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When a doctor told Michael Hearn of Atlanta, Ga., that he should consider weight-loss surgery, he balked: “I was very much against weight-loss surgery at first. I felt like it was surrendering, and I didn’t want to surgically alter myself,” he tells TODAY.com.
“I thought, ‘I’ll never be able to have a hamburger again. I’ll never be able to have a plate of spaghetti. And I’ll always have the shame of thinking I quit trying, and I had to surgically keep myself from being fat,’” he says.
But Hearn weighed 450 pounds, and his weight was affecting his health and his life. He had high blood pressure, which runs in his family, and prediabetes.
His main concern was that he couldn’t keep doing things he had taken for granted. “You start to lose independence. My dad was very heavy, and for the last several years of his life, he was miserable because he needed help getting around, getting off the sofa and doing things most people could do. He always said he would do something about his weight when he got older, but it caught up with him. I didn’t want to be like that,” he says.
Yet Hearn, now 60, saw himself headed down the same path: “It took everything I had in me to go to a Georgia Tech game with my son — to ride the train, walk up to our seats in the stadium and reverse the process at the end. It was awful, because I wanted to be a big part of my son’s life, and I wanted to be active.”
Once, when he was traveling, he had to try five different rental cars before he found one he could fit in: “It was humiliating. I still had to put a towel between my pants and the steering wheel because they were rubbing against each other.”
He couldn’t be spontaneous, because he didn’t know if he’d find a bathroom that could accommodate him. “I had to be on the lookout for toilets. You can’t just go…
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