Kathleen’s Weight loss Journey

We hope her amazing story helps you in a special way. Kathleen lost 167 lbs with Live in Fitness. She came for two long stays to make it happen in a year. Her transformation physically and mentally was simply amazing.

Kathleen Bruno is a beautiful, upbeat southern woman who used to be morbidly obese, massively depressed, and stuck in a place where she felt like giving up. 

After losing more than 150 pounds and finding a new life at Live In Fitness, she’s excited to reach out to anyone who is desperate and struggling to make a change.  Please read her story and don’t be afraid to reach out to her…she wants you to.

“Hi there,

My name is Kathleen Bruno, and I’ve had quite a ride to get where I am now. I’d like to tell you about it, and I hope it helps you get to where you really want to be.  It starts out bumpy, but if you can just hold on, it gets a lot smoother. I promise.

I’m from the South…specifically Mississippi, where every self-respecting southerner knows you never ask a woman her weight or her age…so I’m not going to tell you either. Let’s just say one of those numbers keeps getting smaller.  But that wasn’t always the case.

For a long while, I was heavy but not unhappy. I had been with my husband since 1993. We liked to say that we had “grown” in our relationship, but the truth is we had become morbidly obese together. 

It was a pact we made. We were the jolly, fat chefs who made other folks happy with our eclectic cuisine and funny fat jokes. We loved our work, each other, and especially our cuddly, curly-headed baby girl.

Still, throughout our 18 years together, we vowed to lose weight at least once a year. I tried everything from woo-woo hypnosis to practical diet centers, and ultimately gastric lap band surgery. That had to work, right?  

Of course not…I discovered a way to eat around the banding and ended up in the hospital three times with aspiration pneumonia. The band was removed, a PICC (peripherally inserted central catheter) was inserted, and IV antibiotics were administered every eight hours for five weeks.

Even after almost dying from bariatric surgery, well-meaning people continued to suggest that I undergo the more radical gastric bypass. They were convinced that no one could lose over 150 pounds naturally. 

I feared dying on the operating table, so I decided to forego the surgery and figured I’d just die young. Besides, balance is boring; moderation is for the unimaginative, and too much of good thing is a better thing…at least that’s what I convinced myself to believe.   

My husband, on the other hand, had a little (a lot) more success. He lost 160 pounds in 5 months on a radical liquid diet…and then the son of a bitch promptly left me for some skinny blonde. 

I was pretty sure things couldn’t get worse…until a couple months later when I lost two pets to advanced age-related illness and a 10-year dream job to a corporate buyout.  But I held it together.  I did what any responsible adult and parent would do: curl up in the fetal position and sob for hours and hours at a time. 

It didn’t take me long to realize that I couldn’t spend my life balled-up and marathon crying. I had to do something. So I numbed the pain by overeating, drinking, and fantasizing that my husband was a human speed bump. I would ping him from behind like the last pin in a spare, run over him, and then put the car in reverse…you know, just in case.

Then something occurred to me…I have a young daughter. I can lose damn near everything, but I can’t lose her.  And there’s no way I’m leaving my baby girl to be raised by “him.” That was my moment of clarity.  

God stripped away every excuse I had for living an unbalanced, unhealthy lifestyle. I had to do something radical, and I had to do it immediately. Instead of planning for an early grave, I went online and researched weight loss facilities. When I found Live In Fitness, I booked 4 months.”

This is by no means the end of the story. Next week the road gets a little bit smoother.