Caitlin’s POV

Speaker: Caitlin

My name is Caitlin, and I live in West Virginia.

What has your journey with obesity care looked like?

My personal journey with obesity started from a very young age. I was obese pretty much most of my life, had a lot of struggles with that. I had some struggles with an eating disorder as well. Just never really found a healthy relationship with eating or with food in general.

My biggest issues were my health issues—being pre-diabetic, not having great lab results, not being able to do most of the things that I wanted to do in life, you know, with my kids, with my husband. Just walking, even, at a point got so difficult that I would have to take breaks walking short distances. So that’s what I knew I needed to change.

I can give a personal example about my daughter’s softball. I was not able to walk to her home softball field from the parking lot to the field without having to take breaks and I could not help carry anything. So now, being able to be healthy and do those things, I can carry things to the softball field. I can walk the whole trail around the softball field. I can get out practice with my daughter.

The main reason that I started a weight loss journey was because I have a non-working gallbladder. I did have a consult with a general surgeon—I was not able to have this surgery as it wasn’t considered emergent and I had a lot of risks associated with having the surgery. If I did have to have an emergency surgery, there would definitely be some barriers to that due to my weight. I can now have surgery, but I will also say I no longer have as many gallbladder attacks because of my weight loss.

What obstacles do women face when trying to access obesity care?

I think that the biggest issue that women face when they’re trying to access support as an obese woman is not being taken seriously. You go to a doctor, you have a problem, and it’s always, “Oh, well, you’re just overweight. Have you tried losing weight? Have you tried changing your diet?” and that’s not the fix all for everything. Yes, you know, we might be overweight, but we have real health problems that are not always related to that.

But I am really lucky in the fact that I did get in with a clinic that listened to me and told me, “You’re not alone in this. You do have a medical condition, you do have food addiction, and this is something we can help you treat.”

It didn’t have to be an uphill battle the whole time, I had tools available to me. That was a big help. I’m almost 150 pounds lighter, so going through this right now and just seeing that I could do it, I know other people can do it if they just have the tools that they need.

How can improved obesity care coverage make a difference in the lives of people living with obesity?

I think that if we had more coverage, people would be more willing to reach out to their physicians. We would have healthier people. We would have a healthier population. We would have people that are able to get out and do things with their families, which would, in turn, probably improve mental health. So I think that access to obesity care is just one step as being more overall healthy as a society.

Why did you become an advocate for obesity care coverage?

I live in a, again, very rural community, and most of the state employees are on the state insurance that is offered through their employers, and that state insurance no longer offers access to obesity care. So we have a large population of people in my state that suffer from obesity that now can’t get that kind of help.

What is your message to policymakers and employers who influence coverage decisions?

I would ask that you listen to your constituents, and I would ask that you listen to your employees and see that what they’re going through is something real, and see that the needs that are being asked for, they need to be addressed because obesity is so much more than just being overweight.

Obesity is a real problem that has a lot of health issues associated with it. So if you want a healthier population and you want healthier employees, then you should probably listen to the physicians.

What gives you hope?

What gives me hope is that I hope even just one person or two people hearing my story may change their whole outlook on everything. And not only would it change their views, they can start talking, and they can hopefully help also change some viewpoints, and maybe if we collectively work together on this, we could get coverage options changed for everybody and let people have access to what they need.