Obesity is on the rise in Canada, in men, women and children.
It’s a disease that many people have trouble battling and causes many to just give up, allowing their health to plummet. And unfortunately, it’s more common then we think.
According to Statistics Canada, two out of every three adults in Canada are overweight or obese. Khaliah Ali, daughter of retired boxer and three-time world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, was morbidly obese at 325 pounds.
For Ali, a lifetime of dieting and starving left her miserable, depressed and unable to walk up a flight of stairs without losing her breath.
“I actually had an incident, and as trivial as this may sound, I sat on a chair and broke it. And I thought ‘Oh my god,’” Ali tells Metro.
At the time, her son was very young and all Ali kept telling herself was, “You’ve got to get this off now before he’s old enough to realize what’s happening.’”
About a week later one of her eating buddies told Ali that they were at an amusement park and weren’t able to get on the ride because they couldn’t fit.
After all this, Ali realized she had to do something about her health. If not for her sake, for her son’s — “What would he do without a mother?”
When a friend told her about gastric banding, Ali called Dr. George Fielding and Dr. Christine Ren. They told her about the Laparoscopic Adjustable Gastric Banding procedure (the LAP-BAND System), which limits the amount your stomach can hold by placing an inflatable silicone band around the stomach and creating a smaller stomach that limits the amount of food you can consume at one time.
“I had my surgery live on the Today Show, and it took under than 20 minutes to be done … there are greater complications during a hysterectomy,” says Ali, who just released her book, Fighting Weight, in which she discusses her weight-loss journey.
“Keeping the weight off is completely effortless with the Lap-Band … but you must keep up with your adjustments, if you do not, it will be as if you’ve never had surgery and you will gain every precious pound back,” adds Ali.
