Source: Amber Rochelle / AR
Growing up, Amber Rochelle didn’t look at food as simply nourishment. For the Cleveland native, she saw it as a coping mechanism for whatever good, bad or even boring things were going on in her young life. She was and still is an introvert, so instead of running around being active with the other kids, she was indoors enjoying her own company and processed treats.
“As a young kid I just found solace in food,” she told me over the phone. “It’s just me and all my snacks and that’s all I need.”
After years of all of that snacking, which would eventually develop into a binge-eating habit, Amber found herself getting bigger as she got older and feeling more sad and uncomfortable. The reason for her feelings wasn’t simply because she was overweight, but also because she was suffering with depression and anxiety issues. Because there was so much holding her back mentally, when she did get older and attempt to lose weight, she was doing it for the wrong reasons.
“When I set out to lose weight, it was because I thought if I lose weight I’m going to get happy,” she said. “If I can lose 50 pounds then I’ll look better, I’ll be cuter and then people might like me more.”
And though she did lose a good amount of weight with the help of gastric bypass surgery, it didn’t rid her of the mental stressors she was facing, which inevitably led her back to gaining weight, and to her highest weight of 363 pounds. It wasn’t until she was ready to do the emotional work that Amber could successfully do the physical work.
Now 32 and down 180 pounds, in a year no less, the Chicago transplant, is, overall, in a much better place. Therapy has taught her to not only look at food differently, but to handle the dark moments differently as well. She no longer engages with negative thoughts, but rather, lets them come and go. That’s why she’s finally met her goals and dropped the pounds.
“It wasn’t the first time I had done it, but I had a whole new motivation behind it,” she said.
Read on to find out about Amber’s journey to healthy and happy, the role prioritizing her mental health played in getting there, and how also changing the way she sees beauty and bigger bodies helped, too.
MadameNoire: Has weight always been an issue for you, or was there a certain life event or experience that caused you to gain? Was binge eating an issue for you growing up?
Amber Rochelle: I have always been at least a little bit chubby ever since I was a kid. Probably the earliest I remember being overweight was the third grade, and being a little bit bigger than the rest of the kids. That’s when I was getting picked on by dumb little third grade boys. So my weight has always been an issue. It just became a bigger issue as I got older. In my house it was kind of like, “Oh, are you sad? Let’s have some pizza and some ice cream. That will cheer you up.” Or “Are you happy? Do we need to celebrate something? Let’s also have some pizza and some ice cream! That’s a good way to celebrate.” “Are you bored? Let’s have some pizza and some ice cream.” Food was a replacement for, probably, coping skills, especially when it comes to dealing with sadness or feelings that you didn’t want to address. So I remember, even as a kid, even when I was bummed out and sad, “Well, I’ll just go to the corner store.” Back in the day you could get chips, pop and a Little Debbie treat for 25 cents each. That’s a lot of snacks for 75 cents. I would hide food, I would hide snacks. I did that a lot, so I was always an overweight kid.
You said that you had surgery more than a decade ago when you were, if I’m not mistaken, 19. What pushed you to decide to try gastric bypass surgery then?
At that time leading up to the surgery, my weight had been up and down and up and down and I gained and lost hundreds of pounds, even by that time. I had gone off to college at Ohio State and in that freshman year, I gained 100 pounds. I was so depressed. I couldn’t fit in the seats in the classroom anymore. I was failing some classes. I was in a bad spot. My depression, anxiety and binge-eating were all just running my life unfortunately, so I came back home. Those things didn’t improve and my weight continued to climb. At that time, my highest weight was 350 pounds. I was physically in pain and out of breath, could barely move. At that time I certainly didn’t have, first of all, the insight to know what to do, nor the skills to manage anything. Prior to that, I had been considering surgery, but it was the first time that I felt like my situation was so severe because I had reached a really high weight and I was in one of the darkest places I had ever been. My situation was so severe that I thought, surgery is what I need to do right now. I feel like that surgery gave me a little bit of a reset button and kept me off of a much darker path. I’m grateful that I had it.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BwsqZCCg1Kz/
Looking back though, why would you say it didn’t work out?
It didn’t work because you can not solve a problem that originates in the mind by operating on the stomach. It just doesn’t work that way. The problem wasn’t that my stomach was too big or that my intestines were too long and so we needed to go in and decrease the size of the stomach and the length of the intestines that the food will travel through. The problem was in my brain. The problem was that I had an undiagnosed eating disorder and that I had poorly managed depression and anxiety, and that was the underlying cause of the obesity. The obesity was just a symptom of all those other things and until those things were treated, no surgery was going to fix that.
The screening process for bariatric surgery does involve a psych evaluation, but in my experience, it was not entirely thorough, not in the way that I would describe a thorough psych evaluation now. It sort of says, “Are you mentally ready to accept the changes you will need to make for a lifetime of living with altered anatomy?” I explained that I was and I knew the right answers I needed to say because I wanted the surgery so badly. I wanted to be out of the body I was in. But yeah, the surgery didn’t work because you can’t cut things out and expect that to fix any kind of mental illness. There’s this honeymoon period where hormonally, your appetite decreases and you’re on this high from losing weight and food sort of becomes less desirable and all of the rest. But that lasts not very long. That lasts about 18 months, so you fall back on old habits. So anybody who has bariatric surgery or wants to have it, I’m not saying don’t have the surgery, but address the whole person and all of the things that are going on. Surgery is not a quick fix. If you have an eating disorder, having surgery and no treatment for your eating disorder, you’re going to end up back at square one like I did. I don’t want that for anyone.
Fast-forwarding to 2018, what was the motivation/catalyst behind you deciding to make a serious change of consuming 1,200 calories a day and doing 45 minutes of cardio every day for a year?
So what happened is, back in 2017, I was very depressed and my binge eating had flared up again and my depression was really bad, so I went to treatment at this place called Insight. It’s an eating recovery center and they also treat mood disorders like depression and anxiety. I got treatment for six weeks, and when I left there, I felt like I’d learned so many helpful things. I just felt the happiest I’d ever been in my life. In 2017 I was living my life, and I gained, probably happy weight because I was eating what I wanted to eat when I wanted to eat it. Felt fine. Towards the end of 2017, I was the happiest emotionally and mentally that I’d ever been, but also the fattest that I’d ever been at the same time. The thing that made want to lose weight at that time was that physically I couldn’t do the stuff that I wanted to do. I would be out of breath just walking a block. I would wake up and my body would be sore. Everything hurt and everything was more difficult than it needed to be in my body. Mentally I wasn’t like, I hate my body, I’m disgusting, I’ve got to lose weight because I want to look better or because I’m concerned about how people judge my body. None of that. I finally loved myself and I was happy being me. I was out in the world being fat and happy, except for the way I experienced my body. It hurt and I felt restricted. That was the motivation for me wanting to lose weight in 2018. That was totally different from the motivation I had for losing weight at any other point in the rest of my life.
I put some things in place that would kind of keep me in line. I needed some extra support, so I signed up for this thing called Healthy Wage where you bet a certain amount of money that you can lose X amount of pounds in at least six months. Through this Healthy Wage I was betting $150 a month that I could lose 80 pounds over seven months. With that I was like, if I don’t lose this weight then first of all, all my money is gone and I don’t want to lose my money. Secondly, if I do lose this weight then I’m going to win. So over that period of seven months, I ended up betting $1190 that I could lose 70 pounds, and when I did lose all that weight, they sent me a check for $3400. That’s what helped me work towards my goal. I put some skin in the game and I feel like that kind of helped me. I bet on myself.
I also decided that I was going to post on Instagram every day. I had to tell somebody that this is what I planned to do, because if it was just me, I could tell myself no and no one’s going to know what I did or didn’t do. It’s just me. We let ourselves down first. If somebody let us down as frequently as as we are able to let ourselves down, we would and should rightfully kick that person out of our lives or let them know that we expect more than that. However, we easily do it to ourselves, which is unfortunate. So I posted every single day for accountability, and once I started doing that, I was like, wow, there are people watching. There was this group of people watching who expected me to tell them what I did that day and they were rooting for me. I didn’t want to let them down.
Those were the external factors. The internal factor was like, I am excited for what I’m going to be able to do in this body once I’m back down to a size that I can manage again.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BxTRJ7VgUFK/
Why has it also been necessary, as you shared, to retrain your mind when it comes to the way you think of/look at what’s beautiful so that you can better embrace your body at any size?
Our whole lives we are told basically that skinny, white or light-skinned women with straight hair, that is what’s beautiful. The closer you are to that the better. If you have a big belly, get out of here. Big thighs, you’ve got love-handles, big arms, you can’t be beautiful. I think we are all so socialized and programmed to think of these very narrow beauty standards. It is harmful to us all, because you know who looks like that? Very few people look like that. The rest of us look like actual people. Actual human beings, and we’re just walking around being human beings, thinking something is wrong with us. Nothing is wrong with us, we’ve just been programmed or socialized to believe this story that we’re told that this is what beauty is, and that’s it. That’s not it. We define what beauty is.
I started reprogramming my brain a long time ago. I used to be on Tumblr and I would follow a bunch of plus-sized fashion blogs and I would see plus-sized women in cute outfits and at first it was jarring to me. Like, hold on a minute, this is not wrong, but this is foreign to me because we don’t see it. Where do you see images of fat women in bikinis? Almost nowhere. I first felt uncomfortable seeing it, although these women’s bodies were reflections of mine at the time. It made me think, wow, I didn’t think this was beautiful at first. I see that now as like, well why would I? My entire life I’ve been told that this is not okay. But I would continue to follow these things and I would follow them because they were aspirational to me. Over time it just became normal. It was normal to my brain to see these things and I started seeing these bodies with rolls and pudge and stretch marks and cellulite and “imperfections” as beautiful and acceptable because they are. That really changed me and let me see myself in these women. I wish everyone would do that.
With that in mind, what would you say you see when you look at yourself these days? I interviewed a woman about her weight loss recently and despite losing more than 150 pounds, she said she still sees herself at times as 400 pounds. I’m assuming retraining your mind may help you to not see yourself in a similar way.
There was a period where I first got down to like the 180s at the end of last year and my body felt super foreign. I could feel bones in places where I couldn’t before. I didn’t understand it. My knee bones could touch and I didn’t know what to make of it. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I can clearly see the difference. I can see me. Now I just see Amber. I guess I’m happy for that. I don’t pick my body apart like there’s still fat here and my body’s not good enough. I just see myself as a person. I’m just trying to live my best life.
Be sure to follow Amber on Instagram and check out the rest of our Fitness Fridays profiles here!
