By the time Alecia Patranella’s weight reached almost 300 pounds, everyday activities left her winded and in pain.
A visit to the dentist meant extra anxiety because it required climbing a flight of stairs. Her knees and back hurt. She felt depressed.
Her husband, Jason, also struggled with his own obesity and felt constantly exhausted. Just tying his shoes left him out of breath as his weight reached 245 pounds.
The couple, both 44, say they tried many diets and spent thousands of dollars on personal trainers and fitness classes, but nothing worked in the long term.
The breaking point came in 2022 when they went to an Astros baseball game in Houston, Texas — one of their favorite places to be. Alecia Patranella headed to the bathroom and found she had a hard time getting into the stall.
“It was humiliating and it really broke me,” she tells TODAY.com.
“When I walked out of there, I just knew I could not keep doing what I was doing. Something had to change.”
She started researching weight-loss surgery on the way home to Huntsville, Texas, and soon told her husband her mind was made up. He surprised her by signing up for the surgery himself.
“I knew we needed something. We needed a swift kick in the behind, I guess you could say,” Jason Patranella tells TODAY.com.
A year after they both underwent a sleeve gastrectomy performed by a bariatric surgeon at Memorial Hermann The Woodlands Medical Center in Texas, the couple has lost 190 pounds together.
In November, Alecia Patranella celebrated that she weighs less than her husband for the first time in 17 years.
Here’s what they want others to know about their weight-loss journey, why surgery is not “an easy way out” and how their mindset about food has completely changed:
Weight gain
When the Patranellas got married in 2005, she went undiagnosed with an underactive thyroid and PCOS for about a year, leading her to…
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