Celebrity News, Weight loss Surgery
Al Roker, broadcast celebrity, shares weight loss success story after 20 years of bypass surgery
Al Roker Reflects on his incredible body transformation 20 years after undergoing Gastric Bypass Surgery.
Al (Albert) Roker is a famous American journalist, weather broadcaster, actor, television personality and author.
He is the co-host of NBC’s Today. He began his broadcast career in 1974, joining The Today Show full time in 1996. He has held the position since then.
Early Life
Al Roker was born to Isabel, a homemaker, of Jamaican descent, and Albert Lincoln Roker Sr., a bus driver in 1954.There were 6 kids all together in the family so that meant the family diet was filled with carbs to feed all the mouths, using his father’s bus driving salary to manage.
Al said both his parents came from families that loved eating and he said he himself was a “portly kid from Queens, New York.”
Al loved food, but did not really enjoy sports and being active. Every year meant he would become chubbier.
Even when young, Al Roker battled with his weight, and there was a time when he decided enough was enough, embarking on an amazing weight loss journey.
Weight loss journey
The TV host, now 67, first thought about getting healthy when he started feeling pressure from his “mixed-weight marriage” to second wife Deborah Roberts. He was weighing around 154 kg (340 pounds) around that time.
“My wife is a size 4; she runs, she works out and it became a problem in our marriage … On a Saturday she’d get up, get dressed to run and I’d be sitting on the couch or making breakfast for the kids,” he wrote in a “Today” essay in 2013.
“She was upset about it, she was frustrated, she was angry. She thought, ‘Why don’t you care enough about yourself and why don’t you care about me and our relationship enough to change?’ And I said, ‘Look, it’s not about you. It’s about me.’”
The turning point for him was when he promised his late father he would lose weight as he lay dying.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever had to make a deathbed promise to someone you love, but if you have, you know the kind of guilt and massive responsibility I felt in that moment,” he explained in his memoir.
Following the life-changing surgery, Roker ended up losing more than 150 pounds. Currently he tries to maintain his weight around 86 kg (190 pounds).
2 Decades of successful weight loss journey
Al Roker celebrated two decades of improved health on Tuesday, and fans celebrated with him. Roker made an Instagram post on the 20th anniversary of his gastric bypass surgery, reflecting on how his life has changed since losing all that weight. Fans congratulated the weatherman on staying healthy and inspiring others to do the same.
Roker posted three photos on Instagram on Tuesday, the first of which showed him holding up a pair of jeans that were about twice as wide as his waist. In the two pictures that followed he tried to put on the jeans, holding them out to show that there was practically enough room for a second person within the waistline. He wrote: "Hard to believe it was 20 years ago today, I wore these size 54 Levi jeans to my gastric bypass at 340 lbs and here I am today."
"It's still a struggle but I'm never going back," Roker continued. "I have setbacks and struggle every day, but I never forget how far I've come." The post picked up over 100,000 likes, and many commenters let Roker know how much his public journey has meant to them.
Since he has been working in television since his early years, the national audience has watched his journey towards better health in real-time. Roker got a total knee replacement in the summer of 2001, and in March of 2002, he underwent gastric bypass in order to lose weight.
With the public eye on him, Roker was candid about his previous attempts to lose weight without surgical intervention. He admitted that he had tried and failed to stick to numerous diets, and he did not advocate for others to go straight to surgery without trying other methods first. He reportedly dropped over 100 pounds within 8 months of his surgery.
Roker wrote about his weight loss and his unique perspective on health in his memoir Never Goin' Back: Winning the Weight Loss Battle For Good. It was published in 2013.
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