickly became the largest person in the room.

And from the time I was an adolescent I dreamed of being an athlete.

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t run fast, I couldn’t move with ease, and I was too fat. And people let me know it.

So, I played the drums and channeled any negative energies and emotions into playing the most exquisite music. 

The sounds healed my pain, and the beat of the drum caressed my heart.

By high school I had been teased and ridiculed so much for my size that I came to realize if the world was going to be filled with critics and if I was expected to survive, I would need to overcome every single fear I ever would have. And the first was standing in front of people and reflecting in the mirror. I would be seen and watched. Eyes piercing with judgement. I was big, unattractive and quiet to those that didn’t know me. But smart, funny, beautiful and silly to those who did. I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be heard. I had something to say, and I wanted to overcome my fears of judgement.

Toward the end of my senior year of high school there was a competition to give the final graduation speech to the entire student body. I was so nervous and scared. I wrote the most magnificent piece of advice and went up against the most well-known students in the school. And…. I won. 

I still remember when they called my name, and I walked toward the stage to deliver my words of encouragement and someone in the front row yelled “mooooooooo”.

I reminded myself to breathe. I told myself you got this.

In that speech to my fellow classmates and faculty I told them that life was like a book, each chapter was a significant accomplishment one has achieved. I told the audience to make their book mean something because only they could provide the details in the remaining chapters. 

After high school I went on a low-fat diet and started to exercise. I was successful in losing a significant amount of weight, 122 pounds. But slowly I became unhealthy and picked up habits of drinking, smoking and became dependent on the next latest and greatest diet pill. 

I kept that weight off for 8 years and enrolled in college in hopes of developing an understanding of human behavior and received a degree in psychology from Portland State University. My last year of college I got pregnant with my son and gained all the weight back I had previously lost in my early 20’s. But it was different now and feeling a baby grow inside of me is to this day the most breathtaking experience I have ever felt in my body. My son taught me before he was ever born how to love my body unconditionally. I promised myself from that point on that I would never disrespect my body again with fad diets and unnecessary thoughts of self-sabotage. I told myself that my large arms were the same arms my great grandmother and mother had, and they gave great hugs. And my gigantic legs pushed a human being out of my body. 

The decade of my 30s I gained and lost the same weight repeatedly. I prayed to God that I would find an answer to my years of obesity because it didn’t make sense to me that I ate well and exercised but still had an issue keeping the weight off. And while I loved myself at every stage of my life, I was exhausted mentally, physically and emotionally from the constant battle with gravity, and it was getting increasingly more difficult to move. 

In 2017, I dislocated my knee riding a bike in Hawaii and no doctor wanted to work on me because of my morbid obesity, even though I had absolutely no comorbidities. I didn’t have diabetes, high blood pressure and was incredibly healthy, just heavy. For the first time in my life, I experienced utter devastation as a direct reflection of my weight. How could I have fought all these years to be healthy, to have a lean frame that could move as it should, to eat well and exercise daily, to lose hundreds of pounds time and time again and now my weight was going to leave me immobile? I wasn’t going down without a fight. 

I enrolled in the institute for integrative nutrition and learned about the history of obesity and our food system and received a degree to be a certified nutritional health coach. I started cutting out foods with ingredients that I had for years believed were healthy and lost 60 pounds in a few months. But the weight came back and some. 

Overworked and overwhelmed with life’s responsibilities I ended up at my heaviest weight in 2022, 312lbs. I dreaded going to the grocery store, walking up hills, getting out of bed. It had gotten so hard to move from the heaviness of my limbs despite my years and efforts to live a healthy lifestyle.  

And then…. God answered my prayer. I saw a post on the internet that said “does your body” look like this? You just may not be obese; you may have lipedema. And that… That was the answer! After all these years, I finally found it. 

I researched top medical professionals in the field and came across Dr. Thomas Wright @ Laser Vein and Liposuction center and two years after my diagnosis my 40-year-old dream of being an athlete has come true. 

This is me.