In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers share their less than straightforward paths to healthier lifestyles.

Part 1: Asthma had always held Tara Turner back, but when the doctor tells her she’s officially “obese,” she decides to make a change. 

Tara Turner began her journey in the fitness industry over 20 years ago. She has dedicated her life to helping people achieve their fitness goals. Tara holds several national certifications including Group Exercise, Personal Training, Spinning, and Zumba. She is also a master trainer in teaching boxing, kickboxing and kettlebell and shares her knowledge with upcoming instructors. Tara encourages people to embrace their beauty, power and wisdom within their spirit, soul and body no matter what shape or size!

Part 2: Paul Aflalo struggles with the decision to get gastric bypass surgery.

Paul Aflalo is Replay’s artistic director. He is a storyteller and documentary producer. He creates narrative-driven pieces for film, radio and podcasts. Paul has shared stories across Canada and parts of Europe and the UK. His focus has always been to help others share the stories that need to be told. He is also fascinated by the human unknown, take a listen to his radio documentary about aphantasia. 

Episode Transcript

Part 1

I am in sixth grade and I was chosen to be the lead in my school production of Grease. I was playing Sandy. Now, this is my favorite movie, so I was super excited to get this role.

After rehearsal, I go home and I'm talking to my mom about the events of my day and the rehearsal about the costumes, the lines and helping with the set. I'm animated and my voice is loud and I'm talking fast and my mom says, "Tara, calm down. You know what happens when you get too excited.”

But how can I not be excited? This is my last year in this school and this is extremely important to me and I wanted to make my mark. But the problem is I was diagnosed with asthma at two years old. And one of the triggers is getting overly excited.

So I go to bed and in the middle of the night I wake up and I have shortness of breath. I can't breathe. I'm wheezing. I'm coughing. So I already knew what was happening.

Now, asthma is not the type of disease where you can just sleep it off. You have to get treated right away because it restricts your airways. Potentially, if you don't get treated in time, it can mean death.

So I immediately go wake up my mom and she rushes me to the emergency room for treatment. And the only thing I can think of is, “Please, let me not miss my opening of the play.” I wasn't concerned that I couldn't breathe. I was just concerned that I was going to miss the play.

So when I get to the hospital, the doctors are trying to stabilize my symptoms. Unfortunately, I get the dreaded news that I have to be admitted. I stayed in the hospital for a week. I missed the play.

All I could do was just cry every day I was in that hospital because I felt so robbed of my opportunity. I felt that this disease again took another thing from me that I was ready to do, that I was excited for. Not only did I have to miss the play, but I couldn't have pets because of the fur. I had to bundle up when I went outside because I couldn't get cold air in my lungs. I had to make sure that I wasn't around dust because that was also a trigger. And also exercise was a trigger, so I wasn't a very active kid. I probably was the only kid that failed gym in school. I mean, gym is just what? Kickball, right?

So I lived with that disease all through junior high school. Finally, when I got to high school, inhalers came out. And let me tell you, I thought that that was the best thing since sliced bread. I don't have to be in my dad's van driving, running red lights, getting police escorts to the hospital to get to the emergency room for treatment.

Now, don't get me wrong. I still had to watch out for my triggers. I still had to be careful about what I did, but now I had a little bit of a backup. I can take a puff of inhaler and then it would open my lungs and allow me to breathe. So I took this as an opportunity to get a little more active.

I joined the cheerleading squad, I joined the step team, and I was living my best life until I got to college. I became less active because school was the priority in my life and I had a horrible schedule. I was eating poorly. And instead of the freshman 10, I gained a freshman 30.

Now, going to the doctor for my yearly annual checkup, and I get my re‑up of my inhaler, and the doctor tells me, “You are officially in the obese category.”

I was shocked because I thought, “How did I get here?” I knew my pants were a little tight but not 30 pounds tight. But then I realized I wasn't as active, I was eating poorly and that's the reason why I'm here. So I was lost. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to solve this problem.

I went home and I spoke to my grandmother. I told her how I felt and what the doctor said, and she said, “Well, we're not going to quit. We're going to do something about this.”

So she signed me up for Nutrisystem, which is a food portion control program, and I joined a gym, Lucille Roberts, which was in Astoria on Steinway Street. You remember that.

I remember my first day. I went to the gym and I said, “I'm going to take an aerobics class,” because I love to dance. So I climbed the stairs because the studio is at the top of the stairs. I climbed the stairs, and all of a sudden, I'm winded. My lungs is burning, my legs are burning, and I haven't even gotten to the top of the stairs yet.

So when I got to the top of the stairs, the instructor was up there and she pressed play on the tape recorder. She immediately went from zero to 100 in 2.5 seconds. I looked at her, I turned around and I went right back down the stairs, because I knew I was not going to survive 55 minutes in that class.

So I went on a treadmill and that was easy. All I had to do was walk. That's where I stayed for three months, until I lost the 30 pounds.

Now I said, "I'm going to try another class. I'm going to try a step class," which is a class that's choreography and dance and you step on a box and you go up and down. The instructor was the most advanced class on the schedule.

She pressed Play and, pride, A Deeper Love by Aretha Franklin came on. That was my favorite house song and I love house music.

As I took the class, I realized 30 minutes in, “Oh, my gosh, I'm not winded. I'm not breathless. My legs are not burning. I'm actually getting through this class.”

And I'm hooting and hollering. I'm excited. And at the end of the class, she comes to me and says, “Have you ever thought about being an instructor?”

And I'm like, “Nah, that's not for me. I just came to lose a few pounds. That's it.”

But I continued to take every class on the schedule and she pursued me again, asked me the same question. But this time I had a different answer. I said, "Yes, I'm going to try it."

So I get my national certifications and I get to teach at my first class at the YMCA in the city. I lived in Queens. I had a 5:00 AM class. I got up at 3:30 in the morning to go on my journey to the city, but one thing happened. My mother got up with me and she said, “I'm coming with you,” to my first class.

So we took one bus, two trains, to get to the class with three people. I did that for about six months, until I was offered another class at a big box gym, Bally Total Fitness, where I had 50 to 60 people in the room.

And 25 years later, I am still teaching classes. I am still doing what I love to do and I'm inspiring people that may have similar obstacles as I do. I still suffer from asthma and I still have to watch my triggers, but exercise is no longer one of those triggers. And to this day, my mom is still my biggest fan. Comes to my classes whenever she can and supports me.

And she reminded me that, “You're no longer that six‑year‑old girl that missed out on her play. You actually fulfilled your purpose of what you were meant to do.” And that was just the learning block to get there.

Thank you.

Part 2

I know a lot of you have great relationship with your grandparents. They're probably lovely human beings, but my grandfather was a dick. He was just a giant piece of shit of a human being, like the worst.

When I went to his funeral, I made sure to stick around until they covered him. I was like, “The bell? No, thanks.” The Quebecois grave diggers were just really confused.

But I did, I stuck around because my grandfather was not great as a person. He was quite abusive when I was growing up. I lived with him for a really long time, my brother, my sisters, and I. And I vowed to myself that I just never wanted to be like him, which was really tricky because I inherited his height, I inherited his baldness, son of a bitch, I also inherited his temper, which is not a great temper because when he would yell and scream, the room would just tremble, or at least I was probably trembling at the time.

In 2020 when we were all in the midst of you know, I was sitting at my desk looking at a doctor on a screen who was talking about a surgery that I was going to be doing, apparently, at some point. I hadn't made the decision yet. I was just talking to the surgeon to get more information while I was a part of this. It was like, this is going to happen to me. Let me learn more and then I'll make a decision.

So when he said the surgery would happen in a week, my face react in the same way that my words did where I just said, “Absolutely fucking not.”

Because when you're about to do bariatric surgery and you're going to get your stomach rearranged on the insides, well, you want to eat everything you love for like at least two to three months beforehand, right? Because a week is not enough time. Because during that week, you also have to be on this really terrible protein shake, and only that. It's the worst. It's awful.

Just imagine, like, premier protein shakes, just drinking that for a week. It was actually supposed to be two weeks, but because we were in the midst of this delightful global pandemic and they had just restarted surgeries, they were pushing people through like an assembly line. And I was like, “I want no part of this.”

But also, I had just started working again. It was like months of uncertainty and no work. I work in film and radio and documentaries and there was, like, we had just started. If you want proof, my friend Sean is here. We worked together a lot. We literally had just started working again.

So there was no way that I was going to stop eating food then have surgery and then be off of work again for six to eight weeks.

So I looked at him and I'm like, "No, this is not happening. I can't do this. I'm not even mentally prepped for this yet. I thought this was like we meet, and then in three months we do the surgery. And then I convince myself over three months to do the surgery.”

And he was like, "No, we gotta hustle."

And I'm like, "No, we don't. Absolutely not, we don't have to hustle."

So he's like, “Listen, if you can't do the surgery in a week, call the clinic and let them know. And then they'll make a decision when they meet next Thursday.”

I was like, “What do you mean next Thursday? It's Thursday now. You want me to do my surgery in a week? No. I don't know what to tell you. None of this is happening. It's just not. You want to kick me out of the program, then kick me out.”

I had already taken a three‑month break from the program at that point, and they're not usually great at giving you another extension. The uncertainty was just building up inside of me. The fact that we were going through a global pandemic without a vaccine at that moment was also really stressful, so I was not ready for this.

Plus, after your surgery, they want you to have someone to stay with you. And I am single. My family all live in Montreal and we're in the midst of a global pandemic where we're supposed to be like isolation from other people. This was not happening.”

I then called the clinic after our appointment. I told them that I wasn't doing the surgery in a week. I could potentially do the surgery in December. It's much easier over Christmas break. We don't work during that time. And I'm a Jew so I don't do anything during that time. So I'm totally fine with inconveniencing my Jewish family to come and stay with me for two weeks while I'm healing.

So they let me take another break and they postponed my surgery, but they said, “This will be the last time we give you that. If you don't do the surgery in December, you're out of the program.”

There was another COVID spike in December of 2020 so they canceled surgeries again, so I couldn't do it. So I was given another automatic extension for the surgery.

Then at that point, the uncertainty of the world and within myself was like, "I don't even know if I want to do this. I'll wait and see what happens."

But they were also like, "We'll reach out to you, but if we don't reach out to you in six months, you reach out to us."

And I was like, "This is not the kind of relationship I'm looking for."

So I decided to go an alternative route based on one of the social workers at the bariatric clinic at Toronto Western said, “Why don't you get in touch with this one clinic that specializes in weight loss and speak to Dr. Van? She's amazing. She might be able to help you either decide to do the surgery or not.”

So I did. I made an appointment and, with luck, I got an appointment pretty quick. It was our first appointment before she was literally about to go on maternity leave. She was very pregnant.

We met on Zoom. She told me about what the plan would look like in a year when she would be coming back. And I was like, “Well, this makes my life easier,” because now the decision is made for me. I'm not going to do the surgery. And two, I actually genuinely would like to give this a try because we connected really well. She understood everything that I was going through in terms of my thought process and what it meant because I didn't know how badly I was eating. I didn't know what I was doing to my body physically.

And I would speak to friends and talk to them about it and just see what their advice were. Everyone had an opinion but they were all really delicate in the way they spoke to me about it, and they were really supportive. So when I decided, like, I'm not doing this, everyone was cool with it, including me, very much so.

A year later, it's 2021 at this point. It's the middle of the summer and I'm not feeling great within myself. I'm getting anxious and sweaty, but not in the way that anxiety builds up in someone. More in a different way, like I would get sweaty and anxious and my hands would get clammy, and then I'd get really hungry.

Or then there'd be times where I'd just get a little bit kind of delirious, in a way, and it didn't make sense to me. I didn't know what it was.

When my grandfather was in his 40s, he was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes because he was a very unhealthy, shitty man. He drank way too much beer, he didn't eat properly. My grandmother would yell at him, he would just ignore her. He would go to Italian restaurants and eat pasta with a steak. I never understood that. And, like, everything he did to himself was just bad for him, which maybe probably, in turn, made him shitty towards everyone else, including me.

So when I learned that my grandfather in his mid‑40s became diabetic, I, like, just reiterated all these thoughts of I don't want to be like him.

So in July of 2021 when my family doctor looked at me and said, “You have Type 2 diabetes,” I panicked because I was becoming more and more like the man.

I managed to suppress this temper in my mid‑20s, and that took a lot of therapy and it hasn't come out since. I don't need it to come out because I have other ways of dealing with anger and frustration. He didn't. I feel like I got a little bit better at that than he did. But getting that diabetes diagnosis was not great.

Shortly thereafter, I started sitting down with Dr. Van. We had our first appointment back and she remembered everything about our first session from a year earlier. It was the late 2021. I was telling her what I was feeling and we were going through the process and I met with a nutritionist. I met with her weekly. We went through what I need to be doing to get myself healthier.

And she wanted to double check my diabetes and see where things were at, so we were always consistently doing blood work and it was like, I was it. I was definitely diabetic.

Then she looked at me in one meeting and she goes, “You know that gastric bypass surgery can put your diabetes into remission?”

And I had this sort of thought of like, "Wait, what?"

And she goes, "Yeah. Research has shown that people who go through gastric bypass surgery can literally reverse their diabetes. It's not a cure. You can still fuck up your body afterwards if you're not good about it, but it can definitely help you get rid of it.”

So we talked about it a lot. We talked about it all through into 2022. Then finally, by the end of 2022, she said, "Let me just sign you back up. Let me refer you back to the program and then you go through the motions and decide for yourself."

January 2023, I had the first session, the group session where they give you all the information about the program. I was like, "Back to school again. Here we go."

Then all at once, in the meeting, you say yes or no, and I said, “Yes, I'll go through the motions.” I was still really uncertain. But in every session and meeting and appointment that I had over the course of 2023, I started really thinking more and more about what this could mean for me. And I started thinking about more about what I want to be.

I was in my early 40s. I was diabetic. I was balding. I was very tall. I got rid of my anger and my temper, and I needed to get rid of this one last thing that my grandfather gave me. Well, maybe he didn't actually give it to me. I did it to myself, but let's be real.

October 13th of 2023, I'm sitting in front of my computer in a session with the surgeon from the Toronto Western Bariatric Clinic. We're getting along really well. He's answering all of the questions I have. He's explaining things to me in a way that it's understandable, like every doctor should act. He made me feel comfortable with the thing that I would probably be doing. And they were really great at accommodating the fact that I wanted to do this over Christmas, because my date for the surgery was December 18th.

So on December 18th, I arrived at Toronto Western Hospital. My younger sister, Jessica, was there waiting for me. And I did it. I had the surgery.

It's been two‑and‑a‑half months. It's going to be three months since I've had the surgery in like a week‑and‑a‑half, almost, and my diabetes is headed in the direction where I need it to be. I'm off of most of the medication I've ever had to take. I've lost 45 pounds. And when I look at myself in the mirror, I see me, not my grandfather.

Thanks so much.