Bloated and suicidal, British mum Sharon Rook turned to face the camera but couldn’t smile. At 300kg, she was wheelchair-bound and trapped in a loveless relationship with the father of her four children.
Amazingly, this photo is one she now treasures. Although it marks the lowest point of her life, it led to her finding love and losing an incredible 195kg.
Now a size 12 to 14, she is happily married to Dave, a Kiwi man she met online, who has stood by Sharon throughout her amazing transformation. The two live in Temuka.
“I cannot believe how my life has changed,” says Sharon (46).
“At my biggest, I wanted to kill myself, but I couldn’t bear leaving the children. I felt I didn’t deserve to live – I felt degraded and useless.”
Sharon’s weight problem began in her teens, and came to a head during her first pregnancy in 1983, when she put on 20kg. By the time her baby was one year old, she had stacked on another 40kg – and with each child, her weight shot up again.
“When I my weight passed 190kg, people in the street giggled at me. A little boy once said, ‘Look how fat she is!’ It just destroyed me, so I stopped going out,” she says.
“By the time I was pregnant with my fourth child, I weighed almost 240kg and was declared 80% disabled. I was in a wheel-chair and had been told I’d never walk again. I was so big, I couldn’t even brush my hair! I tried every slimming regime but nothing worked. I couldn’t exercise, and after so many years of being indoors I became agoraphobic. My relationship ended. I was just something that sat in the corner. I’d lost all self-respect. The internet was the only way I talked to people.”
one night in 1997, Sharon was online when she saw a name from New Zealand.
“I emailed people all over the world but I’d never spoken to a Kiwi before so I sent a cheeky email saying, ‘I hope you’re not like the other idiots on here.’ He replied, ‘I consider myself to be a gentleman’.”
“We started chatting and I told him I was happily married so he wouldn’t think I was looking for a relationship. He told me New Zealand was wonderful and invited me to bring the family there for a holiday. For weeks, I would sit up through the night waiting for him to email. After two months, Dave asked why a happily married woman would be up at 3am emailing him. I told the truth and he asked me to think about emigrating.
“I told him he needed to see a photo of me first. I emailed it over and asked him not to look at it until he was on the phone to me so I could hear his reaction. I expected that would be the end of it. I thought he would throw up when he saw me.
“When he rang, I told him to describe what he saw. He said, ‘There’s a woman who looks very sad but I can see a girl trying to get out from behind those sad eyes’. I was blown away. Then he told me he loved me.”
When Dave sent an engagement ring through the post and proposed – on one knee – over the phone, Sharon was determined to start a new life with him.
She used a hospital hydrotherapy pool to exercise. And after shedding 25kg, she was ready to book her flight to New Zealand with her four children – Kimberley (then 16), Nikita (9), Jaymie (6) and Ben (3).
“Friends said I was crazy – Dave could be a paedophile or murderer. But I knew in my heart he wasn’t. I’d never have risked my children – they were all I had.”
When the family arrived in New Zealand, Dave told friends it felt like his wife was returning from a long holiday.
“I felt the same,” says Sharon.”We already knew each other so well.”
Six months later, they tied the knot and Sharon decided to tackle her weight problem once and for all. She went to a specialist, who fitted a gastric band to her stomach. The operation was a success and within 18 months, Sharon lost 190kg. She went from making clothes out of bedsheets to shopping up a storm! But her weight-loss left her with stretched skin.
“I used to wear body stockings to smooth my bits out. I was trussed up like a turkey. David told me I was beautiful, but I’d think, ‘I need to be ironed’.”
Last year, Sharon went to oalaysia with Gorgeous Getaways for cosmetic surgery.
“They removed almost 12kg of skin. The surgeon found no underlying fat – it was all just saggy skin.”
Sharon had always hated how she looked in her wedding photos so for their ninth anniversary, the couple had them retaken.
“I finally felt as beautiful as Dave had always told me I was,” she says. “He always found me attractive, even when I was huge. I used to avoid getting undressed in front of him but now I’ve bought some sexy lingerie.
“I always used to worry about drawing attention to myself because of my size. I put up a wall around me. But now I’m dancing on top of it, saying, ‘Get a load of this!'”
“So to anyone who’s thinking of giving up – please don’t. I wouldn’t change the past 10 years for anything.”
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