This WA grandma used to drink up to 10 litres a day – now one glass lasts her a month, discovers Natalee Fuhrmann.
Like most women her age, Judy Stewart loves a big cook up.
Some days, between vanilla slices and hearty chicken casseroles, the 63-year-old’s oven doesn’t get a break. But the food goes off.
Off, as in donated to friends, or off, as in moldy. And it’s a travesty, because there’s nothing Judy would like more than to eat it.
“I love cooking and I’d kill for a steak,” laments the mum of four, who has 18 grandchildren and three great grandchildren. “But I can’t eat any meat, it comes straight back up.
“And the smell of bacon and eggs drives me crazy, but my stomach rejects it.”
The former truck driver’s relationship with food was always complex.
But after a gastric sleeve operation in 2008 to control a life-long weight problem, it’s now ‘off the Richter’.
“I was always a heavily-built girl, with big bones,” explains Judy, who lives on a rural block with her husband Rod, in Perth’s foothills.
“In year 5, I remember wearing big clothes to hide my size, including my size 16c breasts.
“And in my adult life, I only have memories of being size 22 and feeling horrible about my weight, which was around 100 kilograms.”
Judy and her husband Rod.
To deal with her ballooning stomach that hung in folds over her hips, Judy tried the cabbage soup diet, bought treadmills and cross-trainers, and even lived on tinned salmon for a period.
She had flashes of success with all, before deciding to deal with her problem in a more permanent fashion, with a gastric sleeve.
“We were told there’s a 90 percent success rate for sleeves [also known as stomach stapling], and I can only remember excitement when I was being wheeled in for the operation,” she says.
But after two years the disheartened mum hauled her size 22 frame back to the doctor.
She was eating the same amount of food and there had been no change in her triple-digit weight.
Woman’s Day cannot reveal what happened next, because it is before the courts.
But we can reveal that Judy’s now a slender 55kg with a stomach that only stretches to the size of a teacup, while other adults can go to 10 times the size of a fist.
“Dinner is typically one thumb-sized broccoli floret, a small spoonful of mashed potato and a few peas,” says size 8 Judy, who can’t eat anything after drinking a mouthful of water.
“And it takes hours to eat. I would advise people against getting gastric sleeves because too much can go wrong.”
