By Christian Messer

Jim Wilburn, a colleague and friend contacted me when he found out what our topic was for this issue. He volunteered to share his experience and story with all of you, in hopes that it may help someone else.

id Magazine: Thank you for volunteering for this interview…and from what I’ve learned weight really is on a individual basis, case by case situation. Like one person I know who’s struggled with their weight because of thyroid problems and other complications and hasn’t been able to lose the weight they they’ve wanted to…and they’re a fitness trainer.

Jim Wilburn: And that was the big thing with me that got me going on it was, I was 25 years old and my doctor put me on high blood pressure medicine and I was a 130-140 pounds overweight…my family’s history of stroke and heart disease is huge. Everybody in my family was obese. I know there’s genetics that play a role, but it’s habits too, growing up.

We ate a lot of processed foods, my mom wasn’t into fresh vegetables, she just had bags of frozen vegetables. There were the ceremonial trips to Costco and Price Club back in the day, and we roll out with two palettes full of food and stuff. Finally my doctor threatened to put me on blood pressure medicine before a couple of years before he actually did. I tried exercise, dieting and all of that, but finally I researched gastric by-pass and found that it worked.

The particular surgeon I went to in Los Angeles has performed it on celebrities, heads of state for various foreign nations. He pioneered this particular procedure that I had implemented. The reason I am able to maintain the weight loss i because I have a ring around the ouch that they created. A lot of doctors will just create a pouch, and the pouch will stretch in time.

Mine, they put a ring around it to restrict it from stretching. So it’s almost like I’ve got a band around it and so I have a 3oz. stomach now, where I used to have a 30oz. stomach. Quite a different size. Once that fills up, it tells your brain, “oh, I’m full,” so you eat half the food you used to eat.

I know at one time you mentioned your mother isn’t heavy, right?

She was…my mom and dad had the surgery. There’s ways to…I grew up, I was always the little fat kid. I grew up on diets. I was 16 and going to Jenny Craig, going once a week, eating their pre-packaged food. I did Weight Watchers, SlimFast, I did other diets. It usually in concert with my parents, they’d go on a diet and I’d do it with them. My brother was always skinny when we were kids. We always had to go buy him extra-slim jeans…and Sears was the only store to sell them, and I had the Husky Jeans. Now it’s the opposite. I’m smaller and he’s bigger because with time and age he’s let himself go and formed bad habits, once he got married and had kids. Habits change.

Sure, and stress…if you don’t have an outlet for stress.

So I decided that I wanted to be healthy. My biggest fear was having a heart attack or having a stroke either early in life or later in life. What could I do minimize those chances and live a healthier life? I mean I was 330 pounds at my heaviest. I was 285 pounds when I graduated high school…I was a big kid. At my biggest, I had a 54 inch waist and a 3X shirt. Now I have a 34 inch waist and depending on the shirt I wear a medium or a large.

So that was a big change. 20 inches of waist and five shirt sizes. That change happened over the course of 12 months. I had the surgery in July of 1999, and I was only out of work for two weeks.

Wow…that’s quick.

Yeah…and I had the open style, where they cut you between your sternum and belly-button. They cut an incision, went right through my abdominal muscles and so there was a little more down-time for that. My health insurance paid for it because I had ongoing joint issues in my knees from when I was a little kid. I went through physical therapy because of carrying extra weight, and I had high blood pressure… so those conditions are considered co-morbidities, considered morbid obesity. That’s what qualified me, because they considered it preventative care in their eyes and they took care of it. It was $20,000 back then. That was a day and a half in the hospital, I stayed in L.A. for a week.

A week later they have you drink a solution to do an upper G.I. to make sure there are no leaks. So they take X-rays to make sure there were no leaks, and everything is healing properly. There was a significant amount of care that was taken by the doctors too, after the surgery, so I knew it was a safe thing.

I think the biggest thing for me to wrap my mind around was that I could not eat a full plate of food. Right after the surgery, everything was swollen inside and all I could eat was a cup of soup…I got really depressed because I thought, “Is this all I’m ever going to be able to eat?” Once the swelling went down and things healed, I was able to eat a little bit more and little bit more. But even today, I can generally eat only half of a hamburger and 10 fries, and that’s it.

Any other restrictions?

I have to be selective about the food I eat. Different densities of food will fill me up faster. But then there’s things like popcorn…I can eat a medium size bucket of popcorn all by myself.

Then it’s all about your choices…

Absolutely. One of the great things about my surgeon is that he had support groups for his patients. That’s one thing that he did that not many surgeons do. Once a month in your town, in your city a group got together and talked about how this life changing thing affecting you, positively and negatively. In Reno we had a support group and that was really important.

I can see how that would be critical to the process.
I went from being huge, to now being socially acceptable by some standards, and I got attention I wasn’t used to. I got told when I was a kid or teenager, I was good looking for a fat guy. Or I was cute for a fat guy. At least that part hasn’t changed, the cute part!

I know you were married before, did your wife have the same issues?

No, she was skinny. I was 300 pounds when we got married. But I think it’s really interesting from my prospective to see how people approach you differently, how you’re included in things, you’re invited to parties. It’s just amazing how people treat you when you’re skinny as opposed to when you’re obese.

No kidding?

Absolutely. That was a big thing that I noticed and I’ve shred it with people that have gone through the same thing I’ve gone through with weight loss. It’s huge.

That’s another reason we’re doing this subject and shedding light on it is that people just don’t think about it. In doing some precursor research, I read some material on Jezebel.com by Kate Harding, she called herself Queen of the Fat-o-spehere. She posted some comments that people have posted on her site or columns, these comments were just vile and nasty! Awful stuff…and that’s where I learned the term Fat-Haters.

There’s a lot of health reasons… and as much as we’d like a simple answer or a right answer. It really is an individual thing. I know people, they couldn’t handle the surgery I had done. I had it done for my own reasons, it’s not the right solution for everybody. Nor is exercise or diets. It depends on your state of mind and your health. I was as healthy as a horse, aside form being morbidly obese and having high blood pressure. They’d do blood work on me and say, “OH you’re fine, your liver, your kidneys…everything’s all in good shape, it’s just that your heart’s gonna give up someday.”

The other thing, from a quality of life standpoint, when you’re carrying less weight, you have so much more physical ability. You’re more able to do more strenuous activities, whether it’s hiking or exercise. Little things like cleaning the house, we take for granted. You could be like, “Oh I’m going to clean the house…oh I’m so tired when I’m done,” I don’t feel tired when I’m done! The energy just builds up in me, where before it just wiped me out. Physical ability is one thing people don’t think about, they’re so focused on food.

I can enjoy the same foods that I used to enjoy before, it’s just that my body doesn’t absorb the fat. That’s because it bypasses the duodenum, which is the limb of the intestine just below the stomach. So the food doesn’t go through that any more. It goes from my esophagus into my intestine directly.

Your parents…and you, did you become successful then gain it back and then give up?

A mixture of everything. You know, human nature is that we’re lazy. It’s easier to give up than follow through sometimes. In so many diets you see results in the beginning…like these reality shows like Biggest Loser, I’ve seen a few episodes…you get to a point where you plateau, and you don’t or can’t lose any more weight for several weeks. It’s because your body starts to adjust to a different caloric intake and different activity level and what not. That’s where most people fall off the wagon, you get to that point and plateau with your weight loss…that can usually happen about three to four months into a diet.

Even though I’ve had this surgery, I still have to keep my activity level up. I could put on about 20 pounds…but I’m not going to put on 100 pounds. Now if I want to lose 20 pounds? I can lose that inside of two months, if I wanted to. If I put my mind to it and ate lots of fresh vegetables, lots of fiber, lots of protein, and a little fat for a month or two…I can drop weight like crazy. It’s amazing. Where as before, to drop the same amount of weight would take six months.

On the physical changes, another thing that you see is a change is your intimacy level in your relationships. That’s one of the big things that people noted in our support group was that their sex life got far more active when they lost weight, because they were more physically able to do different things and become more active for a longer period of time. And because they felt more attractive, that’s a huge thing! That’s a huge thing with obese people, because our society says, “Oh you’re fat and ugly.” that’s not necessarily true. I know people who are very, very attracted to obese people, physically and emotionally attracted to their personality.

But our society says, “You’re fat and ugly,” so when you go through this extreme weight loss and you just lost 100 pounds and ten pant sizes, you’re down to a level where you feel sexy again and you feel attractive.

More so if you have never known that or experienced it…

Right. I think the weight loss really helped me to come out of the closet because, while I loved my wife and I still talk to her to this day, we were married 13 years ago…I wanted to be with her because everybody thought I should be married to a woman and have children etc, etc. But myself deep down inside, I had insecurities and I had something that was secure. I had a relationship that was secure, with someone who loved me and I loved back.

As obese as I was, I knew I couldn’t go out and date whoever I wanted to date because not a lot of people are attracted to big people.
I put my heart and soul into the marriage for as long as I could…because I needed to come out of the marriage so I could come out of the closet. The weight loss really helped with that. Because I had seen the stereotypical gay community. The 20 inch waist with skin-tight boxer briefs and all that on every advertisement…you see that in the straight community too, they’re not all that different. But there’s still that image.