When Every Doctor Said No—I Kept Going
- Courtney Torchia
- Jun 9
- 2 min read
Being able to walk, hike, workout again has made all the difference in getting me back to me.
After I quit smoking in 2012, I packed on the weight! I put on 100 pounds in the first year alone. At my heaviest, I was 336! I’m 5-foot-3. So, my BMI was astronomical. That weight, added with years of being active put the pressure on my knees, and by 2018, it was clear I needed replacements. But there wasn’t a doctor that would touch me.
Additionally, Kaiser Permanente wouldn’t pay for it until my BMI was under 30. I was simply too heavy. I heard it from all of them, you can’t recover, they said.
So, I started down a strict Keto path, and by the heart of COVID I’d lost 110 pounds. But I was still to heavy, and unfortunately all the gyms closed. By 2024, I had put 60 of that back on. Fortunately, I moved to Wyoming, and with a new job came new insurance.
I found a doctor in Colorado that believed in me, and he agreed to do the surgery, despite my BMI over 40! I recovered ahead of schedule. I had my first on July 30, 2024 and my second on Dec. 17, 2024. I’m told I was in the top 5 percent of all recoveries. But I was determined. I was not about to give up. I needed this weight to come off.
That’s when I started my journey on Zep, one month after my first surgery. After my insurance quit paying for it six months later, I found Emerge and continued on that journey. I’m down 85 pounds since starting on Zep in Aug. 2024. I still need to lose another 60 to get to the upper end of my chart weight, but I would be happy with another 40.
On June 7th when the picture on the left popped up on my timeline, it became that perfect example of a picture is worth 1,000 words. Being able to walk, hike, workout again has made all the difference in getting me back to me. The picture on the left was exactly 10 years ago in Austria and the picture on the right is me on June 7, 2025. I still have more to go, but the difference between these two pictures is 126 pounds! I've gone from a 3XL to a Medium/Large! I've lost a whole other person!
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