Palomar UC San Diego Health Weight Management Center patient Hailey Decker could be on the cover of People Magazine’s “Half Their Size” edition. She has gone from a peak of 330 pounds at five foot 8 inches tall to her current weight of 160 pounds at age 27 in about two years. The tool that gave her the ability to lose 170 pounds was gastric sleeve surgery performed by Palomar UC San Diego Health surgeon, Ramin Sorkhi, MD, FACS.
“I’ve lost more than my best friend weighs,” Decker said proudly.
Decker says she had been overweight since she was a small child but didn’t let her excess weight stop her from living her life to the fullest. However, as she got older, her feet started to hurt all the time; she couldn’t fit on amusement park rides and in one of the defining moments of her weight loss journey, wasn’t allowed to zip line with her friends in Las Vegas because she weighed too much.
Fed up, she made a consultation appointment to pursue bariatric surgery but got cold feet and decided to try one last time to lose weight through diet and exercise. A year later she was even heavier and was about to lose her health insurance. She would be turning 26 and aging out of her parent’s health insurance coverage, so she decided to make an appointment with Dr. Sorkhi.
“I knew that if I didn’t do something to change my life and get my weight under control, it would never happen.”
She enrolled in the Palomar UC San Diego Health Weight Management Center support group, started exercising and within six months had surgery on September 3, 2019.
“From the get go it was amazing. The care I had at Palomar Hospital was amazing. The support I had from Florence (the Clinic Coordinator) and the support group was super helpful,” Decker said.
Now more than 21 months later Decker has achieved her ideal weight and is maintaining it. She is experiencing the benefits of living a healthy lifestyle, including working in a physically demanding job. She rattled off the things she can do now that she couldn’t before.
“My feet don’t hurt anymore. My knees don’t hurt. I can fit into a size small. I can walk for days. I can take my dog for walks. I did a pull up on my front porch for the first time. My life has changed so much for the better,” Decker beamed.
Maybe most important is Decker’s mental health. She says she doesn’t obsess over weight any more. She doesn’t weigh herself all the time. She doesn’t desire to binge eat. She says she loves how she looks in clothes. Part of her mental transformation has come from her support group and therapy, which she recommends for everyone who’s going through extreme weight loss.
“You can’t control the things around you as much as you learn to deal with them.”
Another piece of advice she gives to others is don’t put off surgery because of self-doubt. She said she delayed surgery because she didn’t think she could make the necessary lifestyle changes to keep the weight off. She was worried she’d gain it right back but one thing she learned in doing her research is that “everyone said they wished they’d done it sooner.”
Decker recently got engaged and is enjoying looking for wedding dresses. Her fiancée has also experienced extreme weight loss, losing more than 200 pounds, but without surgery, showing different people have success in different ways.
“Surgery was only a tool; I had to utilize it to (help me) make good choices.”