"It was more than that I had kissed away my twenties and was miserable. I couldn't be naked with anybody, couldn't wear a backless dress, couldn't go to the beach—all the things a person should be able to do."
hen Muhammad Ali's daughter Khaliah hit 325 pounds, she didn't need to be told again that she was morbidly obese. A lifetime of dieting, of starving, had not helped. She thought about gastric bypass surgery but couldn't pursue it after reading the statistic that as many as one in twenty-five people suffers complications, and sometimes death, from the operation. She could not afford to risk leaving her young son without a mother.
Miserable, depressed, and unable to walk up a flight of stairs without losing her breath, she did not know which way to turn—until a friend pointed her toward a new type of surgery called gastric banding. It is just as effective as gastric bypass with a fraction of potential complications. With the band placed around her stomach and completely taking away her hunger, Khaliah slimmed down to half her former size.
The band she used has been the surgical option of choice in Europe for more than a decade but is only just now arriving in the United States. It is sure to become number one here too. Unlike gastric bypass surgery, gastric banding is reversible, is completely safe during pregnancy, involves no nutritional deficiencies, and best of all, takes away hunger forever, not just for the first year or so.
Khaliah wraps her story of weight loss in this memoir of what it was like to grow up the daughter of one of the world's most famous men, and teams up with her surgeons at the New York University Medical Center to detail the lifetime of misery suffered by an obese girl; the ins and outs of the banding operation; and the joy, serenity, and health resulting from a solution that until now had eluded her.
