An overweight woman, Holly Figueroa O’Reilly, says she felt trapped in her body after trying to lose weight. She claims she tried “every known diet” and two bariatric surgeries that didn’t work long-term. Overweight all her life, she at one point reached 300 pounds.
However, when she lost some weight, she couldn’t work outside the home due to a family medical crisis. So, in 2022, she started a home bakery and chocolate shop. “It’s a lot of eating and tasting,” said O’Reilly, 52, who lives in Seattle. “And it’s not great when trying to lose weight.”
Consequently, her weight crept back up to 250 pounds. But today, O’Reilly weighs 145. When people ask her how she did it, she tells them she lifts heavy weights and eats a high-protein diet. However, O’Reilly claims that was not what made the difference.
She says it was Ozempic, the Type-2 diabetes drug that reduces appetite as a side effect. “Before I started taking Ozempic, my brain was constantly thinking about food,” O’Reilly says, describing what she went through. In addition, she said she could only think of her next meal. “It’s like your brain is always yelling at you, ‘Food, food, food,’ and my brain does not do that anymore.”
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As a child, O’Reilly noted she had always been bigger than other kids since preschool. However, she said she was especially heavy in middle and high school. In addition, O’Reilly said she grew up in a low-income family, so meat was scarce. Hence, cheap processed foods, like crackers and canned soups, helped fill the gap.
“There were four kids, so you ate whatever you could grab first,” she recalls. Unfortunately, O’Reilly noted her family had a history of diabetes. Her grandfather weighed about 400 pounds when he died from complications of Type-2 diabetes. Similarly, her father also developed Type-2 diabetes.
O’Reilly didn’t want the same thing to happen to her, so she started monitoring her weight. However, her weight kept creeping up after she gave birth to her first child when she was 23. Eventually, she ended up weighing 300 pounds in her 30s.
Consequently, O’Reilly had her first bariatric surgery, a gastric band, in 2006. The surgery helped her get down to about 135 pounds for a while. However, she claims a lot of scar tissue formed around it, and doctors removed it in 2012. Afterward, she performed a gastric sleeve, her second bariatric surgery.
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Like the first, that didn’t help for long, either. O’Reilly claims she lost 40 pounds but regained all of it “pretty fast.” From then on, she tried to manage her weight with a diet. However, in 2021, her husband had leukemia and almost died. It led to many visits to hospitals, doctors, and clinics.
“There was no way to cook,” O’Reilly recounts. “There was no time, nor did I have the energy to make a meal.” She added, “I just ate cafeteria food for months, maybe a year, and it wasn’t great.” “I just started gaining weight, and I didn’t care,” she concluded.
Consequently, her doctor told her she was “significantly overweight.” Concerned she’d be prediabetic at her next visit, her healthcare provider prescribed Ozempic. O’Reilly began taking the medication in the spring of 2023 and lost 105 pounds in less than a year.
In addition, she’s now at her goal weight of 145 pounds. Since reaching her goal weight, O’Reilly has been cutting down on using Ozempic. She claims she’s been self-injecting it every other week rather than weekly to see if she might not need it anymore. However, she says she hasn’t noticed a difference.
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