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All her life, LydiaMay Wylesky has been overweight. When she started kindergarten, she weighed 102 pounds. Over the years, she kept gaining weight and became so heavy that scales couldn’t measure her. While working in a scrap yard, she climbed on one of the industrial scales and learned she weighed 618 pounds.
“It was depressing,” the 39-year-old from Charleston, South Carolina, tells TODAY.com. “I did what many people do. I just tried to find things that would make me feel better … (which was) food.”
Wylesky knew she’d be a better mom to her four children if she lost weight and underwent gastric bypass surgery. Since then, she’s lost more than 400 pounds.
“I decided I can’t do this,” she says. “I can’t keep going on this rollercoaster ride.”
Weight gain
Wylesky says she was a big baby, weighing 10 pounds 7 ounces, and was a large child, too. By middle school, she weighed 218 pounds. In high school, she weighed 308 pounds.
“I just had bad habits in life, stress eating,” she says. “Food became my happiness.” By her mid-20s and second pregnancy, Wylesky weighed around 400 pounds and she continued to gain weight. Right before her fourth pregnancy, she tried to lose weight and was down to 552 pounds. Still, doctors felt concerned by how heavy she was even though she now weighed 518 pounds. Instead of congratulating her, her doctor chastised her.
He said: “‘What are you going to do? Because if you keep going the way you are, you’re going to be dead in five years and your kids are not going to have a mom,’” she recalls. “It just motivated me even more.”
Weight loss
To lose her first 100 pounds, Wylesky cut out energy drinks. She tapered her consumption by only taking one sip before tossing…
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