03 · The Recovery
Another fight I won
154 pounds
Epilepsy wasn’t the only weight I was carrying. For a long time my body felt like another chain — heavy, slow, and hard to trust. At my heaviest I was 368 pounds. Every step took more than it should. Every seizure recovery felt harder. Clothes, chairs, flights of stairs, the quiet math of what I could or couldn’t do — it all added up. I was surviving. I was not free in my own skin.
So I decided to change that, too. Not overnight. Not with a miracle. Over three years I showed up for myself the same way I showed up for surgery, for programming appointments, for the long haul of treatment: one hard day after another. I learned what it meant to be hungry for a different life and to keep going when the scale barely moved. I learned that discipline isn’t loud — it’s quiet, and it compounds.
Pound by pound, the number came down. Months turned into years. The mirror started telling a different story. People who hadn’t seen me in a while did a double take. More than that — I did a double take. I could move again. Train again. Believe that a marathon wasn’t a fantasy reserved for someone else’s body.
Today I stand at 214 pounds. That’s 154 pounds gone — more than the weight of a whole person lifted off my frame. I didn’t just lose weight. I took back miles of my life. The same resolve that walked me into operating rooms is the resolve that got me here: lighter, stronger, and lining up for 26.2 with Team CURE Epilepsy.
Epilepsy tried to write my limits. The scale tried too. I’m still rewriting both.
Another fight I won How epilepsy fed 368 pounds — and how I fought my way back to 214
The weight didn't come out of nowhere. Valproate — one of the seizure medications I was on for years — carries weight gain as one of its most common side effects, driven by increased appetite and changes in how the body stores fat; it's well-documented enough that neurologists weigh it directly against seizure control when choosing a drug. Steroid courses after surgery added more. And epilepsy itself did the rest: driving restrictions, the fear of triggering a seizure through exertion, long recovery stretches after every breakthrough — all of it quietly taught my body to stay still. Stillness has its own weight.
By the time I stepped on a scale and saw 368 pounds, I understood it as another set of chains — not the kind epilepsy put on me directly, but the kind it built around me while I wasn't looking. Two fights stacked on top of each other: one against a brain that misfired, one against a body that had quietly learned to stop moving.
I couldn't win the first fight on willpower alone — that one took surgeons, devices, and years of trial and error. But the second one, I could fight head-on. Smaller plates. Longer walks that slowly turned into runs. Working with my doctors instead of around them, so cutting calories never meant cutting the medication keeping me seizure-free. Three years and 154 pounds later, I'm not just lighter — I broke the one chain epilepsy never had the right to put on me in the first place.
The weigh-ins
Tap or hover any dot for the exact date and weight.