By the time Tiffaney Anderson was 26 years old, she weighed 413 pounds, consumed 11,000 calories of junk food each day, and spent about $8,000 a year to support her bad eating habits.
The woman from Brigham City, Utah, had always struggled with her weight. Ever since she was a child growing up in a traumatic, physically and emotionally abusive environment, Anderson had turned to food for comfort.
By the time she reached high school, she was homeless.
“I had a really rough childhood, I graduated high school and college homeless because I had to escape from my home. Growing up I lived in a nightmare,” she explained. “I was made fun of in high school, called ‘beached whale’ and ‘fat cow.’ I would walk on the bus and people would ‘moo’ at me.”
The hurt she endured from these taunts, however, only caused Anderson to turn even more strongly to food as a form of comfort. “It was a horrible, vicious cycle,” she said.
Over the years, the situation only continued to get worse.
Soon enough, Anderson’s BMI hit 54.5. She was in the highest level of obesity, according to the World Health Organization.
Every day, she would consume around 11,000 calories, all in fast food and junk food. Every year, she averaged an $8,000 spending on all the food she consumed. One month, her credit card bill reached $1,600 just from her takeaway orders.
“While traveling to work, I would order four egg, cheese, and sausage McGriddles and a large chocolate chip frappe,” Anderson recalled. “Then 20 minute later I would be back at McDonald’s, for a second time, ordering the exact same thing before going into work.
“There were days that I’d arrived to work early and go to the staff room disgusted with myself,” she confessed, “all I could smell was the fast food I’d eaten.”
Between Anderson’s meals, she would simply pass the time by feeding on sugary drinks and snacks. “I always used to have big purses to hide all my food in,” Anderson explained, “then I would either go to the bathroom or sit eating in my car because I was embarrassed.”
I would constantly eat fast food every day no matter what, my diet was so high in calories that I was gaining weight very easily.”
Despite all of this, Anderson didn’t think she had to change anything about her lifestyle – until she suffered from a minor stroke when she was six months pregnant with her second child and lost the baby.
It was only then that she realized how badly she’d been taking care of her body.
That was when Anderson vowed to turn her life around. She would change her diet and in 2015, she underwent a gastric sleeve surgery. The following year, she had a gastric bypass surgery done, to help reduce the size of her stomach and help her lose weight.
Now, in 2017, Anderson has managed to shed a whopping 238 pounds.
Although Anderson had been successful in keeping off her weight, she confesses that surgery wasn’t as easy of an journey as many people might assume. And even without all the excess weight as before, Anderson’s self-esteem is still fairly low because now she’s having to drag around all her excess skin.
“The skin looks nasty, it pulls over my abdomen and back,” she described. “It hangs down and is disgusting, I feel like it makes me look like the 400lb girl still.”
Anderson is trying her best to remain positive about the future and is working on building her self-esteem. She does, however, hope that she will someday be able to raise enough money to undergo excess skin removal surgery to become what she believes is the best version of herself.
Please donate here to support her if you can.
