Lighter in Spirit and Body
Leissa Tasker shares her struggle with weight
Diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke — the health risks of obesity are legion. For Leissa Tasker, being seriously overweight also meant struggling with a deep depression.
Now 53, Tasker can’t remember a time when her size wasn’t an issue.
“I was a chubby toddler and kept my baby fat in childhood,” she recalls. “At certain times I may have been a little thinner than at others, but I always had excess weight on me.”
As a teen, she tried Weight Watchers and hypnosis and once managed to lose about 20 pounds. But unable to resist her mother’s gourmet cooking, she gained it right back. Her lowest adult weight — 132 pounds on her 5’4” frame, just in time for her wedding at age 22 — was accomplished only through near starvation.
“From there, it was pretty much a steady, slow gain until my mid-30s,” says Tasker. That was when she tried the diet drug combination known as Fen Phen and saw 35 pounds melt away. Success was short-lived, though. When the drug combo was linked to heart valve abnormalities, Tasker’s doctor took her off it, and the pounds came back.
Finally, in 2008, at her all-time high of 237, and under the additional weight of a depression she believed was at least in part, due to her inability to control her weight, Tasker attended an informational meeting at the U-M Adult Bariatric Surgery Program.
“I walked away thinking, ‘There’s no way in hell I can do that,’ because I’m such a food addict,” says Tasker, who does assembly work at Dexter Research Center by day and plies her trade of hairdressing two nights a week. But the more she thought about it, the more she felt she had to do it.
“I really was feeling as though I was so out of control I couldn’t change my behavior on my own, and that this was what I needed to do for myself. As it turned out, I was very right about that. The surgery gave me the jump start to change a lot of food behaviors that I honestly don’t think I would have otherwise. If my stomach was not able to cooperate, I don’t think my head would have been able to cooperate.”
More than a year after her gastric bypass surgery, lighter in both spirit and body (by 90 pounds), Tasker knows her love of food still could undermine her achievement if she reverts to her old ways of overeating and rationalizing every extra bite.
“There’s a ton of high-calorie, no-nutritional-value foods out there, and you can slowly gain every pound back if you’re not careful,” she says. So she sticks to a few favorite foods that satisfy cravings with few calories: low-fat cottage cheese with pears, filling soups, a handful of pretzels, and the occasional, carefully measured portion of high-quality ice cream.
And she’s discovered one more weight-control strategy.
“I study thin people,” Tasker says. “How they talk about food, how they eat, how they deal with going out. I don’t know whether they actually say to themselves, ‘I’m eating to live, not living to eat,’ but it certainly seems that they have more of that mentality.”
And day by day, so does she.