By Lydia Morgan
“I’m too young for this shit,” was my dad’s first thought as he was rolled down to the ER, leaving my mother a wreck, tears streaming down her cheeks in the waiting room. He had just narrowly escaped a full-blown heart attack.
Growing up, my dad never really discriminated about what he ate. If it tasted good and was available, he would eat it. Nobody seemed to say anything about it, except, of course, the other kids who would pick on him and make fun of him for his size, but he never let it get to him. “I always got thick skin,” he said when the other children would tease his younger self.
Chad’s weight never really bothered him as a kid, but it all started catching up to him going into law school at 5’9” and 305 pounds. He knew his weight was not optimal and tried many different diets over many years. Some worked for a little while, but sometimes they were too extreme, and sometimes life just got in the way. But he never truly gave up because he knew how important it was for his health. He was even dieting up until his heart attack.
According to research published in the Gland Surgery Journal, obesity is a significant public health challenge worldwide and is inextricably linked to negative events that affect the heart or blood vessels. It is estimated that obesity accounts for 65–78% of cases of high blood pressure that have no single medical cause. My dad recognized this in theory, but he never thought anything would happen to him. He thought he had time to worry about his health later in life. In recent years, the rate of heart attacks in people under 40 has significantly increased. According to Northwestern Medicine, about one in five heart attacks occurs in people under 40, and this increase in younger people is related to the growing twin epidemics of diabetes and obesity.
Many believe that they are too young for anything serious to happen to them. My dad thought the same until he had a heart attack at 38 years old.
It started with difficulty catching his breath. My dad described these difficult breaths “like when you hold your breath in the water when you’re swimming, and you come up, and you get that first breath and kind of reset everything.” Breathing became more and more difficult as the days went by, but he went to work as usual. Then the chest pain began with an indescribable pressure weighing him down. It did not necessarily hurt, but it was more like a tightness similar to a rubber band around the chest. My mom questioned why he was breathing like that, and he tried to explain it away, but she had heard enough, declaring that he should go to the doctor. He kept clacking his keyboard, unwilling to leave his work unfinished. She would not take no for an answer and finally got him to leave and go to the doctor.
The journey began with a drive to the urgent care in a town about an hour’s drive away, which recommended he see a cardiologist, but they did not seem anxious to see him. My parents were dissatisfied and decided to see a different cardiologist how far away? in Plano, Texas.
The doctors in Plano took my dad’s situation much more seriously. They began running numerous tests, and after one of these tests, my dad noticed the technician furrow her brow as she looked at his results. She said she needed to speak to the doctor and rushed out of the room.
The next morning, my dad was on an operating table to place three stents, tiny, expandable mesh tubes that go inside your arteries to keep them open for blood to flow through, in his heart. The doctor said that it would feel like an enormous weight on his chest, and it would feel like he could not breathe when putting the stents in place. “It [felt] like an elephant,” my dad said.
So everything is good again, right? The procedure is done, and everything should be fine again. No, the heart attack was more like a serious wake-up call. The true battle was one that my dad had been fighting for most of his life: losing weight and keeping it off.
And so the never-ending weight loss journey reared its head once again, but this time, he could not fail. He said to me, “I wanted to make sure I was around for you guys. I wasn’t messing around, I’m around for the long haul.” But as many people know, weight loss can be incredibly difficult, no matter how determined you are. My dad broke some bad habits and formed good ones, but his progress was still stagnant.
He tried going back to what had worked for him before: slashing carbs from his diet, but this backfired horribly. He became so incredibly sick and dizzy that he could not get out of bed for three days. So he went with the tried-and-true classic of just eating less, but even before he started dieting, he never really felt full. He craved food constantly, and even after a full meal, he would not be able to stop thinking about food and could eat again just soon after. My dad just had an all-consuming, pervasive hunger that did not align with the simple mindset of burning more calories than you consume, which so many people trying to lose weight live by.
Due to media portrayals of obesity, many people see the condition as simply a lack of discipline and self-control. This perspective can lead to a feeling of derision towards people who are obese because it is seen as something they brought upon themselves. The first example of this behavior that comes to mind is Ogilvie’s disgusted attitude and negative comments towards an obese patient, Howard Knox, in a recent episode of “The Pitt”. When the paramedic states that she couldn’t get an IV, Ogilvie quietly remarks, “I wonder why.” This is just one instance of many distasteful remarks about the patient’s weight and lifestyle that are scattered throughout the entire encounter. This depiction made me realize that people who struggle with obesity are judged, humiliated, and taken advantage of at every turn, like my dad was.
Watching these scenes reminded me of all of the microaggressions my dad had to deal with from the other children teasing him when he was a kid, to having to pay extra for clothes that fit as an adult. My dad had to deal with all of this for most of his life without reprieve and with little hope for change, then, about four years after his heart attack, consisting of failed diets, illness, and a broken spirit, GLP-1s entered the market.
“Life-altering” was the exact phrase my dad used to describe how GLP-1s had impacted his weight loss journey. According to the Cleveland Clinic, GLP-1s replicate the effects of a hormone your body naturally makes to slow digestion and increase the feeling of fullness: two things that are very helpful when trying to lose weight. GLP-1s gave my dad control over what he ate and how much, which allowed him to do what he previously could not without becoming ill or instantly rebounding. He said the most consequential part of the GLP-1s was that he was finally able to just say no and instantly be able to stop eating. It altered the course of his entire life and made what seemed impossible for decades possible.
In April of 2024, he weighed 273 pounds, and the day I interviewed him, he weighed 173.9 pounds. He had lost 99.1 pounds over the course of just two years.
His entire lifestyle changed. He walks and jogs almost every morning, things that would have previously left him winded or aching from the stress on his joints. He doesn’t have to spend extra money on clothes and suits that fit him. Everyone from the outside looking in could see just how much his health and quality of life had improved. His doctor was so ecstatic at his progress and said that his blood pressure and cholesterol had decreased so much that he could stop taking his blood-thinning and blood pressure medication altogether if he chose to. Even though my dad does not have to worry very much about another heart attack, he has not stopped taking his medication. “I will take medicine, whatever it takes, for as long as I need to,” he said.