Amcarter51706
My Names Ashley. I am 19 years old and have been overweight for a lot of my life. I never really was big until I got to 6th grade. In 6th grade my parents split up and when that happened my first comfort was food. And it seemed to go on like that for entirely too long. At my biggest I weighed 376lbs. It was like I was in a cage and couldn’t get out. Life wasn’t worth living. In high school I wasn’t an outcast I had my share of friends but I never felt like I actually fit in with anyone. I was kind of the "passer by" person. I wasn’t involved in anything even though I wanted to be. I had the WORST self esteem. I hated who I was and how I looked. No matter what I did it just seemed to get worse. As I got bigger the want/need to get healthy diminished because I didn’t feel like I wanted to do anything. It was almost like I gave up on myself. My senior year of high school up until my surgery on May 17 I was the biggest I had ever been. Life was horrible. Walking up the stairs, trying to play with my nephew, hanging out with friends, meeting new people, from back aches to my ankles hurting, feeling out of place, like everyone was watching me, it was the worst year of my life. In the end of November early December of 2005, I decided that I wanted to look into having the surgery. I figured that life couldn’t get any worse unless I continued to gain weight, so it seemed to be what needed to be done. I had a lot of support from my family and friends to do whatever I felt was right. By February of 2006, I had finished all of my testing and was ready to get the surgery over with. On May 17, 2006, I had my surgery. Probably one of the scariest times of my life I wasn’t really aware of how big of a change this was going to make on my life. But I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. I am now almost 7 months out and I have lost almost 150lbs. I feel like an entirely different person. I can run upstairs, play with my nephew, walk without getting out of breath, breathe when I sleep without a machine, I have my life back.
