After her mastectomy in 2019, April Capil was at a weigh-in for reconstructive surgery. She watched in disbelief as she saw the nurse add more weight to the arm of the scale until it read 204.
“Here I was having major surgery to reduce my risk of a cancer recurrence, but it turned out that obesity was an even greater risk to my health,” she says.
Capil had been overweight most of her life…
Growing up, Ellie Marie Manacchio realized that she didn’t look like her peers.
“I was always the heavy kid in a room of super-thin friends,” she remembers. “My dad told me I was ‘big boned’ and that it was just our family’s genetics.” Manacchio came from a…