Before: 320 lbs.
After: 147 lbs.
Program Used Her own diet and workout regime

In December 2000, Mary Jane Medlock did something she had been dreading.

She flew home for Christmas. It wasn’t that Mary Jane, then 43, didn’t get along with her large Italian-American family. She adored them. It was flying she hated. At 320 lbs. and 5 feet 3 inches, Mary Jane had to board the plane sideways; it was the only way she could fit down the aisle. In fact, she was so embarrassed by her size, she hadn’t seen her family for two years.

On the plane, she needed a seat-belt extender — “I could have used two, but I was too ashamed to ask for another one” — and her arms and legs spilled onto the next seat. (Her husband, Jon, couldn’t get off work, so she was traveling alone.) “I prayed,” she recalls, “please, please, don’t let anybody sit next to me.” But a slender man made his way to her row. He looked at her with disgust, and then loudly demanded to have his seat changed. Throughout the flight from Dallas to New York City, Mary Jane wept.

As it turns out, that humiliating flight may have saved her life. Mary Jane’s health had been steadily deteriorating since March 1995, when she brought herself and her secretarial-services business from the San Diego beach town where she had been living to Waxahachie, Tex., to marry Jon Medlock. On her first morning in her new home, she opened her front door and discovered her porch swarming with crickets. “Right then and there,” she says, “I started getting depressed.”

Seeking Solace in Food

Without friends or family nearby, Mary Jane turned to food for comfort, gorging on high-fat local fare like chicken-fried steaks. By the end of April, she had gained 20 lbs. Six months later, it was not unusual for her to eat an entire pizza pie by herself on the nights her husband worked late at the Georgia-Pacific Paper Company.

By this point, she weighed 220 lbs.; a year later, she was up to 320. “I used to sit on the couch and imagine that I had a zipper that started at the top of my head and went all the way down to the bottom of my toes,” she says. “I’d think if I could just unzip that zipper and walk out, I’d have my life back.”

Jon also found himself missing the old Mary Jane. “We used to love going to blues bars, and we’d be the only ones on the dance floor,” he says. “But once she started gaining weight, she got depressed. She didn’t want to do anything, and the more depressed she got, the less she’d want to do.” When Mary Jane returned from that trip, she phoned her doctor. “I told him, ‘We have to do something. I don’t want to die,’” she recalls.

She was approved for gastric bypass surgery, but grew panicky at the prospect of the procedure. On the other hand, she had tried diets — 50 in all! — and nothing had worked. When her doctor suggested a supervised meal-replacement program, she went for it. By the end of the first week, Mary Jane lost 16 lbs. and felt her energy level rising.

Another Chance at Life

Six weeks into the new diet, Mary Jane began taking water aerobics and toning classes. Later, she added kickboxing. In a little more than a year, she had lost 172 lbs. She created an “instead list” of things to do when she felt herself in the grip of a craving: Get a manicure, or play solitaire online. And she started cooking meals that were, as she says, “big on taste,” but not on calories — adding, say, a pinch of blue cheese rather than gobs of flavorless cheese to a salad.

By the spring of 2002, she was down to 147 lbs. and a size 10. Not only was she no longer a sofa spud (“I used to have to rock myself back and forth just to get off the couch”), but she had also become a certified fitness instructor.

These days, Mary Jane teaches kickboxing and toning classes that she modifies for her overweight students. “Anyone who has been morbidly obese knows that maintaining weight loss means battling the demons every day,” she says. “I want to help show people it’s a fight they can keep winning.”
Mary Jane’s biggest fan, Jon, can barely contain his pride. “The more weight she lost, the more excited she became, and the more excited she was, the more weight she’d lose,” he says. “Her confidence returned, and I recognized my wife again.”

The first December after she lost all the weight, Jon’s company had a big Christmas party. “All the top people from the company were there,” he recalls. “Mary Jane got out on the dance floor for the first time in years, and I could see the shine in her face and the gleam in her eyes. I still get emotional remembering that night — my wife was back.”