Mine kept going, and the part that came after was harder than anything before it.

Sophomore year of college, I was struggling with depression. One morning before a 9am class I was in the kitchen with the television on, watching a little girl, age three or four, describe finding her mother unresponsive and saving her life by dialing 911.

Something I had buried came up without warning. It was something we didn’t talk about, and to me that meant it was handled.

I broke down right there in the kitchen. And food became my best friend that day. Oreo cookies and Frosted Flakes were daily staples in my diet.

That is where the weight actually began. Not with appetite. Not with discipline.

I struggle through college and the early phase of my Technology career. In 1999, I got approved for weight loss surgery, picked a date, and backed out a week before. I told myself I wasn’t ready and that I’d try one more time on my own first.

Well, I tried. It didn’t work, because I never made it a lifestyle.

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Summer 2009, we took a family trip to DC. When the photos came back there was one of me in a blue dress, holding my son’s hand, my stepdaughters beside me. Although I felt the physical toll of the weight daily, to see it in color was something I wasn’t prepared for. I didn’t recognize that woman.

The first thirty minutes of every day hurt. My shoes were worn out from the inside. I had sleep apnea and didn’t know it. I clearly remember a plastic chair during a work lunch that would not hold my 399-pound body.

For the first time I felt embarrassed to be seen.

December that same year, I had weight loss surgery. The duodenal switch, which at the time was the most aggressive procedure available.

The night before, I wrote a letter to my family in case I didn’t wake up. And I made a promise to God: bring me through this and I’ll help other women.

I still have that letter. A reminder of the commitment I made.

The first two years post-op are what they call the sweet spot. That is the most optimal window to lose the majority of weight, and everybody tells you about those two years. I went from 384 pounds the day of surgery down to 234.

And then it stopped.

234 to 211 was all me. Lifting, eating differently, on my own, because I had looked in the mirror and understood that I was smaller but I was a smaller, bigger version of the same body.

Then I hired a trainer. Casey. She taught me about macros. Fats, carbohydrates, proteins, and how they actually work. Real programming. I was eating 2,200 calories a day, the majority of it from carbs, which is the opposite of everything I had been told, and I got down to 164 pounds right before COVID.

The lowest I have ever been.

Then COVID took the gym.

On a Thursday evening in April 2022 after family bible study, my husband of 13 years, partner of 15, told me he didn’t want to be married anymore.

That Saturday I bought a new mattress and an entire new wardrobe. Because I knew that if I took care of how I looked, even though I was a wreck on the inside, I wouldn’t look like what I was going through.

And it worked. People kept saying to me, you don’t look like a woman going through a divorce.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to look like.

What I was doing was grieving. The marriage, the family, the whole shape of a life. I stopped training. I stopped cooking for myself. I stopped doing any of the things that had gotten me there, and I did not have the energy to care.

Menopause showed up in the middle of it.

My joints ached so badly I couldn’t come down the stairs without bending over. I was hot all the time. The brain fog was so thick I couldn’t hold a thought, and the ADHD I had spent an entire career masking stopped being maskable.

Then I lost my job.

220 pounds by November 2024.

I didn’t spiral.

Forty pounds back on, marriage gone, body unrecognizable to me again, and I was not angry with myself. I’d look at old pictures sometimes and think, wow, look how I used to look. Then I’d go on with my day.

Because by then I understood where the eating came from. I had done the therapy. I had done the years. And surgery never touched any of that, right? Surgery changes your stomach. It does not fix your mind. Whatever drove you to food is sitting right there when you wake up from anesthesia.

When I get ready to lose it, I told myself, I’ll lose it.

Then I got serious. I found a menopause clinic that ran real bloodwork instead of guessing. Estrogen. Progesterone. Then testosterone. A local trainer to get me back under a barbell. By April 2025 I was at 160.

And I still didn’t feel like myself. My energy was low. I wanted my muscle back.

So I found a nurse practitioner here in Maryland who ran a twenty-page blood panel, looked at what I was taking, and told me the protocol was sub-optimal. Nobody had said that to me before.

She adjusted everything. I feel like a whole different woman.

I’m currently sitting at 149. Sixteen years out. Still lifting. Still building. Still thriving.

That is what this newsletter is about. The years after. What changes in a body over a decade, what the research actually says about muscle and medication and menopause, and how to read your own numbers instead of drowning in them.

If you are somewhere in the years after, with a body that stopped responding and nobody left to ask, you are not the only one.

Next week: why your scale is lying to you, and the four things worth measuring instead.