After Her Son's Tumor Diagnosis, a Mother's Depression and Weight Gain Led to Surgery and a Book on Obesity

Hilla Schneider was in a car with her husband, just out of a meeting with the doctor who had sent them to a pediatric oncology department, when her labor began. Their older son, Be'eri, was one year old and had just been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Their second son, Maayan, was born that day.

What followed, she says, were two years of uncertainty. Because of where the tumor sat, the doctor told them, operating would inevitably cause brain damage. So Be'eri was monitored instead, with an MRI under general anesthesia every three months. He slept with a pulse oximeter, and the smallest movement could trigger its alarm. Schneider, now 41 and living in Netanya, resigned as a recruitment manager at an investment firm and closed a private business she had only just started. Four days after giving birth, she was running the logistics: who would stay with the baby, who would come along to Be'eri's appointments.

After two years, doctors said the tumor was stable. Schneider thought life could return to normal. She stopped taking Cipralex, an antidepressant she had been prescribed during that period, and once the pressure lifted, she says, she fell apart. She developed clinical depression, lay in bed, barely spoke or ate, lost 10 kilograms (22 pounds) and could not sleep. When she began psychiatric treatment she started gaining weight. By 39 she weighed 137 kilograms (302 pounds).

She had never been thin. She had attended Weight Watchers since she was 12. But this, she says, was something else: her weight had doubled and her body could no longer cope. She struggled to find places to sell her clothes. At Friday night family dinners, her father would tell her the challah was not for her. At Tel Aviv's Carmel Market, a homeless man shouted, "Hippo, move!" Friends, she says, suddenly all became experts on dieting. She modeled plus-size clothing and, oddly, felt comfortable with herself, yet even positive attention felt like being seen as a body rather than a person.

The physical toll arrived next. She developed stress fractures in her legs and had trouble standing, wearing attractive shoes, or sitting with her legs crossed. She could not clean herself properly after using the toilet. She decided something had to change.

Everyone urged bariatric surgery, but she feared the potential harm. She tried dieting instead, cutting sugar and white flour, and lost 15 kilograms (33 pounds) over a year. Then she concluded that the weight loss she needed would require surgery. Two years ago she underwent a mini-gastric bypass, which reduces the stomach's functional size and bypasses part of the small intestine.

Since then she has lost 55 kilograms (121 pounds). She has quit smoking and now eats regular meals, exercises and takes vitamins. Surgery, she says, is one part of the process; keeping the results means building new habits. The gym was hard at first. The first time, she sat in her car in the parking lot and could not go in. The second time she entered, saw she was the heaviest person in the room and left after five minutes. She progressed gradually until she could take spinning classes.

The central lesson, in her telling, is that her obesity came not from too little control but too much. For years she held everything together on too little sleep and relentless stress. That conviction led to her book, On Being Chubby: The Truth Beneath the Layers. Writing it, she says, was therapeutic, and it addresses both the shame aimed at people with obesity and the decision to have surgery. She feared people would call her a loser who took the easy way out, but says choosing surgery says nothing about willpower, and the work afterward is physical and mental.

The book combines her story with research, so women weighing surgery can decide with information. Where she describes her children's fear that she might die, for instance, she also cites studies on the risks involved. Schneider is also an organizational consultant, lecturer and coach, and a mother of two boys, 9 and 8.