Betty Lou Lovato poses for a portrait while sitting on the bike she uses to get around town and to exercise while in the backyard of her Centralia home on Monday afternoon.
After struggling with her weight for the majority of her life, one Centralia woman has been able to lose 185 pounds in five years, providing her with a new sense of energy and confidence.
Betty Lou Lovato, 71, of Centralia, came to the conclusion a few years ago that she’d had enough of being overweight. At 5-foot-3, Lovato weighed 377 pounds and said she needed to make a difference.
“It was just getting so out of hand,” she said. “It was really difficult to get around and there was so many things I couldn’t do.”
She said her life was horrible and she was constantly hungry. Even after eating a full meal, she would soon after experience pangs of hunger.
Her struggles with weight stretch far back into her childhood. Her kindergarten chart included a card on which a teacher wrote “too fat.”
“I had it all my life; I lost weight before, but then regained it,” she said.
In the seventh grade her mother put her on a clinic diet and sent her to school every day with a mixture of canned milk and vegetable oil. At the time it was believed the method would help her lose weight. In the end, though, it did not help.
“It’s just there was so little information a long time ago and they may find things in the future that makes the information we have now ridiculous,” she said.
Lovato joined Weight Watchers to start her weight loss journey. The program offered her a scholarship at the time with the requirement that she had to lose a certain amount of weight each week. At first, her progress was steady and she lost over 85 pounds, but then she reached a plateau and couldn’t shed any more pounds.
She slowly began regaining the weight, and that’s when she decided to take matters into her own hands.
She went to a doctor and asked to be recommended for weight loss surgery, or a bariatric procedure performed on the stomach or intestines to induce weight loss.
After numerous evaluations she was approved for the surgery. She underwent the procedure and had to change her eating habits to ensure she obtained the results she wanted.
“Probably the hardest thing is learning how much you can eat because you can’t eat an awful lot,” she said. “Sometimes the problem is you don’t recognize that you are full.”
In the beginning, Lovato was only able to eat one-quarter of a cup of food at a time. The amount gradually increased.
Before the surgery, Lovato weighed 286 pounds, and she just recently hit a mark within the 100s, a weight she had not experienced for 40 years. She now weighs in at 196 pounds, but hopes to continue to lose weight until she reaches her target goal.
“I think I need to lose at least another 45 pounds,” she said, adding the weight loss has greatly improved her health and even allowed her to stop taking her type 2 diabetes medicine because of healthy sugar levels. “If I can get to 150, I’d be very happy; that’s what I want.”
She learned a lot from her experience and she hopes others can find inspiration in her story. For those struggling with weight loss, she said, the real challenge is shifting one’s mindset.
She also said any amount of exercise, no matter how small, would help get the process started.
“If a person is overweight, it’s important to still try to go exercise,” she said. “Keep moving, so you can move as you get older. I think overweight people need that so they can function on a daily basis.”
