Health for Life - Summer 2017

Lily with her husband Kevin and children Madaline and Jett.

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hortly after her scale moved past 300 pounds, Lily Johnson looked in the mirror and told herself her life had to change. “I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin,” she recalled. Now, two years after bariatric sur- gery, she’s nearingher goal weight of 150 pounds and is busily recommending the approach that worked so well for her. Lily had weighed about 160 at the start of her first pregnancy. Her signif- icant weight gain was just water, her doctors told her, and it would be easy enough to shed. It wasn’t. She actually lost a few pounds during her second pregnancy. After the birth of her son, she’d hit the gym

five days a week and counted calories, but in hindsight, her eating habits were sending her on a dangerous spiral. One of the classic weight-loss strat- egies involves writing down everything a person eats – solid and liquid – during the course of a day. When Lily starting writing, she saw the problem. “It was an eye-opening experi- ence,” Lily recalled. “I saw why I wasn’t losing weight. Starbucks, sodas…. Some days I was consuming 8,000-12,000 calories, 4,000 in liquids,”Lily said. She slipped into what she described as a “slight depression” over her weight. She consulted her husband, her moth- er and her family doctor about courses of action. And she talked to Dr. Andrea

‘