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Originally published October 21, 2024
Last updated October 21, 2024
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, Nancy Romero, 34, almost lost her diabetic father. The combined stress of her father’s medical situation, along with general pandemic stressors, caused her to turn to food for comfort.
Before she knew it, she’d gained almost 60 pounds.
“Walking was even a chore,” says Nancy, a Bakersfield resident. “I would constantly tell my husband that I felt like I was in someone else’s body because the mobility that I had was not mobility that I could recognize. It felt like I was over 60 years old.”
At her heaviest, she was 315 pounds with a body mass index (BMI) of 46, hyperlipidemic and prediabetic. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, any BMI over 40 is considered severely high; any over 35 is eligible for bariatric surgery at Keck Medicine of USC.
Nancy tried conventional dieting and GLP-1 weight-loss medications to no avail.
“It just dawned on me, if I want to be a good mother to my son and a good wife, this can’t continue on,” she says.
One of Nancy’s cousins had bariatric surgery, so she knew it was an option. But videos on TikTok were what really caused her to seriously consider it as an option for herself.
“I would see these people who talked about their successes and how, yes, it was hard for them, but they came out of it, and they don’t regret it,” Nancy says.
Watching videos of a woman who had bariatric surgery with Kamran Samakar, MD, a bariatric surgeon with Keck Medicine, motivated her to reach out to his team for an evaluation.
Dr. Samakar, who is the director of the USC Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery Program, met with her and enrolled her in a medically supervised weight-loss program, designed to instill patients with dietary education necessary for long-term success after surgery.
“She had obviously been trying for some time to lose weight through all the dietary and medical approaches to the treatment of obesity, so it was very reasonable for her to proceed with bariatric surgery at that point,” he says. “No other obesity treatment options work as well as bariatric surgery or have the durability or safety profile of bariatric surgery.”
Once her program was complete, Dr. Samakar performed a laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy at Keck Hospital of USC on March 1, 2023.
The surgery involves removing approximately 75% of the stomach, leaving behind a small, tubeshaped portion resembling a “sleeve,” which is about the size and shape of a banana.
The surgery aims to restrict the amount of food the stomach can hold, while also reducing the production of ghrelin, the hormone responsible for stimulating appetite.
These effects, according to Dr. Samakar, lead to significant and durable weight loss.
In terms of the pain, Nancy says her cesarean section during her son’s birth was worse. Almost two hours after surgery, she was up and walking.
The toughest part of recovery, she says, was not her stomach, but more her mind.
“I missed the sensation of chewing and the mental satisfaction of food,” she says. “It’s more of a mind game than anything physical.”
Gradually after surgery, the weight started coming off. Since then, she’s lost over 145 pounds and brought her BMI down to 26.
But, she says, it wasn’t the “easy way out” as some people might think. There were times the weight loss would plateau, and she would reach out to her Keck Medicine nutrition team for help.
“Almost to the tee, exactly what they said would work, and I would start losing weight again,” Nancy says.
“Unfortunately, obesity is not like a tumor, where once you remove it, it’s been excised and it’s gone,” Dr. Samakar says. “It’s a chronic disease that you must constantly stay vigilant of and treat with multiple approaches. Multimodal therapy — including bariatric surgery — is the optimal therapy for obesity as a chronic metabolic disease.”
Exercise is also a part of that multimodal therapy, although it plays a minor role compared to diet, which is the greatest factor in weight loss, according to Dr. Samakar.
But for Nancy, exercise helps treat the mental aspect of obesity.
She started taking spin classes to increase her physical activity a few months after her surgery.
“It’s funny because I started spin to lose weight,” Nancy says. “Now I do it more for my mental health, and because I enjoy it.”
Life still happens, but I’m definitely more confident in the person I am. Nancy Romero, patient, USC Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery Program
Life still happens, but I’m definitely more confident in the person I am.
In a little over a year, Nancy went from getting tired after going on a walk with her son to being a spin instructor who taught — and participated in — two to three classes a day.
Teaching spin allowed her to share her story and treatment journey and let others know that change is possible.
“We all start out somewhere, not knowing how to do something, but it doesn’t mean you can’t become good at it,” she says.
In addition to spin classes, Nancy also recently started an Instagram account to share her weight-loss journey with others.
But she still doesn’t consider herself cured.
“No one ever is. Life still happens, but I’m definitely more confident in the person I am,” she says.
Now if she has a bad day, instead of coping with food, “I ride it out,” she says.
Nancy remembers that some of the people on social media who influenced her to get bariatric surgery said that it was the best decision they ever made.
“Now I can echo the same,” she says.
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