The trouble started in grade school. Mom had changed shifts at the local hosiery factory. Dad was working long hours as a mechanic. Big brother had left town after enlisting in the Army. So Vonda Vass Summers would come home each day to an empty house in Henderson, N.C. Alone and bored, she found solace in bologna sandwiches and boxes of mac ‘n’ cheese. She binged, then hid the evidence, hoping no one would see what she’d done.
Her weight fluctuated wildly in middle school, high school and college, spiking up, plunging down. She tried Weight Watchers—some 25 times over the years. Summers married, and took a government job in Washington, D.C. But nothing seemed to help. Other health problems materialized: diabetes, high blood pressure, depression. And she developed trigeminal neuralgia, a nerve disorder sometimes called the suicide disease because of the intense facial pain it can cause.
She lost her job, and moved home to Henderson with her husband, so her parents could care for her.
Medication helped ease the aching, but now that she could chew again, the weight kept piling on. Hurting and ashamed as the scale crested 270 pounds, Summers took to her basement, popping 30 pills a day—living, to hear her tell it, in a “zombie-like state.”
A visit to a general practitioner in 2010 put a scare in her. He alerted her to her family’s history of diabetes and high blood pressure, and issued a blunt warning: change your ways, or prepare for an early grave. Summers vowed to try anew. “I was sick and tired of being sick and tired,” she says, referencing the famous words etched on the tombstone of civil-rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer.
Continue reading “4 Out of 5 Black Women Are Overweight. This Group Has the Solution — and They Are on the March”