At 34 stone I felt like a giant blob. You feel like a non-person

I ate to fill the void of loneliness, but missed out on 20 years of living. Here’s how I dropped half my body weight and regained my life

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I wasn’t aware of my weight as it crept upwards. Gradually, I realised I couldn’t buy clothes in normal shops any more. This was in the mid-1980s and the maximum was about size 18. At the age of 20, I was bigger than that.
From age 12 I’d been putting on about a stone every year. By 34, I weighed 34 stone.
I felt a massive detachment from my body. My head felt like it was a balloon on a string, tethered to this giant whale blob. It felt like something I was encumbered with, not part of me.
I was a pariah. I was a failure of a human being. There’s a real social disgust about people that size. Nobody knows what to do with you. You feel like a non-person.
When I walked into a restaurant, they would see me coming and the maître d’ would fetch a chair without arms. On an aeroplane I’d need two seats.
When I was 34 and at my biggest, we went to the beach. I sat down and couldn’t get up. My knees had given way. I had to crawl to the sea like a slug to get myself onto my feet. I can’t describe the embarrassment I felt.
I was born in Sri Lanka in 1965. My dad was a tea taster and we lived in an apartment above the factory. Mum used to say that when I was a child I was always asking questions, and the nanny, who barely spoke English, would feed me to shut me up.
We came to England in 1970. It was a real shock. I hadn’t been to school, I couldn’t read, I was a wild child, always in my imagination, a tropical girl who wasn’t used to wearing shoes. My early memories of England were that it was cold and everything smelled of frozen apples.
Around my 10th birthday, Mum decided I was fat. She would weigh me in front of her friends and if I was too heavy I wouldn’t get fed. She took me to Weight Watchers. Once she put me on a diet of four apples per day. Even at that age, it was humiliating.
I wasn’t fat. I was a normal girl, but my mum got a bee in her bonnet about it. I think she wanted a trophy daughter but I was never going to be that.
My self-esteem was destroyed. I didn’t feel worthy of anyone or anything. There was certainly an emotional component to my eating. I comfort ate to fill up the void of loneliness I felt inside me.
The weird thing is I can’t say I was massively overeating, or that I was a binge eater, or I had an eating disorder or that I woke in the night and raided the fridge or that I ate all the wrong things.
I’ve always been a healthy eater, I never drank alcohol, I was never interested in sweet food, I’d never choose fish and chips over a salad. But I kept growing to the point I became morbidly obese.
I have always been creative and escaped into art and literature when I needed respite. It’s where I have found calm and peace and I’ve been able to draw on that as therapy.
I went to Goldsmiths and studied art. I met my husband when I was at college. Then we married and moved to New York in the 1990s. He was a political refugee from Iran who had come over in the revolution in 1979. He was damaged and I probably thought I could fix him.
I was already 18 stone when we met at 17. We never spoke about it. Understandably, he had his own PTSD about Iran and everything he’d left behind. Even when I was taking medication to improve my fertility because I was so obese, we never talked about it.
He was always distant from me, we were just a mismatch and we couldn’t see it, but my unhappiness meant I kept putting on weight. Our sex life was basically non-existent; I don’t blame him for that; who’d want to have sex with someone as fat as I was? I seemed to get pregnant (with my two children post-bariatric surgery) every time we had sex. My weight in stone matched my age, increasing every year.
I had my son when I was 32 stone. He was induced five weeks early. My blood pressure was so high it would have been dangerous to have a natural birth. They had a whole team at the hospital coming to see me because I was a freak being so fat and pregnant.
Having my son was a wake-up call. I had another human in the world who depended on me. I had to be there to protect him.
But still trying to lose 100kg, it’s so overwhelming. You look at a figure like that, the scale of what you need to do and it feels impossible.
What finally convinced me to do something was a car accident in 1999. My two-year-old son was in the back of the car and I fell asleep at the wheel, clipping the central reservation.
Sleep apnea is a side effect of obesity. Fat constricts your airway making it more likely to collapse when you’re asleep. You sleep poorly so you’re tired all the time.
I could have killed us both. There were huge trucks on that road. That was a tipping point. I knew I had to do something about myself but I had no idea where to begin.
Soon after the accident I had a fall because my knees were so weak from my weight so I was on crutches. I went to the doctor. He said: “I can’t let you leave until you promise you’ll go straight to the hospital.” He thought I had deep vein thrombosis, so it was urgent.
There, I met Dr David Lyons who took me through all the tests and scans. I was in a bad way (though I didn’t have DVT, thankfully). Dr Lyons was putting together a weight loss clinic and offered me the chance to be a guinea-pig. He said: “There’s a cute Lisa inside you.” It was the first time in my adult life I felt like someone could see me.
I had gastric bypass surgery in September 2000. It was a high risk procedure for someone of my size with co-medical issues. I left my son a long letter in case I didn’t make it. In some ways I didn’t: at one point I died on the operating table and had to be resuscitated. I was intubated the day after surgery when I lost vital signs and was in ICU for five days.
As soon as I left the hospital I began losing weight quickly. Within three months I’d lost 100kg. It was like I was a candle, melting away. I lost half my body weight.
One time, my roofer came round. I hadn’t seen him for a year and he said “oh my god, you’re absolutely gorgeous!” I was thrilled that someone had noticed me, because my husband didn’t say anything.
You feel great. You want to conquer the world. You want to catch up on all the stuff you haven’t done for years. I got pregnant with my second child quickly. I found out I was pregnant on the night of September 10 2001. My husband missed his normal train and went to Manhattan late; he watched the first tower collapse from Grand Central Station.
We moved back to England in January 2002 and during that year I had lost enough weight and become strong enough to have surgery to repair my knees. I gave birth to my second son in May while in a wheelchair and had bilateral knee replacement surgery (with an epidural) in September 2002 when I was able to go into hospital for a week. By Christmas I was walking again. Then I got pregnant again with my daughter. There was this whole life out there which I’d missed out on over the last 20 years because of my own stupidity.
I got a job, started seeing more of the real world, I started aqua-aerobics, going to the gym, but still, something wasn’t right so I started having psychotherapy. I had done all this work on myself, I had lost all this weight, I’d raised my kids, and yet I was so miserable.
I’d needed therapy my whole life. I needed to work out why I had been so self-destructive. I needed to see my self-esteem issues with a clear eye and understand why I’d become so fat and cared about myself so little to allow that to happen.
In retrospect, it’s funny. I’d taken my son for his check-up before he started school in 2001 and the doctor told me he’d been reading up about bariatric surgery in the journals – it was quite a new and exciting thing at the time. I remember him saying “a lot of papers say relationships break down after surgery like this, because you realise the weight wasn’t the problem, the relationship has been the problem which made you put weight on.”
That turned out to be true. At least partially. All these difficult, distant relationships in my life – first with my mother, then my husband had made me cease caring about myself. That detached me from caring about my body. I lost half my body weight and my ex-husband still didn’t want me.
In marriage counselling, the counsellor asked what attracted him to me in the first place. He said: “I thought she was the type of person with a personality which could open doors for me.” I sat there thinking “well, that’s it. You can’t bring back attraction that was never there”.
I filed for divorce in 2013 and faced a few personal challenges. That led to some weight gain. I’m now 114kg and using Mounjaro to lose it. I’m aiming to get down to 90kg, which was what I weighed in my teens. Mounjaro is a game-changer. The hormone that it releases makes you feel satisfied with your food.
I’ve also written two books about the benefits that art and literature have on wellbeing and improving mood and mental health when you feel trapped in yourself. I’ve built 1.3 million followers on social media. I’ve met a lot of people who were in my position and heard a lot of their stories, which has given me strength.
To all those people I say the same thing: you must fix it. Don’t beat yourself up about it. The more you feel guilty, the more you’ll eat to fill that guilt. But do it, you can’t fix what you don’t face. You must fix it because there’s a whole life out there and if you don’t do it you’ll miss out.
As told to Jack Rear
Calm Your Mind by Lisa Azarmi, @ravenous_butterflies, is published by Batsford in hardback at £16.99
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