Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition: “Sally” Recap
In this week’s episode we meet Sally, a forty-five year old mom who is approximately 200 pounds overweight. Sally wasn’t always overweight, as a child she always very active and spent most of her time swimming well up into her early twenties, but an accident change all of that. She fell down the stairs and broke her leg so badly that she needed five surgeries and therapy to learn how to walk again. From this excruciating hardship and being completely drained emotionally and physically, Sally started to eat and gain weight. She replaced her love for swimming with an addiction to food and soda drinks. Sally knows that she is overweight and desperately needs help so not only can she live a long and healthy life for her son and husband, but live the life she always deserved; enter Chris Powel!
Chris surprises Sally at work and whisks her away to the California Health and Longevity Institute to run a series of medical testing to see how badly Sally weight has affected her health and to begin their first week of boot camp. First, Chris has to weight Sally and in order to do so with the super obese Chris has to a truck scale in order to do so. At five feet and nine inches, Sally comes in at 335 pounds. Her goal for this year is to be able to surf again and to do so Sally is going to have to work her butt off, but luckily she will have Chris by her side for the next 365 days.
For Phase One, Chris will live with Sally for the next three months to help her lose a goal of eighty-five pounds within the next ninety days. Her incentive for this phase is a full makeover and shopping spree if she reaches this goal. Over the next weeks Sally struggle with not only losing weight, but of the fear of hurting her knee and leg again. Chris helps Sally overcome her fears and when the three month weigh in finally comes around Sally unfortunately loses seventy-seven pounds, just eight pounds shy of meeting her goal. Sally of course is understandably upset, but losing seventy-seven pounds is a victory within itself, something that she has never been able to do before.
With the next Phase about to begin, Chris says goodbye to Sally, leaving the next months her responsibility to lose the weight. Chris has given all the tools and techniques she needs to succeed, but it is up to Sally to implement them. The goal for this phase is to lose fifty pounds. For Sally, this should be a breeze for her with the incentive of a pro-surfing lesson on the line and since she didn’t get her last incentive she is definitely determined to reach this goal. The thing is that sometimes the bad habits that made you gain the weight in the first due return, especially in this case for Sally. She does work out, but as time goes on the intensity at which she started, begins to slowly fade away and the old eating habits of drinking large of amounts of soda return. Chris watches all these events unfold via his webcam and decides to fly out to see what is going on with client.
Chris decides to give Sally an impromptu weigh in to see where Sally is at. In the past couple of weeks she has actually gained weight. Sally doesn’t know how gained the weight back, but Chris exactly knows what happened and more importantly where, the kitchen. There he finds tons of junk food and soda, which Sally claims to be her husband. Whether the snacks are hers or not is not the case. The simple matter of fact is that Sally gained the weight back due to her eating habits and lack of exercise. Sally reveals that she is having a hard time finding people to talk to, especially those that can relate what she is going through. Chris offers to not only find someone that she can talk to, but help her get back on track.
Chris is able to find Sally a therapist, to whom Sally can talk to. Sally opens quite a bit about her childhood and understands that even as a child she learned to numb her emotions, whether it was swimming as a young adult or overeating as an older woman. The sessions are a tremendous benefit to Sally and Chris ends up setting up a meeting with Sally’s family to help them understand that they are Sally’s support system. Thanks to this new added support system Sally quickly gets back on track, exercising up to four hours a day! As the six month weigh in approaches, Chris flies out Sally and her family to Hawaii. At the weigh in, Sally lost a total of twenty pounds this phase. Something is still amiss and Chris is determined to figure out what that is and what it amounts to is a lot of excuses. Sally has an excuse for everything. She rationalizes her behavior so when she doesn’t meet a goal, she can put the blame on something else, instead of on herself.
Even though Sally didn’t meet her second phase goal, Chris still offers her the chance of being able to surf, which she hastily accepts. Her pro surf lesson is taught by none other than big-wave surf king Laird Hamilton. Sally does an amazing job and her lesson with Laird, really helps boost her self-esteem and confidence way up. However, Chris still knows that Sally has a hard time sticking to the regiment that is needed for her to lose weight, so he invites Sally to stay with him and his wife Heidi, who also happens to a fitness trainer, for the next two weeks. During these two weeks, it becomes evident that Sally really doesn’t push herself. She doesn’t quite know what her intensity should be after losing a large amount of weight. The same intensity level is not going to be the same as when she started, because she is now more conditioned, so she needs to push harder and up the level of intensity in order to reach the same amount of results as when she first started.
Yet, when Chris and Heidi try to help her attain this new level of hard work, she continues to sabotage herself. She keeps making the excuses to stop exercising or not to give it her all that she is causing more damage to herself and the progress she has made over the past few months. Heidi and Chris don’t let her give up and she gets through her tough moments despite breakdowns and has a major breakthrough. She is able to comprehend what she has been doing to herself and why she needs to stop making the excuse and push through. So after the two weeks are up she flies back home to continue losing weight in what’s left of her phase three allotted time. As a video montage is shown it is evident that she still has that same mentality of not pushing herself to her limit. When the nine month weigh in finally arrives, there really isn’t a dramatic sense of weight loss. She looks nearly the same before she stayed with Chris, it doesn’t seem like she was able to make the forty percent weight loss mark.
As predicted she doesn’t meet her goal yet again only losing thirty seven percent of what was need in her order for her to receive skin removal surgery and breast reduction. Even though she was not a candidate for surgery now, she can still be reevaluated at the end of the year if she loses more than a grand total of 200 hundred pounds. Hopefully, this will be a large of enough incentive for her to keep losing weight.
Fast forward to the final weigh in and Sally looks amazing. She looks so much more happier and radiant. Now in order to receive the surgery she needs, Sally had to have lost nearly 200 pounds. So when she steps on the scale and reads a grand total weight loss of 197 pounds she is ecstatic! This means she can finally get the surgery that she needs and with the help of a $50,000 gift card to Walmart eating healthy and maintaining her weight will be one less thing she needs to worry about to keep her going strong for years to come!
Originally posted on Affairs Magazine
