I have been heavy from a very young age and began dieting at the age of 15. I have been on every kind of diet. I used to win T-shirts and prizes because I had ordered so many diet books off the TV shopping channel. I guess I thought that having the book, even if I didn’t read it, might help me lose weight by osmosis or something. I got married when I was 17. I was fat, but my husband was with me through the thick and thin of all my dieting years. When my daughter, my youngest child,

I was born in Lagos, Nigeria. I loved food and was obsessed with it from a young age. I thought about where I could get food, who was serving what, who was eating what, the kind of food other people had, and how much food I could eat without my mother noticing. I would read books that discussed food, and would fantasize about the food in those books. I recall declaring that I would marry a particular type of protein because I loved it so much! I also recall one day at dinner when my mom served me a huge

My partner had an operation; it was routine. The last time he had surgery was over 30 years ago, before I came to program. It was for cancer and the chance of him living 5 years was 20%. My reaction to that time was to use food to numb myself. I gained over 25 pounds in the ten weeks he was recovering. Fast forward to today and the surgery was successful, however, the recovery was not. Fours days post-surgery he was rushed by ambulance back to the Emergency Department. He spent 13 hours in the ED before being admitted back