Article: Gaining a Life…

I had to share this inspirational story. If you’ve already heard about it, read it again! 🙂

Gaining a life

Julie Hall got off the couch, lost more than 200 pounds and took a hike with Oprah, but she’s not through yet

By Karen Garloch
Knight Ridder Newspapers

Julie Hall used to weigh 422 pounds. Two and a half years ago, the Charlotte, N.C., native couldn’t fit inside a restroom stall or a restaurant booth. She barely left the couch, and she was miserable.

So in January, when she saw an Oprah show featuring several morbidly obese women, she was amazed to hear them say they were happy being fat.

Hall typed a letter to Oprah, telling how she’d lost 242 pounds and how, last August, after 43 years of mostly sedentary life, she had walked a half-marathon in Alaska.

“I am here to tell you that there is life after 400 pounds,” Hall wrote. “I did not have surgery to staple my stomach, nor did I take drugs to lose the weight. I simply started to take steps, one at a time, to make permanent lifestyle changes.”

Oprah’s producers liked the letter, and asked Hall to be on the show. With only six hours’ notice, she flew to Los Angeles for a free makeover and shopping spree and a mountain hike with Oprah. Then she flew to Chicago for another makeover and shopping spree before taping “Incredible Weight Loss Followups.”

A week after her eight-day Oprah whirlwind, Hall watched the show with family and friends at the YMCA, where she exercises. “I still cannot believe it,” Hall said, flipping through photos of her trip and showing off new shoes and clothes, including a $1,400 Italian leather jacket. “Not only did I get to hike up a mountain, but my guide was Oprah Winfrey. I got to hang out with her and be girls.”

Now Hall weighs 169. Getting there wasn’t easy, but she says it was worth the struggle. How much more energy does she have? “I can’t even tell you how much more. It’s like being reborn.”

Getting up, getting going

As a teen-ager, Hall weighed 250 pounds. But she deflected teasing with jokes, made lots of friends and was Miss Personality in 10th grade. As an adult, Hall tried lots of diets but kept gaining.

Then, in 1984, melanoma was diagnosed in her left leg. Surgery cured the cancer, but more medical problems followed. In 1993, she developed a pulmonary embolism. Then back problems led to two spine surgeries, in 1995 and 1997. In those years, she was in a lot of pain and could barely walk. Her weight rose to 370.

In 1998, she developed lymphedema, a condition that caused her legs to swell. She spent a month in the hospital, and her weight reached 422. “I was just a mess,” Hall said. Finally, in the spring of 2000, she’d had enough. “I truly felt the Lord had more for me than to sit on a couch at 420.”

With help from a counselor, she faced the shame of having been sexually abused as a child by a neighbor. She realized it was the root of her eating problem. “You can numb your emotions with food, and I did.” Then, in 2001, she heard Oprah’s celebrity psychologist, Dr. Phil, admonish another obese woman on TV. “He said, ‘You have to work at maintaining a 400-pound body.’ And he was right,” Hall said. “I thought, ‘It’s time to get the weight off.’ “

She joined Weight Watchers.

“They literally taught me how to eat,” Hall said. “Who knew that a serving is a half a cup?”

Walking in water

About the same time, she started exercising at the YMCA. She was too big to use any of the machines, so she chose water walking in the pool.

“I was so embarrassed and I was so big,” said Hall, who wore a size-60 bathing suit. “They had to hook two of the flotation belts together to go around me.”

She walked the pool two days a week, with her mother. “It seemed like a very long, long road,” Hall said. But she credits her family, friends and faith for keeping her going.

“I really am a strong woman of faith, and that has been the crux of my success. I really believe that God healed the inside, and then the outside came.”

After Hall lost 100 pounds, a friend paid for a personal trainer, and Hall worked out on a treadmill and weight machines. “He kicked my butt,” Hall said. “But he knocked off 80 pounds.”

Annie Keith, the Harris, N.C., Y’s senior membership marketing director, noticed Hall in the pool during those first days. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, gosh, that poor woman. Good for her.’ It’s hard to come in and be that heavy in front of people.”

The two women became friends, but they didn’t see each other for months while the Harris Y’s pool was being renovated. When Hall returned, Keith didn’t recognize her at first.

“I looked at her and burst out in tears. She just looked so different. I had never seen her in anything but a muumuulike dress. Here she was wearing workout clothes. She had on makeup. She had her hair done and her nails done. I just couldn’t believe it.”

Still on track

Last summer, when Hall had reached about 230 pounds, she set a new goal. Still taking medicine for the pain in her back, she walked the half-marathon, 13.1 miles.

All the weight loss had left Hall with “skin that you can’t get rid of exercising.” She had plastic surgery to remove excess skin from her abdomen. Another surgery this summer did the same for her arms and upper body, eyelids, chin and neck, and she had her nose reshaped. Excess skin will be removed from her thighs in another surgery yet to be scheduled.

And she’s still losing weight.

“The last 25 pounds are stuck like glue on my behind,” she says, but she’s training for a marathon and more weight is coming off all the time.

Meeting Oprah

Three months after sending her letter, Hall got a call from one of Oprah’s producers. Over the next two days, she responded to their requests to send in “before” and “after” pictures and to make a list of her dreams.

Two days later, she got the final call giving her six hours’ notice to catch a plane to Los Angeles. Producers picked her up in a limousine and drove her to Beverly Hills, where cameras filmed her makeover and her shopping spree.

That night, she rode in the limo to the San Ysidro Ranch, where rooms overlooking the Pacific Ocean can go for $4,700 a night. The next morning, before the mountain hike that Hall had asked for in her list of dreams, a stylist spent two hours doing her hair and makeup. When she opened the door to leave, there stood Oprah.

“No way!” screamed Hall, who hadn’t been told Winfrey was coming along on the two-hour hike.

For the taping, Hall’s parents, John and Gayle Hall, and a friend flew to Chicago to watch.

Hall’s mother said she looked “like a million bucks” in her new black leather jacket by Marina Rinaldi (“Oprah’s favorite store”), black silk pants, a hot pink shell and strappy black Italian sandals by Taryn Rose.

Nervously, she walked onstage, where Oprah “held my hand the whole time.”

Hall, who just turned 44, hopes others who watched the show will learn from her journey. “Now I am in a position to reach back to help those who felt like I did,” she said. “You CAN do it.”

Staff writer Betsy Friauf contributed to this report.
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