"Pick up 130 pounds and put it on your back and carry it around for a day," said Barb Wilson, who had the surgery.
"That's what we were carrying before. That's what I was carrying before. It's not a choice. Nobody chooses to be fat."
"Food's an addiction, too, just like everything else," said Dennis Eastman, who also had the surgery.
"Just like the cigarettes and everything else, it really is an addiction. You don't like to admit it. You think you can control it, but but obviously you couldn't -- or I couldn't, anyway."
"You don't even realize it's there," said Candis Waltz. "I mean, you get to the point where you are as large as you are and you don't have any idea that you've even gotten there and then it's too late."
Their war stories are different, but they are fighting the same uphill battle against obesity -- a disease that wasn't just taking over their lives; it threatened to take them away.
"I had to have a stress test because I had too many heartbeats," said Marie Trotz. "It was called do or die. What do you want to do? Do you want to live or do you want to end your life now?"
"I had doctors telling me for years I needed to consider this surgery and do something because I was just on a downward spiral," Eastman said. "And you finally have to come to grips that you can't handle it."
And in each moment of truth, these five people made the life-changing decision to have some form of bariatric surgery. Risky, perhaps, but no more so in their eyes than the lives they were living.
"With all the medication everyone was on -- the sleep apneas, the diabetes -- there is only so much time you have living that way," said Jim Lanning. "When you are 375 pounds, it's going to take its toll on you."
Once past risk, each still fights the stigma -- that because bariatric surgery limits the amount of food you can eat and calories absorbed, it is somehow the easy way out.
"It's not, 'Just go in, cut my stomach and make me a beautiful person,"' Waltz said.
"I mean, they are going to go in and cut your stomach and you are going to come out the same fat person you were when you went in and now you are going to have to work at it for however long it takes to get you where you need to be."
Both Waltz and Lanning have run the Crim since their surgeries. Exercise as a lifelong habit is critical to keeping the weight off. And food? Well, that battle hardly ends with surgery.
"When you quit smoking, you never have a cigarette again for the rest of your life," Eastman said. "We still have to eat. If you have a food addiction, you still have to eat every day."
"You have a period of about 18 months from the time you have the surgery," Wilson said.
"For the 18 months, they call it your honeymoon period where you get used to not wanting food. Well, there comes a time when you can eat more, but you have to take the tools that you've learned and put it back in use."
And key to surviving bariatric surgery and all that comes with it, these people have each other and their twice-monthly support group meetings.
"I think it should be mandatory that people have to come to these before they even are even considered for the surgery," Lanning said.
"All it is is a tool," Trotz said. "Unless it's in your mind, unless you are ready to make a change in your life, nothing is going to happen. Nothing."
Most patients have to undergo extensive psychological exams before bariatric surgery. For more information on weight loss, you can click here. To get in touch with the support group, you can send an e-mail to flint bariatricssupport@gmail.com.
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